Paul Hollins Professor

The GREAT (Games Realising Effective and Affective Transformation) project explores new approaches that foster climate change discussion and stimulate citizen reflection. However, some citizens have limited resources for participation, even though their engagement and contributions are crucial. To address this challenge, the authors present two studies that have deployed mini data sprints (MDS). The MDS approach uses interactive data applications and visualisations to provoke citizens? feelings, knowledge, and perspectives towards the climate conversation and presented data. These studies highlight how the MDS approach can provide data set recommendations, facilitate efficient and focused climate conversation, and improve the data literacy of the cohort.

This paper introduces the Games Realising Effective and Affective Transformation (GREAT) research and Innovation project. The project will examine the emerging ways Applied Games could be used to facilitate the social engagement of European citizens in determining future policy priorities and policy interventions to the existential challenge of climate change. This full paper is a provides detail of the work in progress but moreover provides a a conceptual analysis of the methodologies applied to this emerging domain of study. The project is funded by the EU Horizon programme with UK Associate partners funded through UKRI and coordinated by the DIPF, Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education, Frankfurt and involves seven partners located across Europe, Serious Games Interactive (SGI) Denmark, Centre for Social Innovation (ZSI) Austria, International University of Rioja (UNIR) Spain, Frederick University, Cyprus, Playmob and The University of Bolton (UoB) as UK associate partners. The project incorporates collaborative design and citizen science methods and brings together researchers with expertise in the areas of games, data analytics, and policy development. This integrated investigation will be articulated by case studies of the use of games in facilitating dialogue between citizens and policy stakeholders including policy makers, policy implementers, political parties, campaigning organisations and affected citizens. This will be achieved by leveraging the central role of games in contemporary culture by combining academic studies with practical experimentation of novel applications of games. The context for the research is the global challenge of climate emergency, and each case study incorporates a research cycle addressing a policy issue and research questions, using multiple pilots to generate both quantitative and qualitative and data to further inform research activity.

To the casual observer, late 1970s Sheffield was a grim place, littered with the charred decaying remnants of post-industrialisation and humming with the urban renewal of brutalist post-war dystopian architecture. Framed by the harsh northern landscape, it was seen as either the spectre of a dire past, or the vision of a romantic, technological future.
Drawing inspiration from this environment and fuelled on a cocktail of Roxy Music and A Clockwork Orange, electronic musical pioneers Cabaret Voltaire and the Human League appeared. These bands would establish a music lineage encompassing bands, clubs and labels through to the 21st century and placing Sheffield at the centre of the UK’s electronic music story.

Much has been written about the theoretical potential of digital games to transform teaching and learning and to offer new forms of digital assessment; yet the education system in the United Kingdom (UK) is arguably still focused exclusively on the assessment and reward of individual effort and achievement. This can be at odds with the requirements of twenty-first century working environments and in the requirements for developing the personal employability characteristics of students. Engaging students in authentic collaborative project work that requires sophisticated and coordinated communication can present real challenges. Employers are demanding, as prerequisite, that graduates have highly developed communication and collaborative team working skills for opportunities in the digital industries such as Games Design, however Games Design students are often quite isolated in their personal industry related practice, working methods and their online lifestyles and lack the “soft skills” which would enable them to work successfully within a team. In this paper, the authors elaborate on how Hull School of Art and Design has attempted to address this problem through the implementation of an Applied Game, the “Watercooler Game”, for their Games Industry undergraduates. They present their reflections on the rationale behind the pedagogic approach, the decision to develop an applied game to address their pedagogic challenges and their experience of working with a commercial Games Developer in producing the game. The authors present the initial findings of their evaluation of game from a multidimensional perspective. The pedagogic approach (using applied games with a selected small cohort of students), the technical approach adopted by the developers of the game (an open source asset based approach) and the pedagogic efficacy of the game through evaluation of the learning objectives achieved by a cohort of seventy learners situated in the College’s School of Art and Design.

Much has been written about the theoretical potential of digital games to transform teaching and learning and to offer new forms of digital assessment; yet the education system in the United Kingdom (UK) is arguably still focused exclusively on the assessment and reward of individual effort and achievement. This can be at odds with the requirements of twenty-first century working environments and in the requirements for developing the personal employability characteristics of students. Engaging students in authentic collaborative project work that requires sophisticated and coordinated communication can present real challenges.
Employers are demanding, as prerequisite, that graduates have highly developed communication and collaborative team working skills for opportunities in the digital industries such as Games Design, however Games Design students are often quite isolated in their personal industry related practice, working methods and their online lifestyles and lack the “soft skills” which would enable them to work successfully within a team. In this paper, the authors elaborate on how Hull School of Art and Design has attempted to address this problem through the implementation of an Applied Game, the “Watercooler Game”, for their Games Industry undergraduates. They present their reflections on the rationale behind the pedagogic approach, the decision to develop an applied game to address their pedagogic challenges and their experience of working with a commercial Games Developer in producing the game. The authors present the initial findings of their evaluation of game from a multidimensional perspective. The pedagogic approach (using applied games with a selected small cohort of students), the technical approach adopted by the developers of the game (an open source asset based approach) and the pedagogic efficacy of the game through evaluation of the learning objectives achieved by a cohort of seventy learners situated in the College’s School of Art and Design.

This paper describes the structural architecture of the RAGE repository, which is a unique and dedicated infrastructure that provides access to a wide variety of advanced technologies (RAGE software assets) for applied game development. These software assets are reusable across a wide diversity of game engines, game platforms and programming languages. The RAGE repository allows applied game developers and studios to search for software assets for inclusion in applied games. The repository is designed as an asset life-cycle management system for defining, publishing, updating, searching and packaging for distribution of these assets. The RAGE repository provides storage space for assets and their artifacts. It will be embedded in a social platform for networking among asset developers and other users. A dedicated Asset Repository Manager provides the main functionality of the repository and its integration with other systems. Tools supporting the Asset Manager are presented and discussed. When the RAGE repository is in full operation, applied game developers will be able to easily enhance the quality of their games by including advanced game technology assets.

Software assets are key output of the RAGE project and they can be used by applied game developers to enhance the pedagogical and educational value of their games. These software assets cover a broad spectrum of functionalities – from player analytics including emotion detection to intelligent adaptation and social gamification. In order to facilitate integration and interoperability, all of these assets adhere to a common model, which describes their properties through a set of metadata. In this paper the RAGE asset model and asset metadata model is presented, capturing the detail of assets and their potential usage within three distinct dimensions – technological, gaming and pedagogical. The paper highlights key issues and challenges in constructing the RAGE asset and asset metadata model and details the process and design of a flexible metadata editor that facilitates both adaptation and improvement of the asset metadata model.

The established (digital) leisure game industry is historically one dominated by large international hardware vendors (e.g. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo), major publishers and supported by a complex network of development studios, distributors and retailers. New modes of digital distribution and development practice are challenging this business model and the leisure games industry landscape is one experiencing rapid change. The established (digital) leisure games industry, at least anecdotally, appears reluctant to participate actively in the applied games sector (Stewart et al., 2013). There are a number of potential explanations as to why this may indeed be the case including ; A concentration on large-scale consolidation of their (proprietary) platforms, content, entertainment brand and credibility which arguably could be weakened by association with the conflicting notion of purposefulness (in applied games) in market niches without clear business models or quantifiable returns on investment.
In contrast, the applied games industry exhibits the characteristics of an emerging, immature industry namely:
weak interconnectedness, limited knowledge exchange, an absence of harmonising standards, limited specialisations, limited division of labour and arguably insufficient evidence of the products efficacies (Stewart et al., 2013; Garcia Sanchez, 2013) and could, arguably, be characterised as a dysfunctional market. To test these assertions the Realising an Applied Gaming Ecosystem (RAGE) project will develop a number of self contained gaming assets to be actively employed in the creation of a number of applied games to be implemented and evaluated as regional pilots across a variety of European educational, training and vocational contexts.
RAGE is a European Commission Horizon 2020 project with twenty (pan European) partners from industry, research and education with the aim of developing, transforming and enriching advanced technologies from the leisure games industry into self-contained gaming assets (i.e. solutions showing economic value potential) that could support a variety of stakeholders including teachers, students, and, significantly, game studios interested in developing applied games. RAGE will provide these assets together with a large quantity of high-quality knowledge resources through a self-sustainable Ecosystem, a social space that connects research, the gaming industries, intermediaries, education providers, policy makers and end-users in order to stimulate the development and application of applied games in educational, training and vocational contexts.
The authors identify barriers (real and perceived) and opportunities facing stakeholders in engaging, exploring new emergent business models ,developing, establishing and sustaining an applied gaming eco system in Europe.

Although many scholars recognise the great potential of games for teaching and learning, the EU-based industry for such “serious” games” is highly fragmented and its growth figures remain well behind those of the leisure game market. Serious gaming has been designated as a priority area by the European Commission in its Horizon 2020 Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. The RAGE project, which is funded as part of the Horizon 2020 Programme, is a technology-driven research and innovation project that will make available a series of self-contained gaming software modules that support game studios in the development of serious games. As game studios are a critical factor in the uptake of serious games, the RAGE projects will base its work on their views and needs as to achieve maximum impact. This paper presents the results of a survey among European game studios about their development related needs and expectations. The survey is aimed at identifying a baseline reference for successfully supporting game studios with advanced ICTs for serious games.