Game Engines Selection Framework for High-Fidelity Serious Applications

Abstract

Serious games represent the state-of-the-art in the convergence of electronic gaming technologies with instructional design principles and pedagogies. Despite the value of high-fidelity content in engaging learners and providing realistic training environments, building games which deliver high levels of visual and functional realism is a complex, time consuming and expensive process. Therefore, commercial game engines, which provide a development environment and resources to more rapidly create high-fidelity virtual worlds, are increasingly used for serious as well as entertainment applications. Towards this intention, the authors propose a new framework for selection of game engines for serious applications and sets out five elements for analysis of engines in order to create a benchmarking approach to validation of game engine selection.Whilst selection criteria for entertainment game engines are often transparent, an emergent challenge is the choice of platform for serious games, which often have substantially different objectives, emphases and technical requirements. In particular, the convergence of training simulators with serious games, made possible by increasing hardware rendering capacity is enabling the creation of high-fidelity serious games, which challenge existing instructional approaches. This paper overviews several game engines that are suitable for high-fidelity serious games.