Building a Complete Online Ecosystem for Serious Game Development and Deployment

Bert Snow

Wed., June 10, 3:30–4:30, Old Madison (3rd floor, East/Southeast)

Over the past five years, Muzzy Lane has been developing learning-games and deploying them in and out of classrooms: Our Making History strategy game series has been used successfully in high-school and college classrooms. In 2008, our American Dynasties social history game prototype has been tested extensively in classrooms, with strong results. In addition, we have developed and tested game prototypes in areas ranging from middle-school science to college-level Marketing classes.

In this work, we have experienced many of the hurdles that make it challenging for serious game projects to reach their potential. Although game design and learning design are important, there are a lot of other hurdles that can hinder a worthy project.

We decided to embark on an R&D effort to see if we could overcome these hurdles. In essence, we wanted to provide a complete "ecosystem" to support serious game efforts, from creation and collaboration tools through deployment, management, reporting, and assessment.

The result of this work is the Sandstone Game Service, which we will be making available to serious games developers (as well as using for our own projects). Sandstone is an always-on web-game service that delivers immersive 3D games in the web browser and includes many features that will be valuable to learning-games.

The talk will cover the key goals we set for the design of Sandstone, including minimizing installation and technical issues, reducing development cost and difficulty, enabling online collaborative development, making deployment instant, integratiing with LMS and web applications, building in "expensive" features like multiplayer and assessment, and simplifying the "upkeep" of games.

In each area, we will talk about the goals we set in that area and the features we developed to address those goals. And of course, we will show the latest version of Sandstone, including examples of games being developed with Sandstone, which includes the American Dynasties project.

We envision the audience interested in this as educators, designers and others interested in developing serious games or in integrating and using them successfully.