Interaction and Sharing Between Communities

The paper thoroughly highlighted the need for increased interaction between game developers, academic modeling and simulation interests, and non-game industry organizations. Suggestions included organizing stand-alone meetings, attending major game trade shows and conferences, and reaching out to various training and academic interests. Even now, this advice is sound and much of it has gone unheeded. There is little governmental and non-governmental public interest presence at the two major game industry conferences held each spring. There are no general clearinghouses of information to help vendors and organizations find each other, nor is there much being done to highlight various resources available to game developers who might want help tweaking their own models and datasets.

Since the report was published, the Internet has made it easier to publish and circulate documents between groups and made it easier to identify and find development teams. The open-source movement has seen a number of game engines and programs published with public source code. However, the existence of the Internet has also led to a great deal of person-to-person matchmaking. Overall interaction has been unorganized and stunted the potential for strong, higher-profile partnerships.

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