'Game Ready' Research and Development Project

[Jude Ower]

At Digital 2.0 we have been working on research to create the Game Ready tools and have a survey to be completed by developers and a survey to be completed by a customer of the developer. We are looking to gather around 10 responses from each group and wondered if you can help us by filling out the developer survey and send on the customer survey to a client or past client who would be willing to help? The links for the surveys are below:

Developer Survey
http://www.surveyshare.com/survey/take/?sid=81725

Customer Survey
http://www.surveyshare.com/survey/take/?sid=78943

Ideally, we are collating all the information next week so if we can have all responses back for the 12th January, this would be a great help and keep us on track to complete our Game Ready tools. I have also attached a posted of the project and tools which you can send out to people as you wish.


Thanks for your help!

[John Nicol]

I hate to be critical, but it wasn’t the best in terms of questions or methodology with several contradictory or irrelevant responses and I wonder how the information is to be used. There were many questions that I thought showed that the whole concept of Serious Games isn’t being “got”. I think that there is confusion also between a “serious game” and using a game engine to produce a serious game. I consider my company as specialists in Serious Games, but looking at the survey, I don’t actually think we would fit into their perception of Serious Games developers. Perhaps what we do isn’t the norm, but we use various gaming technologies for our military clients in distributed simulation. For example, we can link X-Plane, MS ESP and VBS2 into a “Federation” with military simulators. We create the 3D assets using our own 3D Modelling tool, create the scenarios, the DIS and HLA interfaces etc. We have also installed an immersive 3D infantry simulator for the Canadian Forces, complete with head mount displays, wireless weapons, interfaces to military simulators etc all based on the UnReal engine using a variant of Americas Army.

My biggest concern with the survey is that it will be used to represent the status of the Serious Games industry, or developers that are in it, I am not sure I am getting it so let me know if I am off base here. I realize that serious games is more than what we do as an organization, please don't get me wrong. I just think that it is all in the presentation of the survey. I get concerned when we start putting the whole area into a silo.