Serious Game Engine Shootout
Serious games and educational simulations are an unique product category with functional requirements that are different from platform and casual games, MMOGs, and drill–n-skill learning games. The gameplay itself is only the tip of the iceberg: hidden out of sight is an engine the player doesn’t see. (Note in this article the term “engine” is meant to be inclusive of the middleware, networking, client software and other components used to deliver the desired user experience, whereas “platform” refers to the combination of hardware and software required to use the product). As an emerging market little has been written about the best engines for building serious games. This lack of transparency makes it difficult for publishers to choose development partners, and for developers to scope serious game projects and determine the best tools to use. In this article – and in a panel discussion on March 6th at the Serious Games Summit – we’ll begin to address this deficiency. What Makes a Game Engine Serious? It seems there are new serious games announced almost daily so my initial challenge was deciding how wide a net to cast. Reflecting practical time and space limitations I chose to focus on five that were built specifically for serious games, plus a few “non-serious” engines and development environments that warrant consideration as well. Before we get to naming names, however, let’s define what a game engine is and what makes it serious. I agree with Wikipedia’s definition of a game engine as “…the core software component that provides the underlying technologies, simplifies development, and often enables the game to run on multiple platforms such as game consoles and desktop operating systems… and typically includes a rendering engine for 2D or 3D graphics, a physics engine for collision detection, sound, scripting, animation, artificial intelligence and networking.” That definition is a good start, but a serious game engine needs to deliver a lot more. At a minimum it needs to track player behavior, assesses their ability, capture and report on those metrics and make them available. In some serious games where player behavior must be analyzed closely, providing “instant replay” may also be essential. Depending on the product and market segment, an engine may interact with real world data from GPS systems, instrumentation, weapons, vehicle simulators, as well as other players and non-player characters. And for certain government or education applications, conforming to SCORM, Regulation 508 and COPA standards may also be required. There are other important differences between entertainment and serious games. Lee Wilson, formerly chief marketing officer at Harcourt Achieve and a strong proponent of serious games in K-12 education observed, “Unlike in the consumer space for games, schools are complete ready-made communities. As such, the software should be able to dynamically access the existing user databases of those communities, rather than requiring redundant data entry. Think of it as acquiring user communities wholesale. This will dramatically ease deployment and accelerate usage, but is not commonly found in existing tool sets designed for a world where customers are added one at a time.” “The other challenge is on the publisher side: it’s the time and expense of producing high-quality games” says George Kane, VP of business development for Pearson Education. “Modularity is important, so that content and functionality, and whole engines, can be reused in different contexts in order to maximize the return on our investment. Flexibility, such as the ability to turn features off and on, by us and by the teacher or school administrator, is also a central requirement.”
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