This is an exploratory project to investigate, prototype, and demonstrate a computational framework for developing science mission games or game-based virtual worlds. Mission-oriented science is a sizable part of the national agenda for research and development within many science, technology, engineering, or mathematically based disciplines. These missions are complex endeavors that articulate a life cycle of recurring socio-technical and economics-driven processes, such as mission planning, vehicle and payload or instrument design, launch, transit, arrival, landing and deployment, resources collection, return, and debriefing. Increasingly, students, teachers, scientists, engineers, technicians, and others need to become aware of, gain knowledge about, and ultimately encourage support and enthusiasm for new scientific missions. This research will articulate such a framework and provide a proof of concept mockups or prototypes for science mission games that employ this new framework.
The results can serve as the basis for developing new research projects of interest to specific science research agencies or programs for creating new, mission-specific science games. Such games represent a new medium for communicating, educating, and engaging a new generation of people interested in new science missions and scientific grand challenges. By design, the approach must be science domain-independent, and a reusable computational framework for producing extensible science mission games would represent a new, high-value engine for innovation that serves to address the new grand challenges for science and technology, and to advance the collective societal mission of producing, sharing, and applying new scientific knowledge and technological practice within and across science disciplines.
Mission-oriented science computer games provide game-play mechanics and play experiences that help players to (1) gain awareness, (2) acquire scientific knowledge, or (3) participate in customizing and extending the specified details of a scientific mission or exploratory expedition in a specific domain of interest. Such games can afford opportunities for the public to gain awareness of the mission and its potential consequences, for students to learn about the scientific foundations that characterize the domain or mission challenges, and for domain specialists or citizen enthusiasts to participate in articulating, refining, and optimizing the scope, scale, efficiency, and effectiveness of such science missions.
Our interest is to investigate and prototype a new computational framework for developing science mission games or game-based virtual worlds. Mission-oriented science is a sizable part of the national agenda for research and development within many science, technology, engineering, or mathematically based disciplines. These missions are complex endeavors that articulate a life cycle of recurring socio-technical and economics-driven processes, such as mission planning, instrument design, data collection analysis and educational outreach. Increasingly, students, teachers, R&D scientists, engineers, technicians, and others need to become aware of, gain knowledge about, and ultimately encourage support and enthusiasm for, new scientific missions. Through this research effort, we have begun to articulate such a framework and provide a proof of concept mockups or prototypes for three distinct science mission games that employ our framework. Such results allow us to describe the new scientific knowledge we have produced, which in turn can serve as the basis for developing new research proposals to specific science research agencies or programs for creating new, mission-specific science games. Such games represent a new media for communicating, educating, and engaging a new generation of people interested in new science missions and scientific grand challenges. Large-scale missions like manned/robotic space travel to near-earth asteroids for exploration and resource harvesting may transform the economics of manufacturing products with costly, exotic materials found on Earth. Exploratory missions that navigate through the micro-passageways within the human brain, possibly to direct surgical procedures that inject nano-scale robots that diagnose or deliver targeted treatments to otherwise inaccessible regions of the human body. Military mission planning, command and control are also common for national security, while design and deployment of advanced decentralized manufacturing systems may point to new regimes for technological innovation, unprecedented new products, and new stimuli for workforce development. Some of these mission domains will attract competition from research institutes, corporations or nation states that may seek to obtain scientific, socio-economic, and even national security advantages through their efforts to be the first to explore and exploit these unfamiliar terrains. Such competition may serve to articulate the narrative back-story for subsequent mission engagement. Furthermore, determining how best to succeed at these missions with fewer resources than historically provided, challenges the current scientific, technological, and engineering knowledge we have. Without such public awareness, engagement, and enthusiasm, support for bold science missions in the foreseeable future will be modest at best, or antagonistic at worst. Such a position dramatically reduces the likelihood of mission engagement, while increasing the risk of mission failure, cost and schedule overruns, growth of scientific antipathy, and lack of beneficial societal transformations that emerge from scientific and technological progress. Mission-oriented science computer games provide game play mechanics and play experiences that help players to (a) gain awareness, (b) acquire scientific knowledge, or (c) participate in customizing/extending the specified details of a scientific mission or exploratory expedition in a specific domain of interest. Such games can afford opportunities for the public to gain awareness of the mission and its potential consequences, for students to learn about the scientific foundations that characterize the domain or mission challenges, and for domain specialists or citizen enthusiasts to participate in articulating, refining, and optimizing the scope, scale, efficiency, and effectiveness of such science missions. This investigation seeks to rapidly create and conceptually demonstrate an unprecedented, reusable computational framework that guides and enables the rapid development of mission-oriented science games for diverse science-based domains, accommodating players with different skill levels and subject matter interest. Without such a framework, science mission games are unlikely to arise from commercial computer game industry (no existing or perceived market), nor will scientists whose expertise lies outside of computer game development be empowered or encouraged to undertake development of such seemingly complex software applications.
