Serious Games Architectures and Engines Heinrich Söbke1, Alexander Streicher2 1 Bauhaus-Institute for Infrastructure Solutions (b.is), Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Germany
[email protected] 2 Fraunhofer IOSB, Karlsruhe, Germany
[email protected] Abstract. The term Serious Game includes a wide, heterogeneous field of digital games with varying purposes and objectives and for a multitude of different ap- plication areas. All in common is the underlying software. This chapter gives an overview on the technical aspects of serious games including their software ar- chitectures and engines. As the general topic is manifold and the technical aspects of serious game software are quite comprehensive, this chapter covers the basic principles of and requirements for serious game software. It depicts selected soft- ware architectures and provides examples for game engines including a descrip- tion of selected components. Keywords: Serious Games Architecture, Game Engine, Serious Game Devel- opment, Distributed Architecture, Game Component, Schema. 1 Introduction What are serious games and how can they be categorized? Schmidt et al. [1] suggest a categorization according to the purpose of the game: they follow the work of Connolly et al. [2] and classify the purposes of a game as Attention, Motivation, Knowledge or skill acquisition, Process Support, Joy/Playfulness and Information. Michael & Chen [3] identify eight categories as markets for serious games: Military, government, edu- cation, corporate games, healthcare, politics, religion and art. These are only two of the suggested categorizations – Djaouti et al. [4] present a literature review of serious games categorization in their work to develop their G/P/S model.