The RAGE
(Realizing an Applied Gaming Ecosystem) Project aims to boost advanced
technologies from the entertainment games industry, turning them into
self-contained gaming assets that will support European game studios at
developing "Serious Games" for Education & Training more efficiently.
According to the press release, “The EU based
industry for "Serious Games" is an emerging business with multiple uses in
industry, education, health and the public administration sectors. As such, it
is still fragmented and needs critical mass to compete globally. Nevertheless
its growth potential is widely recognized and even suggested to exceed the
growth potential of the entertainment games market.”
To take advantage of the promising opportunities of
this growing industry, the RAGE project will deliver a collection of
self-contained gaming assets, made available through a Serious Games Ecosystem.
The RAGE Ecosystem would act as a single
entry point for the Serious Games industry, centralizing access to dispersed gaming
assets as well as to a wide range of software modules, services and resources developed
in the context of EU funded projects.
Arranged as a well-managed and structured
repository system, the resulting material would be semantically annotated to
support search and access. In addition, RAGE is expected to make
available a set of asset creation aids that would allow developers and
educators to create their own assets and post them to the Ecosystem’s
repository.
In brief, the anticipated benefit for European
developers and researchers is five-fold: getting hold of advanced, usable
gaming assets (technology push), getting access to the associated business
cases (commercial opportunity), creating bonds with peers, suppliers and
customers (alliance formation), advocating their expertise and demands
(publicity), and developing/publishing their own assets (trade).
The gaming technology assets gathered along the
project life cycle will be tested and evaluated by game development companies
integrated in the RAGE consortium. These companies will be creating
games that will be empirically validated in real world pilots in different
application scenarios representing different markets and target groups for the Serious
Games industry.
RAGE’s
results are expected to generate direct impact on the competitive positioning
of thousands of European SMEs in the Serious Games market. Impact from RAGE
would be visible in terms of fulfilling new client needs by quicker and more
challenging methods of skills acquisition, enabling new business models based
on the usage of the assets repository, contribute to secure direct skilled jobs
and further job creation, and strengthening collaboration across the entire Serious
Games value chain.
RAGE is
a 48-months Technology and Know-How driven Research and Innovation project
co-funded by the EU Framework Program for Research and Innovation, Horizon 2020.
The project, launched on February 1st 2015, is coordinated
by the Open University of the Netherlands and it includes 19 key partners from
the game industry, the education sector and research centers from 10 European
countries: Austria, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Spain,
United Kingdom and The Netherlands.
OUNL
is a government-funded institute for open distance learning at university
level, facilitating 26,000 students, typically lifelong learners combining
working and learning. The OUNL experts participating in RAGE are with the
Welten Institute. The Welten Institute is both on a national and international
scale a leading institute in learning sciences and technologies, with around 70
academics working in R&D and innovation and strong connection to
educational professionals.