Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/103965
Imagery Applications approach illustrates some of the novel thinking that can come from the video-game-developer world when energy is focused on traditional GIS problems. Indeed, much of modern GIS technology is rooted in old-school static cartographic concepts, while the idea of map-as-interactive-simulation world is much more naturally accepted by recreational video gamers. Players of "Black Ops" and other first-person shooters commonly refer to the various simulated mission environments as "game maps," without giving it a second thought. In addition, video-game characters perform a wide variety of character-specific animations and behaviors that affect their overall location in the game-world grid (e.g., walking, running, leaping, etc.), and they can interact physically with objects in the environment and each other. So for GIS visualizations to evolve into "hardcore" game engines, there needs to be more convergence of the concepts of "map," "command-andcontrol interface" and "physics simulator," because video gamers already are actively living in that paradigm, always experiencing the 3-D modeled environment within the context of actively commanding and controlling characters to achieve some competitive game objective. "Drive the A-Team Van" by PlanetInAction.com (top) and "Google Earth Flight Simulator - Online" by Xavier Tassin (bottom) are impressive examples of free-to-play games developed using the Google Earth API. 16 G E O W O R L D / J A N U A R Y 2 O 1 3 "Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X." by Ubisoft shows realistic simulated combat over a detailed rendering of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Simulation vs. Game The ideas behind "GIS video gaming" beg an important question: What's the difference between a game and a simulator? Some of the first popular commercial video games for the PC were flight, driving and first-person combat simulators. If people play "Black Ops" for hours a day, it's called it "entertainment," because the world they're playing in isn't real. But change the game map to Washington, D.C., in all its real-world detail, and suddenly there's a potential problem. It has gone from "harmless video game" to "terrorist training simulator" with a simple change of scenery. And yet this is precisely what games like "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" did to a degree; by loosely modeling the game world around a real-world city, they provide a certain training effect of increased geographic and geospatial awareness, layered on top of the entertaining and addictive game-play experience. As long as it's called "Los Santos" and not "Los Angeles," everyone is happy. But the geographic similarities are there, nonetheless, and so is the tactical training potential. Yet the popular video-gaming audience historically isn't keen on "tactical training simulators." They demand "games" and insist on realism in those games—but only realism with a fantastic setting and scenario. When the setting is familiar, but the scenario is fantastic, people enter a new space of reality-based games. The irony is that the most popular subject of game fantasy simulation—war itself—is, in current reality, becoming more like a video game, as the modern drone revolution has turned a person sitting at a computer terminal into an experienced combat veteran. This surreal situation smacks of the classic sciencefiction novel, "Ender's Game," in which children need to believe the training games they're playing aren't real in order for them to play to their highest abilities. Gamers love the "Death from Above" AC-130 gunner missions from "Call of Duty," but what if they could play that Imagery/LIDAR Special Issue