Somehow I ended up in a data acquisition and analysis session yesterday instead of political advocacy. Apparently, the room assignments got switched and the conference assistants by the doors weren't aware. Or maybe I just mixed up the times.
It turned out to be extremely fascinating, as it was more of a roundtable and really highlighted the variety of ways in which game technology us being used. Participants included people from academia, military contractors, healthcare system providers, etc, and they really brought home the limitations in the way commercial game engines are designed and implemented for applications outside electronic entertainment.
The underlying theme was the use of games for experimentation and research, which is a domain and industry that we don't consider much - if at all - on GDNet. This leads me to believe that we need to increase our interaction with academia, because there are many concentrations that we could emphasize to mutual benefit.
It also helps to break the stereotypes of game developers that we have built up. This was a room full of serious-looking people who definitely had non-frivolous objectives such as building applications to teach tactical Arabic or field skills (actual DAR Wars applications).
Need to find out more about COTS and SCORM.
