Russ Phelps on Serious Games for the Military - Jason Dobson

Serious games make up those games that, while entertaining and engaging, also serve the added, more prominent purpose of educating or training the player. To this end, projects created for the military are a major contributor to the serious games gamespace. Everything from games that train users to pilot aircraft and submarines, to those that depict and simulate a conflict to help formulate battle strategies have been created thanks to the growing emphasis that has been placed on military-themed serious game development. Recently Serious Games Source spoke with Russ Phelps, president of Intelligence Gaming, a company devoted to this very focused area of the serious games market.

Hello Russ. Thanks for taking the time to speak with us today. Can you begin by giving a bit of your background, both within and outside of the serious games gamespace?

I am a retired Navy Commander, having spent 20 years in the fields of Cryptology and Intelligence. My specialties were in foreign languages and high technology analysis, training and education. My experience in the military included work on submarines, planes and ships together with duty in over a dozen counties working alongside all services of the military and many intelligence organizations.

How I transitioned to serious games was straightforward. One of the recurring themes in the military is how to train effectively, efficiently, and with maximum return on investment. Scenario training – like war games, field exercises, or simulators -- has always been shown to be amongst the most effective means of training, and certainly a great way to capitalize on traditional curricula investments. A logical extension of this was the emergence of the gaming market and its powerful castoff technologies. Since starting Intelligence Gaming, I have been involved in working at many levels of the military, defense and Intelligence to demonstrate how gaming applications can support their requirements.

You run an organization called Intelligence Gaming. What is its purpose?

The purpose of IG is twofold. First, to serve as an agent to bridge the gap between the commercial gaming industry and defense and Intelligence; second, to provide subject matter expertise and security access between the classified and unclassified markets. Make no mistake, the difference between the two are vast and often insurmountable without an effective interface. With different cultures, traditions, reputations, biases, languages, procurement and requirements in the mix things couldn’t be more complicated.

Last year at the Serious Games Summit part of the 2005 I/ITSEC, there were many excellent case studies and panels detailing the vast cultural and business differences between industry and defense – some of these differences ultimately undermined project successes. The IG model is designed to compensate for these differences. More importantly, most classified projects are not advertised in the public domain, so even if there were a commercial solution you wouldn’t know about the need, nor be able to access the technical details because of their classification.

What projects are Intelligence Gaming working on currently?

IG is exclusively partnered with Whatif Productions in Boston. Upon starting IG, I researched the market for the top technology that could guarantee producing applications faster, cheaper and with the highest possible quality. I also needed a platform that had full graphics reuse, limited to no coding requirements (art-driven), software/hardware scalable, distributable in low bandwidth environments, and one that allowed for rapid spiral development.

I also required features accounting for encryption, advanced privacy features, open architecture, and cell phone/PDA compatibility. Only with these capabilities can the full range of government requirements be addressed. As a result, we recently won a SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research), are subcontracting on two other SBIRs involving adaptive interface design and gaming applications to support joint intelligence training, and we have some other classified projects that we can’t discuss. Business is good.

What is your general sense of the serious games (SG) market today?

I think there is terrific potential inside and outside the defense market. Within the serious games market there are so many applications and technologies that to identify them as an aggregate is a mistake. In this sense, the expansion of the SG market will expand or contract at varying rates relative to each technological area. To me, games are merely an application within the greater SG marketplace – they are innovation showcases or composites of embedded technologies like AI, graphics, simulation physics etc.

While gaming applications will grow in the coming years, I believe their use may plateau until government policy and standards are formulated to deal with issues like platform standards, security, and classifications. In the larger view, however, I see gaming technologies proliferating at unbelievable rates and will disrupt traditional simulation and modeling for the government sector. I also strongly believe that gaming technologies will radically reshape the way that training, education and the transference of real-world experience and knowledge will occur.

What do you see as the key factors that are needed for this market to continue growing?

That’s a big question and lots of room for answers – it’s a great topic for a Serious Games Summit panel. Nevertheless, I see 4 major things.

First – Standards. In the government and defense, configuration management and architecture compliancy spell life and death for software and hardware. The gaming industry has no uniform standards, but more importantly, the government has not published a standard for the importation of serious game applications into its network infrastructure – either classified or unclassified. For the market to continue to grow, government and industry must agree on a policy and standard. As in the case of an innovation market, there are different engines, interfaces, and operating systems vying for market space etc. – eventually it will come to a head. My recommendation would be for the SG leadership to convene a review board and recommendations board and assist the government via Industry-Defense collaboration.

Second -- Price. The costs of quality games are prohibitive. Until costs go down – without sacrificing quality -- I think the market will always have limitations. Costs of $1M or more for a “game” are hard to sustain, although not unprecedented. We all know there are some applications being produced much more cheaply, but from what I have seen they may work in the early markets, but won’t be sustainable because of their overall limitations in network deployability, upgrades, and sheer lack of behavioral sophistication.

Third – Procurement. Most serious games have been developed through Research, Development, Test and Evaluation (RDT&E) funds sponsored by research organizations (i.e. DARPA, ONR, etc.) to promote the exploration of gaming applications. It’s been a tremendous investment. However, once the gaming “mystique” or “novelty” has been quenched, the bulwark of funding will move towards the Other Procurement (Navy, Air Force etc.) (OP) which eliminates developmental or prototype designs – it is this money that buys games and does the acceptance, test and evaluations from industry. You can’t necessarily develop a game with this money. How many companies have the internal R&D to build a game out of pocket and try to sell it to the government; when, if successful, it could easily take a year to get paid? Defense contracting is nothing at all like commercial contracting, it’s important to be aware of that.

Fourth- Classifications: Serious (military) games are just analogous enough to escape the issues of classification. They are often restricted in access and distribution (Like Ambush!), but eventually, copies of a serious game will make it onto the internet be found on a terrorist's laptop and then the party is seriously over. Additionally, games, in my mind, can be divided into two areas: functional or cognitive (training). Typically, simulators address the former and war games the later. For both to progress to the higher levels of realism or specificity, they will cross the line of revealing Tactics, Techniques and Procedures – which are going to be classified.

With regards to military-themed serious games, clearly clearance and sensitive information is key is creating a serious game that accurately simulates a real life event or set of circumstances. Has working with the government in this capacity presented, in your experience, a roadblock, or have they been forthcoming with the necessary information to create a complete and worthwhile game?

In my experience, the military has always been very forthcoming on what is needed. But, remember, I was – and in many ways – still am one of them. Aside from having the security clearances, I can relate to what they want, what they need and where the cautionary lines are. I also have a walk-in resume as a retired military professional and can make it more comfortable for them to articulate what they are thinking. But, if you’re not from this world the experience could be different.

This is no different than if I went to a gaming company and tried to pitch an idea when I’ve never been a developer or programmer. Why should they trust me with no identifiable resume? The other thing to consider is that neither side knows what questions to ask each other. The military doesn’t know how games are designed or built and a gaming company doesn’t understand how the military operates or functions.

Finally, the last “non-digital generation” is at the top of military leadership. These are vastly experienced professionals who are responsible for bottom line results – life and death decisions. Senior Officers and NCOs in essence are the CEO’s of a very, very serious organization. And, in fact, they know games as well if not better than anyone – albeit different games. War games are part of the military professional DNA. With the backdrop of GWOT, Iraq, Afghanistan, serious games have a real and legitimate challenge to show compelling evidence why a lot of money should be spent on their production as opposed to say, body armor, fuel, or guns.

Do you view serious games as innovative, or are they integrative in your eyes?

Great question and one that few people consider. There are two types of defense companies: Innovation companies and Integration companies. Gaming companies and gaming applications are almost certainly “innovation.” The large corporations are the integrators – the ones who do the actual major program design and execution. IG and Whatif have spent considerable time, resource and energy to ensure our product can be integrated into defense architectures despite being an innovative company and technology. I can’t emphasize how important this is – all game development needs to consider government hardware/software in their design doc, which can be problematic if those details are not unclassified or releasable.

With third party companies now eying the serious games gamespace as a possible source of untapped revenues, there seems to be a danger for them, at least with military contracts, to unable to compete with bids placed by bigger corporations such as Northrop Grumman, which have the means to simply buy a market rather than create one. Do you agree, and if so, how do you foresee smaller companies contributing in this area in the future?

Again, an exceptionally insightful question. There are elements in the contracting systems that may allow a small gaming company to win large contracts, for instance via small business set-asides -- but that’s not the norm. Just like the commercial sector, the defense sector is predatory and hierarchical.

Once gaming becomes an integrated segment of the defense infrastructure and market share grows significantly, large companies will vie for and win contracts as the “Prime”. When will that happen? Hard to measure in years, but I would watch the shift of money. When game funding moves from RDT&E to OP executed over multi-year contracts I’d say its happening. When it does, large companies will team with small gaming companies as subcontractors for bidding. Big companies will ultimately also buy select gaming companies.

If you’re a small company and have managed to secure a large contract ($10M+ for multiyear) I would dust off your M&A (Merger and Acquisition) plan. Despite M&As, I see smaller companies having solid and continuing opportunity. The thing to keep in mind is that the gaming industry is moving at such a tremendous speed creating “next-generation” innovations that the technological obsolescence rates will always have to be accounted for; so, even if companies are purchased to fulfill large military contracts, they by nature will become increasingly obsolete vis-à-vis their commercial partners. It’s a circle – and it just depends where you want to stand.

Thank you again for your time today. Is there anything else you would like to add?

The U.S. is in a protracted war and constantly searching for innovations. However, the defense contracting and procurement world is challenging and unpredictable – even to an insider. It’s hard and slow to make money, you have very different financial accounting standards and laws, and government works on a different timeline and sense of schedule.

Make sure you know what you’re getting into – do your research. Talk to someone who knows defense but also understands your perspective, business and market. Conversely, working with the military and defense personnel can be incredibly rewarding. Gaming applications have the power to save lives, improve national security, and give you a once and a lifetime chance to work with professional military. They’re a tremendous group of Americans and overall they’re very excited about serious games and the potential that lies ahead. Thanks for you time!