When Tim Holt discovered the Serious Games Initiative, he found a way to combine his day job as a scientist at Oregon State University with his moonlighting gig as a video game designer.

Holt, a senior research assistant in the College of Forestry, first heard the term "serious games" several years ago at a video game developer conference. It got him thinking about new ways to encourage forest exploration, and to facilitate dialogue between forest scientists at OSU and the field ecologists upon whose data they rely.

"I can take a game where you're given this space alien-looking thing with crossbows and turn it into a forest visualization based on real data," Holt said.

Serious games are still fairly new, but they're quickly attracting attention, he said. They are being used for everything from training surgical nurses in simulated operating rooms to teaching kids French by having them run around a virtual Paris, to allowing fire fighters to safely and cheaply simulate disaster scenarios.

Holt has teamed up with other researchers in the college to modify existing games, creating a broad-scale view of forests along the west coast with accurate information about the types of trees, fuels and topography one would find there.

It will allow scientists to "virtually" explore forests instead of having to travel to their actual locations. Like many popular first-person shooter games, multiple players can participate in Holt's game simultaneously over the Internet, and can interact with each other.

Holt is using data from the Landscape Ecology, Modeling, Mapping and Analysis project (LEMMA).

Part of LEMMA's work involves mapping fuels on forest floors in Oregon, Washington and California to help predict fire risks.

Field ecologists collected data on the species, sizes, ages and densities of trees they found in these forests, along with other vegetation information, and researchers at OSU and the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station used Geographic Information Systems technology to attach these attributes to spatial coordinates.

Holt is incorporating this information into his game.

The two-year project is funded by a $254,000 grant from the Joint Fire Science Program of the U.S.D.A. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management.

Right now the game just covers a forest near Tillamook, and only distinguishes between conifer and hardwood trees. Holt plans to make it much more specific and will expand the program to cover a wider geographic area spanning the western coastal states.

Rather than create games from scratch for learning and training purposes, it's much easier to modify existing commercial games, Holt said.

"Many software developers have spent millions developing realistic-looking games that have dramatic visual elements, great lighting, 3-D effects, human interaction and are easily used by your average middle-school student," Holt said. "Why re-invent the wheel? These games can usually be modified with additional programming. And so long as you don't sell your package commercially, the industry generally encourages this because it helps them sell more of their games."

Holt is using Torque Game Builder software developed by the Eugene-based company GarageGames. They charged him a $1,000 licensing fee, and he can adapt their program to create a forestry game.

All the code Holt is writing is open source, and other forestry researchers around the country will be able to use it for free, modifying the geography and vegetation to reflect their locales.

The game could translate into licensing revenue for OSU, however, if a company wants to purchase the commercial rights, Holt said.

Holt said most of the researchers he's talked to in the College of Forestry at OSU have been excited about the game - after getting past initial skepticism.

Holt believes video games as a whole get a bad rap because some are violent or contain adult content.

"Just because some set a bad example doesn't mean the whole medium is bad," he said.

Matt Gregoy, a senior faculty research assistant in OSU's forest science department, is excited to see the LEMMA data he worked on incorporated into a game.

"There's definitely a wow factor, and that's pretty neat to see," Gregory said. "People get past the initial 'ha ha, this is really funny' and see the possibilities of what it can do."

On the Net: To learn more about serious video games, see www.seriousgames.org. More information about the forestry data used in Tim Holt's game can be found online at www.fsl.orst.edu/lemma/.

Mary Ann Albright covers higher education. She can be reached at maryann.albright@lee.net or 758-9518.