College students to create game for theme park

Move aside Grand Theft Auto, gamers have a new way to impact their neighborhood.

EarthQuest Institute, the ecofriendly entertainment center slated for construction in New Caney, recently partnered with Lone Star College-Kingwood students to develop an interactive game in which players can recycle items in their virtual neighborhood and gain points for their efforts.

The game is intended to be played later this year on EarthQuest's Web site at www.earthquestinstitue.org. EarthQuest Institute is one of six components of EarthQuest Resort, a 500-acre theme park paying homage to Earth sciences. At the nonprofit research institute, visitors can participate in hands-on activities geared toward sustainability.

Game Design and Simulation Project Development students worked through the fall semester with Matt Gardner, an MIT scientist and EarthQuest's chief science officer, to create a virtual environment where players pick and choose items for recycle and learn about reusable materials they wouldn't normally think could be recycled. The lesser-known items yield more points.

"This is likely the single most important semester I can say that I'd taken," said Kristine Lackey, LSC-Kingwood Game Design and Simulation student. "I learned a lot working with a real client. Making a game for an assignment is one thing, making it for a real person or a real group of people is quite another."

Lackey said she felt pressure to meet deadlines and produce quality work like she might experience in a real job.

"It upped the quality of work, forced a teamwork cohesion which we hadn't bothered with before and put a real stress on deadlines that we may have otherwise kicked around," Lackey said.

Gardner met with the students once a month to give advice and review the progress of their game. He said EarthQuest Institute's goal is to promote green living standards among younger generations, and doing that through video games helps.

"The whole premise behind EarthQuest is education and communication about the future of our world. We see students, the next generation of leaders, as key to this. So, even in this early stage of our project, we are seeking to engage with students from local colleges, universities, even primary and secondary schools, to pilot test some models for how we can engage with them in effective and fruitful ways," Gardner said.

Game Design and Simulation is an up-and-coming career choice for students. In addition to the exploding popularity of video games as a form of home entertainment, the U.S. military uses games to create training simulation for soldiers; the health-care industry uses surgery simulations before operations; and public schools are even jumping on the virtual bandwagon with video games solved through math equations, statistics and probability reasoning.

"The purpose of (this project) was twofold - to create a fun and engaging way to teach people about sustainability, which is the mission of the EarthQuest Institute, while giving students the experience of working in a real-world scenario," said Caroline Chamness, Game Design and Simulation faculty member at LSC-Kingwood.

The EarthQuest Adventures project will be located in New Caney at Roman Forest Boulevard and U.S. 59. Originally slated to be open this year, construction has yet to begin. Initial costs were projected to be $500 million to build the theme park, however, developers have gone back to drawing board and cut $200 million from their projections.

The developer, Marlin Atlantis, told East Montgomery County Investment District board members Nov. 10 that the mixed-use project must be re-planned and built in phases. The first phase of the re-design — the dinosaur theme park and museum -will cost approximately $307 million to build and construction will start in the summer of 2011.

For details, visit www.earthquestadventures.com.