A sweetspot for innovation: developing games with purpose through student-staff collaboration

Sloan, Robin J. S.; Galloway, Dayna; Donald, Iain

Abstract

Within industry as well as academia, developing games that have wider impact on society has been of particular interest in the last decade. The increasing use of terms such as ‘games with purpose’, ‘serious games’ and gamification’ has been mirrored in a flurry of activity in games research. Broader applications of games beyond entertainment are now well-understood and accepted, with universities and companies excelling in creating games to serve particular needs. However, it is not explicitly clear how undergraduates of game design and development courses can be directly involved in serious game creation. With most undergraduates inspired by commercial games development, and the games industry requiring that universities teach specific technical skills in their courses, balancing the research aspirations of academics with the educational requirements of an appropriate undergraduate course can be a difficult balancing act. In this paper, the authors present three case studies of games with purpose developed through collaboration between undergraduate students and academic staff. In all cases, the educational value of the projects for the students is considered in relation to the research value for the academics, who face increasing demands to develop research outcomes despite a necessity to provide a first-rate learning experience and nurture future game developers.

• Conference Name: 6th International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications, VS-Games 2014
• Start Date: Sep 9, 2014
• End Date: Sep 12, 2014
• Publication Date: 2014-01
• Deposit Date: Mar 29, 2023
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Book Title: VS-Games 2014
• ISBN: 9781479940561
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/VS-Games.2014.7012027