Jahresbericht 2006 - Biba - Universität Bremen

Providing Real Integration
in Multi-disciplinary Environments
Spielend den Erfahrungshorizont
erweitern
mit Serious Gaming
Serious Gaming: The turnover of the
computer game industry is higher than
the turnover gained for cinema entrance
fees. Also, the production costs for
developing new computer games are
almost the same as for film productions.
Special roles play computer games,
which have beside fun other goals:
Computer games are no longer just pure
entertainment. They are used for the
education and training of the gamer.
This happens automatically when playing
serious games.
The Project: PRIME (Providing Real
Integration in Multi-disciplinary Environments)
uses the serious gaming paradigm
to train in strategic manufacturing.
By playing “production company”, the
gamer learns automatically about problems
and challenges in manufacturing
enterprises. This happens in a virtual world
to avoid any damages of the existing
manufacturing enterprise. The player has
to deal with all kind of strategic decisions
like selection of location, make-or-buy or
outsourcing and strategic marketing decisions
in order to run the company most
profitable. Of course, in a virtual world
time is running faster, so that the player
can see the result of the decisions already
next day (in reality the result of such
strategic decisions is seen after years).
The addressed target group is intermediate
management. The motto of the
game is to create 30 year old business
professionals with the experience levels
of 50 year olds without the drudgery of
twenty years of business mishaps and
successes.
Such a game is only accepted by
the target group, when the content and
the rules are believable. The simulated
virtual world must be comparable with
the real world and the virtual enterprises
must also be recognisable. To ensure this,
PRIME includes industrial end users from
six different sectors.
Having deep industrial know-how, BIBA
has taken over the technical management
of the PRIME project. BIBA leads the
end user requirements analysis phase as
well as the system design and technical
specification tasks. The implementation
tasks (programming) are also carried out
by BIBA.
Results: The so-called Turin version
of the PRIME game was released to the
end users in November 2006. This allows
to collect for early feed backs from users
on order and to manage expectations
and further requirements. A fully functional
version is scheduled for the beginning of
2007 to be used for student education.
Heiko Duin
13