Integrating Serious Game Prototype to Real World locations to aid education of smart contract policies

This project would build upon the research carried out in the Development of a Serious Game prototype to aid the education of smart contract policies project and the Evaluation of a Serious Game as an innovative technology to communicate and engage stakeholders for Digitally Enhanced Advance Service (DEAS) offer project.

The Development of a Serious Game prototype to aid the education of smart contract policies was a five-month research project which addressed the challenges of the industry partner EHAB and looked at, how can innovative digital technologies be used to show risk in different scenarios for the different stakeholders through gamification.

The primary challenge was to determine if serious games could be employed to enhance communication, education, and engagement of customers regarding DEAS offers. Designing, implementing, and developing a game for EHAB’s servitization offer could potentially enhance both the customers and business understanding of the value of DEAS. To this end, a serious game was designed for the EHAB group to improve the uptake of their services for weather risk management. The simplification and simulation of the offer’s benefits could be experienced through the gameplay, impacting clients and customers decision-making process to utilise EHAB’s services. This would provide enhanced planning by enabling users to keep track of weather days per month to avoid unforeseen issues, optimize plans based on accurate forecast information, as well as capture data about their site productivity to help keep better records for claims.

The research carried out in the project broadened the scope of the creative content methodologies for video games; this was done by increasing the impact in the finance sector (EHAB). The creative content methodology adopted in this project was repurposed and developed to have a focus on education and engagement rather than entertainment. One of the main outputs of the previous research was a fully functional/ playable game which was developed and tested by the team at EHAB and others. EHAB saw the value in the proposed research and was involved in up-taking and using this research.
Work to be performed /Methodology

The proposed work intends to further develop the prototype serious game created for EHAB.
The current game features a generic 2D map that contains non-specific locations with construction sites. The overall content including the map, construction site and buildings are abstracted, and many artist liberties have been taken on the visualisation of the content. Although this art style has worked and enabled the prototype game to be developed within the budget and time constraints for the previous project, this work intends to establish if the game concept can feature real 3D locations. To this end the proposed work intends to extend the EHAB prototype game to include a tech demo which will integrates a 3D model of a real world location with the game concept. This will allow end users to visualise the benefits of the EHAB services in real world scenario. Due to the time and budget constraints the proposal will be only for developing this feature as tech demo and not to fully integrate this feature as part of the game. The research team is already familiar with implementing such features due to previous experience and as such the time allocated in the proposal is sufficient for this type of development and improvements to the game.

The proposed work intends to employ an iterative game design process. This design methodology enables the game to be developed in incremental stages. Furthermore, the iterative approach would enable the game to be designed and developed through various iterations, repeated playtests, and evaluation. The iterative methodology will enable the testing of multiple working versions throughout the process to increase the effectiveness and appropriateness of the proposed work.
Through a series of surveys and playtests, the proposed game would be evaluated to determine its effectiveness to support the dissemination of the EHAB information related to their offers.