Brandon Schapekahm is part of the Johnson Center for Simulation (JCS), which is part of the Pine Technical College in Pine City, Minnesota. JCS was founded as part of a regional project to extend East Central Minnesota’s technology infrastructure and services and their projects include scenario and procedural training applications, military immersive simulations, and game development.

For this session, Schapekahm chose some good examples of serious games that JCS has developed. An interesting discussion ensued, on comparing what Second Life and other 3D game engines such as UDL and Ogre can offer the historical reconstruction of historical sites. We saw some example of the kind of detailed textures allowed by UDL and discussed the pertinence of this vis-a-vis the social aspect of a (proprietary) platform such as Second Life.

This discussion triggered the idea that it would very useful to have the same historical site reconstructed using a number of engines (and approaches) so that the team can effectively evaluate the direction to  pursue. We discussed the possibility of an award to be announced to both the social/serious games and the scholarly communities.

By Ana Boa-Ventura