City One - A Serious Game for a Serious Problem


ARMONK, N.Y., USA - IBM  has
announced CityOne, a new “serious game” that can help customers,
business partners and students discover how to make cities and
their industries smarter by solving real-world business,
environmental and logistical problems. Based on decades of
experience in solving business challenges in creative ways, IBM
“serious” games are designed to train the workforce of tomorrow.
Details on the latest serious game from IBM were unveiled at the
IMPACT 2010 conference in Las Vegas.



With an estimated one million people around the world moving
into cities each week, experts predict population in the world’s
cities will double by 2050. Today cities consume an estimated 75
percent of the world’s energy, emit more than 80 percent of
greenhouse gases, and lose as much as 20 percent of their water
supply due to infrastructure leaks. As their urban populations
continue to grow and these metrics increase, civic leaders will
face an unprecedented series of challenges as they modify their
infrastructures to meet these challenges. 



In order for urban centers to sustain growth and play a positive
and central role in the global economy, cities must grow smart.
City infrastructures that deliver vital services such as
transportation, energy and water, must rely on a wealth of new
information and technologies that will allow them sense and respond
intelligently to the needs of their growing populations.



With CityOne, IBM is providing a virtual environment
that will help tomorrow’s leaders learn how to apply advances in
technology and better understand how these systems work. 



CityOne will be a no charge, “sim-style” game in which the
player is tasked with guiding the city through a series of missions
that include the Energy, Water, Banking and Retail industries. For
example, one mission involves a city where water usage has
increased at twice the rate of population growth, supplies are
becoming strained (and possibly polluted); the municipality is
losing as much as 40 percent of its water supply through leaky
infrastructure; and energy costs are steadily increasing. To
complete this mission, the player would be challenged to institute
a Water Management System that would include accurate real time
data to make decisions on delivering the highest water quality in
the most economical way. 



Players who promote a more customer-centric business model to
the banks represented in their city will discover how mobile
payments, dynamic invoicing, and micro-lending can impact business
goals. In all of the missions represented in the game, the player
will need to determine the best way to invest to meet the
financial, environmental and sociological goals of the city’s
industries while balancing their budgets and the needs of the
citizenry. In parallel, players will learn how the components of
service reuse, process management, cloud and collaborative
technologies make business models more agile. 



“Serious games allow professionals to inherently comprehend
system interactions, and accurately model the potential business
outcomes that can result, in a way that no other medium can do,”
said Nancy Pearson, IBM vice president of SOA, BPM and
WebSphere.



“CityOne will simulate the challenges faced in
a variety of industries so that businesses can explore a variety of
solutions and explore the business impact before committing
resources.” 



Historically, simulation gaming has been used extensively in the
military, by athletes and by scientists to discover effective new
strategies and techniques and develop the skills needed to
implement them. These simulations have migrated into the
entertainment space and spawned a new generation of what are known
as massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). In these online
games, players from all over the globe log into realistic and
real-time virtual worlds via the Internet; they learn different
roles and skill sets, and come together in self-selecting teams to
collaborate and carry out missions in pursuit of common goals.
Businesses have realized the value of this and are deploying their
own games to create life-like simulations of real markets,
customers and business situations that they deal with every
day. 



“Enterprises are increasingly adopting Web 2.0 collaboration
tools to appeal to a new generation entering the workforce that
grew up immersed in social media technologies,” said Lisa Rowan,
director HR, Learning, and Talent Strategies research IDC.
“Training will need to follow suit by incorporating interactivity
and gaming to be relevant to this new workforce.” 



City One



IBM is not new to the serious games space. Over the years, IBM
has released a number of games such as INNOV8, RoboCode and PowerUp
that are used by schools, businesses, museums and
conferences.  Additionally, IBM has conducted an extensive
study of massive multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs),
and the results have underscored how a rotating leadership model is
likely to affect an enterprise.  Based on these results, last
year IBM announced the second in the INNOV8 series of games that
teach the fundamentals of Business Process Management (BPM) using a
3D environment. The INNOV8 series is now being used by more than
1000 universities worldwide and is offered for free to schools via
IBM’s Academic Initiative. 



Mark McGibbon, a PhD DBA professor of IT and Business at a
leading university has used INNOV8 in three of his classes
including Process Improvement, his Software Acquisition Class and
Analytics and Simulation. 



“Using serious games like INNOV8 to teach something as slippery
as Business Process Management has really helped my students
visualize directly the impact of these systems on a business,” said
McGibbon. “We are greatly looking forward to the next IBM
game.” 



A special session titled ‘Using Games to develop strategies and
skills to thrive in a real-time world’ is part of IBM’s Executive
Education Track at the IMPACT conference. Michael Hugos of the
Center for Systems Innovation and Phaedra Boinodiris, IBM’s Serious
Games Program manager explained how  businesses can profit
from simulation gaming.



For more information visit: target=”_blank”>http://www.ibm.com/cityone.


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