This paper presents the “gamecomponents” portal, which was funded by the European Commission to support and amplify the field of serious game development. The portal system provides a central point of access for the exchange of advanced game software and knowledge resources. Different from existing game asset stores, the portal is dedicated to serious games rather than leisure games. Its initial offerings include over 40 advanced “pluggable” services. Different from existing asset stores, the software is platform-independent and thus avoids any risks of vendor lock-in. The paper provides a quick overview of the key characteristics of the portal and discusses the measures and options to procure its sustainable exploitation and growth.
INTRODUCTION
The benefits of applying games for serious purposes have
been well recognised. Over the last decade, the European
Commission (EC) has spent over hundred million Euros to
research and innovation of serious gaming through its
Horizon 2020 Programme and its predecessors. The support
from the EC is grounded in the ambition of making Europe
the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based
economy in the world, of creating of new jobs and growth
by raising the level of investments (the Juncker plan) and of
making the transition to a digital, single market that meets
the requirements of the digital age (the Lisbon Agenda [
This paper provides a quick overview of the arguments to launch the marketplace portal, its design considerations and initial offerings, its role to connect serious game stakeholders and an outlook on its potential growth. PROBLEM ANALYSIS The field of serious gaming suffers from a variety of problems. Major issues are summarised below.
Fragmentation
Notwithstanding its potential, the serious game landscape is
highly fragmented. Relevant research groups are scattered
over a diversity of contributing disciplines, ranging from
computer science to psychology and cultural science, as
well as different application areas: health, military,
education, cultural heritage. Likewise, the serious game
industry is scattered over a large number of small
independent players (SME’s) and displays many features of
an emerging, immature branch of business: weak
interconnectedness, limited knowledge exchange, absence
of harmonising standards, limited specialisations, limited
division of labour and insufficient evidence of the products’
efficacies [
and markets (e.g. schools, business, Inherent complexity of games Serious games are among the most complex ICTs because of their inherent dynamics requiring high degrees of user interaction, data processing and adaptation mechanisms, the high audio-visual demands (sounds, animations, videos), and the specific pedagogical requirements to be included in the games’ design.
Comparison with triple A leisure games
In many cases serious games are typically “low budget, low
tech” often referred to as being no more than “the poor
cousins of the computer game industry” [
Technological diversity Progress is hampered by the wide variety of programming languages, game development systems and delivery platforms that game studios have in use, all of which go with specific technical constraints and incompatibilities that pose severe barriers to growth.
High development costs Serious games require high upfront investments. This is partly due to the complexity of games. It can likewise be attributed to a lack of knowledge exchange in the networks, leaving single parties to frequently re-invent the wheel, which is inefficient as such. For large take-up in the market, development costs and time-to-market should go down, which could be procured by enhanced knowledge exchange and the reuse of software for game development. CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD In 2015, the EC decided to fund the RAGE project to address these problems. The RAGE consortium was composed of 19 partners from 10 European countries, including game studios, game researchers, educators and business innovators. The overall budget of 9 million Euro signifies the urgency and significance of the problems identified. The main assignments to the RAGE consortium were:
Provide a model for sustainable exploitation
The RAGE component-based software architecture
RAGE has prepared a component-based architecture to
accommodate the easy integration and reuse of software in
the wide diversity of development platforms, target
platforms and programming languages that are being used
in practice [
Component usage in real-world games
For the validation of the approach, professional game
studios have created 7 games based on the various
components. The games focus on various 21st-century soft
skills and address diverse educational and training contexts:
leadership and management skills for recreational sports
leaders, customer helpdesk skills and collaboration skills
for vocational IT students, conflict management skills and
creative entrepreneurial skills for art and design students,
job application skills for corporate candidates, and
interrogation skills for police officers. Over 2,000
participants were involved in the game sessions. For all
games a dedicated evaluation was carried out with the
purpose to, on the one hand, collect scientific evidence for
the effectiveness of this game-based training, and on the
other hand, to substantiate the practicability of
componentbased game development [
At the core of the gamecomponents.eu portal is a digital
repository of software objects and associated knowledge
resources [
The look and feel of the portal largely complies to what is
common at existing marketplaces, while offering various
search and filter options. Providers of game software can
use the submission tools to specify the relevant metadata
and to upload the associated software and artefacts such as
manuals, tutorials, videos, demos, design documents,
testimonials, training courses, empirical proof cases, etc.
The software can either be uploaded as a separate zip
archive or included as a reference to an external archive
(e.g., Github, Bitbucket). Integration with social media
platforms such as Mendeley and Slideshare allow for easy
import of existing resources [
After its launch in the course of 2018, the number of monthly visits to the portal gradually grew to over 8000 in January 2019. By then, the number of direct downloads from the portal was 40 per month. Additional downloads from existing software management portals such as Github or Bitbucket are not included.
DISCUSSION With its gamecomponents.eu portal and the initial collection of reusable game software, the RAGE project has created a starting point for establishing a serious gaming innovation ecosystem. However, solely the launch of a portal, even if it exposes high quality technologies and resources, does not make an innovation ecosystem. The ecosystem would essentially be a social system that links together diverse stakeholders across the value chain: individuals from universities, industries, education and government, using the portal as a vehicle. A key question will be to what extent the portal will be embraced by serious gaming stakeholders, either from academia or from the industry, to benefit from the opportunities for collaboration and the exchange of knowledge and resources. Evidently, the portal will need to grow in terms of contents and in terms of users. A steady influx of new software components, tools and resources is deemed essential, along with a growing number of users and associated application cases demonstrating the successful deployment of component-based serious games.
To preserve the results of the RAGE project after its recent
ending, parties have established the RAGE Foundation as
the legal entity acting as the custodian of the RAGE legacy.
Currently, the RAGE Foundation has been focussing on the
following priorities. First, the Foundation will arrange and
participate in stakeholder events to enthuse and encourage
the various target groups. This should help to establish
further growth both on the supply side of game software
and on the demand side. Second, the Foundation will
elaborate the details of the hybrid multi-sided business
model that has been devised for sustainable exploitation of
the portal. Based on extensive stakeholder consultations,
this model was selected as the best option, providing the
flexibility and ability to eventually accommodate multiple
revenue streams, such as subscription fees, e-commerce
services, and premium services, and to adapt quickly to
changing market conditions in the fluid and fractured
serious gaming development landscape [
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This research was partially funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 644187, the RAGE project (www.rageproject.eu).