Serious Game Engine Shootout
It’s a NICE Day in the (Virtual) Neighborhood Development of NICE began at CalTech in the late 1980’s as a general-purpose engine for modeling and simulations. That initiative was spun off a decade later as a private company called Numedeon which used NICE to power Whyville.com, a website that was launched in 1998. NICE also powers online learning environments for the University of Texas Medical School, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, and is being used for two new educational products due to market later this year. Numedeon’s CEO Jim Bower, who worked on the original development team when he was a CalTech professor, explains, “Entertainment games tend to focus on graphics to differentiate themselves even if the underlying game play is identical. The problem is graphics are expensive and require that the user have a big pipe.” He continues: “We had five design criteria for NICE, and the first one was there should be no barrier to use. So it had to work on any computer with a 56kb modem and a browser, without special plug-ins or software to install. Second, the avatars had to be fully customizable by users, most of whom are kids. Third, social interaction was key and so were community management tools. Fourth, it had to be a safe, kid-friendly environment that was fully COPA compliant. And fifth, it had to be educationally dynamic, physics-based and not tied to a rigid decision tree.”
Although there are currently no plans to release NICE as a stand-alone engine, I think in many ways Numedeon’s experience operating virtual worlds for 8 to 15 year old kids is just as important as the tech. Today, Whyville claims more than 3.39 billion page views by a virtual population of 2.04 million kids who have played more than 33.58 million educational games. NICE is written in Java, supports a 2D graphical environment, and has a full suite of tools for in-world communication and interaction. These tools include: customizable avatars, bubble chat, transcription, bulletin board, calendar, event scheduling tools, moderator tools, conferencing tools, document sharing, collaborative editing, shared desktop, and patented language filters and community safety tools.
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