=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2497/paper10
|storemode=property
|title=Serious Gaming Coming of Age: Implementing a European Innovation Policy to Amplify Serious Game Development
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2497/paper10.pdf
|volume=Vol-2497
|authors=Wim Westera
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/gamilearn/Westera19
}}
==Serious Gaming Coming of Age: Implementing a European Innovation Policy to Amplify Serious Game Development==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2497/paper10.pdf
Serious Gaming Coming of Age: Implementing a European
Innovation Policy to Amplify Serious Game Development
Wim Westera
Open University of the
Netherlands
Heerlen, The Netherlands
wim.westera@ou.nl
ABSTRACT making the transition to a digital, single market that meets
This paper presents the “gamecomponents” portal, which the requirements of the digital age (the Lisbon Agenda [3]
was funded by the European Commission to support and and the Europe 2020 strategy [4]). Among the many EC-
amplify the field of serious game development. The portal funded initiatives is the RAGE European flagship project,
system provides a central point of access for the exchange which has recently launched a game development
of advanced game software and knowledge resources. marketplace portal to amplify knowledge exchange and
Different from existing game asset stores, the portal is networking across multiple players in the field. The main
dedicated to serious games rather than leisure games. Its goal is to establish a European “innovation ecosystem” [2]
initial offerings include over 40 advanced “pluggable” in serious gaming, capable of interconnecting multiple
services. Different from existing asset stores, the software is innovation actors from R&D networks and networks of
platform-independent and thus avoids any risks of vendor commercial parties across the entire value chain to generate
lock-in. The paper provides a quick overview of the key commercial value. The innovation ecosystem concept is
characteristics of the portal and discusses the measures and particularly applicable to advanced technologies (such as
options to procure its sustainable exploitation and growth. gaming), because high-tech industries are knowledge-
Author Keywords driven, offer higher growth potential and thereby spur job
Game software; online marketplace; serious games; game creation and economic development. The RAGE
development; software reuse; software components; game marketplace portal is readily positioned as an instrument to
ecosystem promote ecosystem formation and the associated
mechanisms of technology transfer and branch
ACM Classification Keywords development.
• Applied computing~Computer games
• Software and its engineering~Interactive games This paper provides a quick overview of the arguments to
• Software and its engineering~Reusability launch the marketplace portal, its design considerations and
• General and reference~Empirical studies initial offerings, its role to connect serious game
• Networks~Cloud computing stakeholders and an outlook on its potential growth.
INTRODUCTION PROBLEM ANALYSIS
The benefits of applying games for serious purposes have The field of serious gaming suffers from a variety of
been well recognised. Over the last decade, the European problems. Major issues are summarised below.
Commission (EC) has spent over hundred million Euros to Fragmentation
research and innovation of serious gaming through its Notwithstanding its potential, the serious game landscape is
Horizon 2020 Programme and its predecessors. The support highly fragmented. Relevant research groups are scattered
from the EC is grounded in the ambition of making Europe over a diversity of contributing disciplines, ranging from
the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based computer science to psychology and cultural science, as
economy in the world, of creating of new jobs and growth well as different application areas: health, military,
by raising the level of investments (the Juncker plan) and of education, cultural heritage. Likewise, the serious game
Copyright © 2019 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under industry is scattered over a large number of small
Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). independent players (SME’s) and displays many features of
In: J. Arnedo-Moreno, C.S. González, A. Mora (eds.): Proceedings of the an emerging, immature branch of business: weak
3rd International Symposium on Gamification and Games for Learning
(GamiLearn’19), Barcelona, Spain, 22-10-2019, published at http://ceur-
interconnectedness, limited knowledge exchange, absence
ws.org of harmonising standards, limited specialisations, limited
division of labour and insufficient evidence of the products’
efficacies [5]. As a consequence, the overall field of serious
gaming is likely to suffer from missed opportunities,
limited adoption, and a lack of success cases to open up
new areas and markets (e.g. schools, business, Provide scientific and practical evidence through
governments). real-world application cases
Inherent complexity of games Create a repository for the exchange of game
Serious games are among the most complex ICTs because software
of their inherent dynamics requiring high degrees of user Provide a model for sustainable exploitation
interaction, data processing and adaptation mechanisms, the The outcomes of the project are summarized below.
high audio-visual demands (sounds, animations, videos),
and the specific pedagogical requirements to be included in The RAGE component-based software architecture
the games’ design. RAGE has prepared a component-based architecture to
accommodate the easy integration and reuse of software in
Comparison with triple A leisure games the wide diversity of development platforms, target
In many cases serious games are typically “low budget, low platforms and programming languages that are being used
tech” often referred to as being no more than “the poor in practice [7,8]. The RAGE architecture is essentially
cousins of the computer game industry” [5]. Product quality lightweight and does not demand substantial overheads
tends to be well below leisure games standards and the from developers. The simple case would be the remote
products’ effectiveness for learning is often questioned [5]. communications of server-side components with centralised
Limited research-industry collaborations applications: these are based on a service-oriented
Although the positive impact of R&D spending on the architecture (SOA) using the HTTP-protocol (e.g. REST),
industry’s competitiveness and innovation power is beyond which offers platform-independence and interoperability
dispute, the small SME’s often lack the resources to invest among heterogeneous technologies. Web services offer
in R&D. Moreover, there are some fundamental several advantages such as decoupling from implementation
differences, if not barriers, between game research and the details and a high degree of reusability of services, but may
game industry with respect to time horizon (typically years also affect system performance due to frequent network
versus months or even weeks), finance (government funded calls and they impede off-line gaming. Client-side
versus commercial operation), and overall attitude components, which all need to be integrated into client-
(fundamental versus pragmatic). machine applications (viz. game engines), bypass these
problems, but they are more sensible to system
Technological diversity
incompatibilities. Regarding the client-side, the RAGE
Progress is hampered by the wide variety of programming
component architecture overcomes many of potential
languages, game development systems and delivery
incompatibilities as it avoids dependencies of external
platforms that game studios have in use, all of which go software frameworks by not relying on game application
with specific technical constraints and incompatibilities that
code. Instead, it uses a limited set of well-established
pose severe barriers to growth.
software patterns (Bridge, Singleton, Publish/Subscribe)
High development costs and coding practices aimed at decoupling abstraction from
Serious games require high upfront investments. This is its implementation. This decoupling facilitates reusability
partly due to the complexity of games. It can likewise be of a component across different game engines and other
attributed to a lack of knowledge exchange in the networks, client environments with minimal integration effort. The
leaving single parties to frequently re-invent the wheel, architecture was validated for multiple programming
which is inefficient as such. For large take-up in the market, languages (C#, C++, Java, JavaScript) and many proof
development costs and time-to-market should go down, cases have been established with real games [7,8].
which could be procured by enhanced knowledge exchange
Reusable software components
and the reuse of software for game development.
The research parties in RAGE have created a diverse set of
CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE FIELD game components, all of which offer pedagogically-
In 2015, the EC decided to fund the RAGE project to oriented functionality to be used or integrated in serious
address these problems. The RAGE consortium was games. They provide unique, enabling technologies for
composed of 19 partners from 10 European countries, game developers empowering them and their studios to
including game studios, game researchers, educators and create better games at lower costs and in less time. As game
business innovators. The overall budget of 9 million Euro components should extend rather than restrict the creative
signifies the urgency and significance of the problems space of developers, the components work under the hood
identified. The main assignments to the RAGE consortium only: they do not directly address the game’s user-interface,
were: thus respecting any look and feel deemed appropriate for
the game. The set of components include software for
Reduce interoperability issues between different
massive learning analytics (tracker, storage, authentication
technical platforms
and analytics fully decoupled from e.g. Google), affective
Provide cutting-edge game technology examples tools (e.g. arousal detection, emotion detection, motivation
that can be easily reused assessment), adaptation and balancing tools (based on e.g.
game difficulty, competences,s, motivation),
motivation) modelling tools nity Asset Store, the Unreal Engine marketplace and
the Unity
for believable Non-Playing
Playing Characters (e.g. dynamic mood place, which are all driven by
the Cry Engine marketplace,
modelling, appraisal modelling), procedural animation of commercial game platform vvendors. The existing stores do
non-verbal
verbal behaviours, a social gamification suite (enabling fically focus on serious games: most objects are
not specifically
multi-player
player features, e.g. tournaments, teams, group media objects (e.g. terrains, audio, buildings, weapons,
challenges, award systems), competence-based
competence adaptation, user-interface objects, and templates) rather than software
dialogue builder and reasoned software,
software natural language objects, and they readily lead to vendor vendor lock-in,
processing (topic mining, sentiment analysis, essay grading, because the scarce game software objects can only be used
summary evaluation, comprehension nsion prediction, text-to-
text in the vendor’s game platform. In contrast, the
speech vice versa, lipsync) and many other functions. So gamecomponents.eu portal is domain-driven
domain instead of
far, all these components use the Apache 2.0 license (white platform-driven: it has a clear focus on serious games,
label software), which allows for reuse by third parties both which are no longer positioned as a by-product of leisure
for commercial and non-commercial
commercial purposes, either under games, and its software offerings can be used across
open source or closed source conditions. To promote the multiple development platforms.
adoption and reuse of the software products exposed, they
At the core of the gamecomponents.eu portal is a digital
have all been enriched with user guides, instructional
repository of software objects and associated
as knowledge
materials, demonstrators and proof cases.
]. Figure 1 shows a screenshot of the software
resources [6].
Component usage in real-world
world games catalogue page.
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
errogation 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 ed training, and on the
other hand, to substantiate the practicability of component
component-
based game development [1]. With respect to the latterlatter, an
extensive assessment was carried out of the usability and
practicability of the available components as well as tthe
RAGE architectural elements among developers.developers The
developers
evelopers are generally positive about the components and
the architecture and claim that these help them to do a Fig. 1. A screenshot of the software catalogue at the marketplace
portal (gamecomponents.eu).
better job in less time. The costs/ s/benefits ratios of
components are highly favourable: while hile all components,
including their design, development and empirical The look and feel of the porta
portal largely complies to what is
validation, are based on extensive long-term
long research mon at existing marketplaces
common marketplaces, while offering various
(multiple years), the integration of a component in a game search and filter options. Providers of game software can
is merely a matter of days or even hours. A case-based
case use the submission tools to specify the relevant metadata
costs-benefits analysis
nalysis has confirmed the impact of reusing and to upload the associated software and artefacts such as
software components, reporting costs/benefits
/benefits ratios up to 1 manuals, tutorials, videos, demos, design documents,
over 100 (a succinct version of the costs-benefits
costs analysis testimonials, training courses, empirical proof cases, etc.
can be found at The software can either be uploaded as a separate zip
https://www.gamecomponents.eu/page/case
amecomponents.eu/page/case-studies). archive or included as a reference to an external archive
). Integration with social media
(e.g., Github, Bitbucket).
The Marketplace Portal latforms such as Mendeley and Slideshare allow for easy
platforms
RAGE contributes to the objective of an innovation import of existing resources [6]. [ Also, the portal is
ecosystem by its community platform at commerce suite, which allows parties
supported by a full e-commerce
gamecomponents.eu, that offers centralised
centrali access to the to sell and buy artefacts. It allows parties to go beyond
collection of reusable game software components. It differs current free and open source offerings, and expose
substantially from existing gaming marketplaces, such as proprietary materials requiring licence fees and service
costs. It helps to transform the marketplace into a true Successful future exploitation of the marketplace may truly
trading place. advance synergy and coherence in the domain of serious
gaming.
After its launch in the course of 2018, the number of
monthly visits to the portal gradually grew to over 8000 in ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
January 2019. By then, the number of direct downloads This research was partially funded by the European Union’s
from the portal was 40 per month. Additional downloads Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under
from existing software management portals such as Github grant agreement No 644187, the RAGE project
or Bitbucket are not included. (www.rageproject.eu).
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