Researchers and game developers explore avenues for further research on serious gaming
Brokerage event on Horizon2020 Serious Gaming in Brussels
On 2 October, the Scotland House in Brussels set the stage for a brokerage event organized by Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) with participants from several European countries (including the UK, Scotland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland and Spain) exchanging ideas on the future of serious gaming and discussing upcoming funding initiatives within the Horizon2020 program. Utrecht University was represented at the event through Joost Raessens, Remco Veltkamp and Stefan Werning.
Serious games and the application of games and play in different social contexts constitute a highly dynamic research area, which still offers a lot of untapped potential and is explored in Utrecht via the graduate program Game Research (Remco Veltkamp), the NWO-funded Persuasive Gaming in Context project (Joost Raessens) and the Utrecht Game Lab (Stefan Werning). Within the EU calls addressed during the event, it plays an important role for instance with regard to topics like cultural heritage, citizen science, informal learning and entrepreneurship.
New directions for serious games
Keynotes by Tom Baranowsky and Isabela Granic addressed the question of how effective existing serious games really are, taking healthcare and promoting healthy lifestyle as an example. While meta studies of serious game effects already yielded promising results, other areas such as the possibility of games to effectuate long-term behavioral change require further validation.
The examples of health games shown during the presentations, which were created in cooperation with external companies, showed that attempting to ‘compete’ with entertainment games has made applied game development an increasingly costly undertaking. However, experimental game design practices, which the Utrecht Game Lab investigates together with contacts at Glasgow Caledonian University, the Abertay Game Lab and the Education Arcade at MIT, suggest alternative and more cost-effective approaches towards creating and distributing serious games.
The third keynote by Peter Walton from the Environmental Change Institute (ECI) at Oxford University on the challenges of contemporary climate change illustrated that there are still many subject areas, e.g. motivating users to adopt a more environmentally conscious lifestyle and helping them cope with the consequences of natural disasters, in which serious games are still less prevalent but can have a notable positive impact.
Challenges and opportunities of EU funding programs
Through presentations of and discussions with representatives of the European Commission, it became clear that EU funding programs are becoming increasingly competitive and require new strategies. One increasingly relevant aspect is the impact of research projects on other academic fields and particularly on society at large. The broad range of disciplines (including game studies, computer science, design, different areas of medical expertise and policy analysis) as well as representatives from game developers and applied games institutes in Brussels allowed for acknowledging this aspects from different perspectives. From that angle, Utrecht University is already in a very strong position through its interdisciplinary focus area Game Research, which recently completed its first call for seed money projects, the close cooperation between computer science and the humanities within the graduate program Game Research and a joint project between the Utrecht Game Lab and the ECI at Oxford University.
Stepping stone towards serious games consortia
The brokerage event already led to the formation of several smaller consortia around specific topics, for example on using games within scenario planning, enabling policy-makers to make more informed decisions, or on addressing new audiences by rethinking delivery methods for serious games, e.g. in the form of text-based mobile phone games rather than traditional mobile applications for use in African countries. The brokerage event closed with a networking reception that allowed for the participants to informally consolidate these contacts over dinner and drinks.
For more information contact Stefan Werning (s.werning@uu.nl), Remco Veltkamp (R.C.Veltkamp@uu.nl) or Joost Raessens (J.Raessens@uu.nl).