Idiot Designs Serious Game
The idiot is me.
At least in the gaming world I am. I'm a technical writer designing a software training course and I want to create a 3D world serious game online where IT support professionals can go into the world, actually run the application from within the world, plus work with virtual/simulated network devices that you configure with the software.
So... how idiotic an idea do you think this is?
Have you ever heard of such a thing?
Should I affix the Dunce cap to my cranium with epoxy?
Paul
Got $10 million sitting around?
Then you're not even going to get started. Sorry.
Wow, $10 million. I don't have quite that much.
But that's a good education for me, Jim and J. This helps me see the significant cost limitations of game technology for serious gaming at this point.
I appreciate your feedback a lot.
You don't have to build everything yourself. Depending on your needs you could do it as a mod of an existing game. Check out: http://www.educationarcade.org/revolution for an example of making a teaching game based on Neverwinter Nights.
I couldn't find any budget information for that project, but it's likely several orders of magnitude less than 10 million.
Interesting idea, Paul. And that MIT site is very interesting on its own. Thanks.
Originally posted by Paul Sinnett
Check out: http://www.educationarcade.org/revolution for an example of making a teaching game based on Neverwinter Nights.
Teaching people how to do journalism and building a virtual testing ground for software are different things. If all he wanted to do was making a graphical MUD/MUSH, he could go into Second Life right now.
Multiverse...
...and a few million. 
I definitely will not have a budget anywhere in that vicinity.
5 years ago I thought I could make a MMOG on the cheap. Today, almost a quarter of a million dollars invested later, almost 5 prototypes later, and A LOT of experience later, I'm going for my first million dollars to get a real studio set up with plan of going after 10 million dollars in investment next year.
So unless you already have a team that will work for peanuts (college friends, work colleagues, or students of yours), you will have to pay for programmers and artists and network guys, not to mention hardware and software and bandwidth, and that burns at least $1M a year and that's not even taking into account testing and deployment.
But the Multiverse MMOG engine is free to develop on (they get paid when you go commercial) so you are free to use that for prototypes and demos which you can use to recruit talent or fund raise... you "may" even be able to do it all on your own! A lot has happened in the last 5 years to make things easier on the aspiring MMOG developer so that my story need not be your story!
I don't think it's idiotic. I do think it would be a huge undertaking creating such a game though.