Gaming

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1. Developing a 5
game

2. Using gaming in 14
your services

3. Learning lessons 20
from the pilot

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Introduction

“Gaming is an innovative new model of

interactive technology. Unlike traditional
games, it is designed to promote creative
ideas enabling you to develop scenarios,
influence behaviours, and help people
help themselves”.

Kent County Council researched the

opportunities that gaming could have on
improving its services. It applied this learning
working the University of Greenwich to develop a
prototype of a game to encourage students to
recycle. This is available in the CD enclosed.

This guide can help you go through the steps of

developing a game. It also provides tips on how
you can use gaming in your services and
learning lessons from the pilot with the
University of Greenwich.

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Developing a game

Before thinking about the technology or

techniques you will use, the first step you should
take is to plan out the process.

1. Identify the need

2. Involve your users

3. Plan the steps of the game

4. Select the technology

5. Attract people to play

6. Blend online and offline interaction

7. Train people

8. Evaluate the impact

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Identify the need

Before commissioning or developing a game,

plan out the process.

o Decide who your target audience are,

not just in terms of whom uses gaming
but how they will benefit from using it and
how they will be able to play it.

o Research to get a better

understanding to see if gaming
influences behaviour in both the short
and long term of your customers.

Involve your users

o Develop a framework for people to

take part. You could provide players with
incentives and rewards, give them higher
status and the ability to customise their
involvement or enable them to collect
social points for online transactions.

o Involving users in designing the game

will bring down development, costs, as
you will no longer need to rely on
expensive games engines or virtual
worlds.

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Plan the steps of the game

o Script the instructions and steps of

the game before commissioning a games
developer

o Make the game time-limited, change

the visuals and start with simple
instructions which gradually become
more complex as the game develops.

o Focus on specific issues your service

or users face that the game can tackle.
This will enable them to better be able to
simulate the impacts of their actions, so
they can more easily identify with them.

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Image from www.akoha.com

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Select the technology

You will need you to make the technology as

universal as possible so that users feel
comfortable. With many more groups of people
using gaming, you can integrate gaming
technology with other tools and content.

o Use technology already used in KCC

like web development or tools that many
people are familiar with such as games
consoles or GPS enabled mobile phones
(such as smart phones).

o Start commissioning the technology

only once you have planned the
process of developing the game. This
will help you work out if this will be
produced in-house or commissioned from
a gaming developer.

o Think about whether you can or need

to mix up the virtual game with real world
games that your customers may already
be using.

o Plan for testing and developing

prototypes and pilots in a trusted
environment where these issues can be
explored.

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Attract people to play

o Send clear messages about the real

life benefits of the game. This may also
remove assumptions about gaming not
being “serious.

o Mobilise groups who may be strongly

involved in a very niche area within the
gaming community. This will provide you
with good feedback from people familiar
with this type of technology and added
verification that this is different to non-
serious gaming.

o Organise meetings around gaming to

bring together local innovators in this
area with people who are newcomers

o Promote games through viral

channels, such as payslips, email
signatures, tickets from speed banks,
geocaches and forward to a friend tools

Blend online and offline interaction

o Use real life environments as

platforms for gaming developed online.
This will help tackle the challenge of
digital inclusion and get people to have to
actually change their behaviours to be
able to complete the tasks.

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 o Get people to play as if the scenario
was really happening rather than just
role playing. This technique, called
pervasive gaming reduces the distance
between seeing what you can do and
how can you do something about it.

Train people

o Walk through with your users on how

they can use the technology. This can
help you decide whether to develop
single or multiplayer games.

o Develop guides or screen casts to walk

through people on how to play the game

Evaluate the impact

It’s not sufficient just assuming that the

techniques will work. When you want to measure
success of gaming it is critical that you use
analytics to understand how people behave in
the game you’ve developed.

o Use background analysis to inform

broad scenarios

o Monitor people’s journeys through geo-

coordinates or SMS texts

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 o Simulate real time data to mimic real life
conditions.

It’s also particularly important that you enable the

players themselves to use analytics to monitor
their own performance so that can effectively
learn for themselves area they can improve. If
you want to adopt more advanced use, focusing
on researchers or analysts as users, you can
also link up to datasets which can be simulated
within the game.

o Use tools which enable people to write

their experiences (or even take photos)

o Use techniques to help them chronicle

their own scenarios so they can provide
feedback to measure success too.

Costs and timescales for developing games will

vary depending on
o Graphical fidelity: from £10K for basic
games to £40K using 3D gaming engines

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 o Personalisation: Games can be
customised for local needs (£3K) or
created from scratch (£10-40K)
o Time needed to develop the game:
Varying from 2D games taking a fortnight
to 3D games taking a month

The financial returns on games vary from £18

per user for a very specific game targeted at
reaching Muslims to 1p a user for the Frank
Puker game promoting the ill effects of cannabis.

See the next diagram for an overview of the

resources needed.

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2. Using gaming in your services
“Gaming can particular benefit your
services to develop scenarios to plan
your services, influence behaviours of
your customers, and empower people to
help themselves”.

1. Developing scenarios

2. Influencing behaviours

3. Empowering people

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 1. Developing scenarios

Service planning needs to be far more

related to real life scenarios, so that
people can anticipate and prepare for
working in new ways. Gaming can help
anticipate real life crises as well as basing
scenarios on real life in the future.

o Involve people who have

experienced the scenario such as
frontline staff and service users to
advise you on how design these into
gaming.

o Combine simulation hardware

with role playing by actors if you
are focusing on planning for
everyday crisis situations, especially

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Image from www.budgetsimulator.com

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 if the scenarios require instant
decision making on urgent issues.

o Video the simulation or game playing

so you can provide crucial content for
feeding back, debriefing and case
conferencing. This can encourage self
improvement and show people the exact
areas that they need to work on.

o Use living labs if you are using

scenarios in your game for training
people who work in risky environments so
they can be put on the spot.

2. Influencing behaviours

Gaming can also put into perspective the wider

choices that users may not have considered in
their daily lives. It can help teach your customers
to learn without them even noticing they’re
changing their behaviour.

o Design the game in ways that give the

public a better understanding of what
your team does and help you to advise
your customers on what they can do to
change the community and their
behaviour.

o Give people tasks that focus on

specific issues and ask them to make
real changes both within and outside of
gaming, especially changes which involve

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 “tough choices” (such as restructures or
budget consultation)

o Include options in the game where they

can help their and compete against each
other.

o Develop the game in different stages

which unfold gradually, run instantly and
interactively and enable people to
complete a set of actions for the game.

o Choose a crisis at the start of the

game and map out what stakeholders
they want to simulate

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 3. Empowering people

Improving support for people in need is another

benefit of using gaming. It can provide the
flexibility in the game to suit different learning
styles.

o Use actors to illustrate types of

behaviours to gaming developers when
designing the technology or to allow
attendees to practice their intervention
skills when using the online game in a
live environment.

o Make sure the technology in this

context can be customised to changing
circumstances.
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Image from www.re-mission.net

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o Allow players to re-organise the tasks
they need to complete amongst
themselves

o Work out how the game can make an

emotional connection between the
learner and the environment they are
confronted with. This is especially
important for staff who require updating
their knowledge with regards to the new
duties they may have

o Make the best use of the skills

developed by your customers through
the gaming techniques they use. For
example, entrepreneurial games are
often more effective than providing
guides to set up a business. For
businesses there are negotiation games
which enable you to engage in artificial
conflicts and confront them with
conflicting interests, while cognitive
games encourage people around
prevention and rehabilitation from poor
health.

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3. Lessons learnt from the pilot
“As part of our research, we worked with the
University of Greenwich to develop a
prototype of a game that applied the lessons
learnt above”.

This was a list of requirements the game had to

have implemented into it to enable it to work as
well as be successful in its initial aims.

• All models and assets for the

environment were made in 3Ds Max
and exported as ASE Files into the
Unreal Development Kit. This was an
essential requirement for the game as the
models needed to create the
environments and assets for the game
weren’t available in the UDK, so they
were modelled in a 3D modelling
package then exported in as ASE Files.

• The game enabled players to use a

virtual joystick. This was vital as the
idea was to use the joystick in the game
to be able to pick up objects and be able
to put them into the correct recycle bin.
So the use of the joystick for the objects
this applied to was needed.

• Texturing in games took up a lot of the

game engine’s resources. By doing
baked textures in the form of UVW maps

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 unwrapped in 3Ds Max this not only helps
with placing less pressure on the game
engine as many textures can be made
into one that can wrap around a 3D
model. The only texture not baked would
be the surrounding environment (hills) as
this was the only asset modelled in UDK
throughout the whole game making
process.

• Appropriate textures used to be able

to be comparable to real world
decisions. The use of the
http://www.recyclenow.com/ website to
download actual recycling logos used on
bins and mostly using real images for
assets such as a typical coke can image
to texture a modelled can, enables the
player to make the in game comparison
of putting a coke can in a metal recycling
bin and doing that also in the real world.

Thanks to advice and ideas from

Anna Bing, Robert Bromley, Joelle Butler,

Dominic Campbell, Bill Cordwell, Sara De
Freitas, Kel Ezekwe, James Barrett, Andrew
Fletcher, Ryan Flynn, Holly Goring, Melanie
Hayes, Donna Henderson, Steve Jarvis, Hugh
Martyn, Claire Matthews, Michael Norton, Nicola
Parker, Sarah Russell, Al Smith, Deborah Smith,
Kathryn Summers, Chris Thorpe, Ian Vickery,
Kirsty Warboys, Ian Whyte, David Wilcox and
Jason Wilkes.

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