SERIOUS GAME DEVELOPMENT BY DISTRIBUTED TEAMS

A Case Study Based on the EU Project PRIME

Manuel Oliveira

Alfamicro, Alameda da Guia, N.192A, 2750 Cascais, Portugal

Heiko Duin

BIBA-IKAP, Hochschulring 20, D-28359 Bremen, Germany

Keywords: Distributed brainstorming, conceptual design, serious games, distributed teams.

Abstract: This paper describes as a case study the first 12 months of a 2 year project developing a serious game tar-

geted at a number of industrial sectors: aeronautical, automotive, civil construction, software and electron-

ics. The paper presents the devised methodology to address the problems that emerged, mostly associated to

the inherent barriers of managing a distributed team with equal participatory roles and responsibilities in the

creative process of developing a serious game. Some of the lessons learnt are shared with the reader.

1 INTRODUCTION

The process of creating ideas within a group of peo-

ple requires good communication to achieve any

form of successful outcome. Such a process always

benefits from a group setting (Gouran and Hiro-

kawa, 1996).

The initial basic principles proposed by (Os-

borne, 1957) to structure the process of creativity

within a group setting, consisted of deferring

judgement whilst instigating quantity, thereby pro-

ducing quality. However, research has demonstrated

the fallacy of this traditional perspective and in fact

nominal groups (pooling the ideas of individuals that

brainstorm on their own) are more productive than

face-to-face groups (Gallupe et al, 1992; Paulus et

al, 1995). According to (Diehl and Stroebe, 1987),

communication is the culprit behind the ineffective-

ness of face-to-face meetings when compared to

nominal groups. The communication problems are

exacerbated when considering groups of participants

that are geographically distributed and rely on

technology to create pseudo face-to-face meetings

within a virtual space. Independently of the

technological advances that have transformed the

globe into a digital village, the creation process

within a team of geographically distributed

individuals continues to present hard challenges to

overcome.

This paper presents a case study of a distributed

team involved in the highly creative process of

developing a serious game targeted at organizations

from differing industrial sectors. The focus is on the

adopted process and the lessons learnt after 12

months of progress. A review of progress after six

months is given in (Oliveira et al 2006b). The

development process adopted in PRIME is based on

a spiral approach using principles from the Agile

Programming community, but focused on the end-

user from conception to final deployment.

2 THE CASE STUDY

2.1 The Project

The case study presented in this paper is based in the

European project PRIME (Providing Real Integra-

tion in Multi-disciplinary Environments). The main

objective of the PRIME project is to give business

professionals a learning environment where they can

experiment with new ideas and learn how to handle

the entire life cycle of products/processes. PRIME

proposes to achieve this by enhancing current work

environments with a new paradigm based on serious

gaming (Annetta et al, 2006).

296

Oliveira M. and Duin H. (2007).

SERIOUS GAME DEVELOPMENT BY DISTRIBUTED TEAMS - A Case Study Based on the EU Project PRIME.

In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Society, e-Business and e-Government /

e-Learning, pages 296-303

DOI: 10.5220/0001272802960303

 SciTePress

Serious games are digital games used as a per-

suasion or educational technology. They can be

similar to educational games, but are primarily in-

tended for an audience outside of primary or secon-

dary education. Serious games might be of any genre

and many of them represent a kind of edutainment

applications. A serious game could be a simulation

which has the look and feel of a game, but corre-

sponds to non-game events or processes, such as

business or military operations (e.g. America’s Army

or Tactical Iraqi (Squire, 2005)).

In PRIME, the adoption of serious game ap-

proach allows the user to learn by experience within

a Virtual Business Environment (VBE) that is safe

and foments risk taking without detrimental impact

on business. The context is based on strategic man-

agement, including multi-stakeholder negotiation

and business connectivity, with a strong focus on

manufacturing.

The VBE is composed of several systems

defining its economic fabric: capital markets,

population, governments, logistic support, labour

markets, business-to-consumer, consumer

associations, labour unions, etc. Within this rich

environment, the business professional assumes the

role of a Business Unit (BU), which may correspond

to either a single site or multiple sites. The

management breakdown of a BU is based on eight

functional units: Production, Product Development,

Sales, Human Resources, Strategic Marketing,

Distribution, Finance and Information Systems.

Associated to each functional unit is a set of

operation processes that are based on an input-

transformation-output model.

The business professional, as a human player,

makes strategic decisions based on information

available through the BU and the VBE. However,

the decisions themselves are not implemented by the

PRIME Serious Game, although the interface and

game mechanisms may facilitate the decision

processes (Kracke et al, 2006). The same is not true

of the artificial stakeholders, who share similar

decision processes, but are required to have them

implemented as a decision engine supported by a

knowledge rule based database. A more detailed

description of the PRIME project is given in

(Oliveira et al 2006a).

2.2 The Stakeholders

The project has a developer team of seven partners

(Alfamicro, BIBA, CIST-Sofia, EPFL, Intrapoint,

MIP and Sintef), who are geographically distributed

across Europe accompanied by six end-user partners

from different business sectors (CRF, IAI, Intracom,

KESZ, LEGO and Siemens). The diversity of the

end-user organizations from different industrial sec-

tors raises additional challenges to the development

process.

The need for a geographically distributed team exists

from the onset of the project, as evidenced by map

illustrated in Table 1. Achieving a cohesive

multidisciplinary team with the ability of working

together irrespective of the cultural differences,

work practices, and geographic distribution across 3

different time zones, proved to be a challenge in

process engineering and not coupled to technology.

Table 1: Stakeholders in PRIME.

Short-

name

Longname Country Role

Alfamicro Alfamicro Portugal Devel-

oper

BIBA Bremen Institute of

Industrial Engineer-

ing and Applied

Work Science

Germany Devel-

oper

CIST Center of Informa-

tion Society Tech-

nologies, University

of Sofia

Bulgaria Devel-

oper

CRF Fiat Research Cen-

tre

Italy End-

User

EPFL Swiss Federal Insti-

tute of Technology

Switzerland Devel-

oper

IAI Isreal Aircraft In-

dustries

Israel End-

User

Intracom Intracom Greece End-

User

Intrapoint Intrapoint Norway Devel-

oper

KESZ Central European

Building and Con-

struction ltd.

Hungary End-

User

LEGO Lego Company Denmark End-

User

MIP Business School of

Politecnico di Mi-

lano

Italy Devel-

oper

Siemens Siemens Austria Austria End-

User

Sintef Sintef Research

Institute

Norway Devel-

oper

3 GAME DEVELOPMENT

The process of software development is permeated

with creativity (Glass, 1995), and in the case of

game development a clear example is embodied in

the dynamic evolution of a game design document,

which final version corresponds to the synergy of all

SERIOUS GAME DEVELOPMENT BY DISTRIBUTED TEAMS - A Case Study Based on the EU Project PRIME

297

the different stakeholders involved in the develop-

ment process.

The production of games has evolved

significantly since the “garage” period when two or

three friends would develop a game by doing all the

implementation, game design and content with no

schedule and minimal budget. Nowadays, a game is

usually produced by a multi-disciplinary team of

about twenty people or more, with the technical

developers being a small core of a few people and

the remainder of the team being responsible for

content creation and game design. The production

cycle usually involves 2 to 2.5 years of desperate

development effort chasing ever-shifting deadlines

and overcoming problems whilst simultaneously

trying to keep to the target release date. The cost

involved in maintaining such a large team for an

extended amount of time requires an investment

budget of a few million Euro. As a result, one

verifies in the evidence in many postmortems

(Gamasutra, 2006) that it is quite common for

projects to exceed the initial budget and overextend

the initial time allotted for completion. In many

cases, critical problems may be traced to the

challenges of managing the creative process of all

facets of game development.

Although similar to one another, the develop-

ment of a serious game diverges in many ways from

that of a traditional game. In the case of a traditional

game, the development process is driven by the

vision of a group of people that expect and plan the

result to be successful, with a sufficiently high level

of market success to justify the development costs.

On the other hand, with a serious game, the

development process is driven by the user

requirements of a well-defined set of users that will

and intend to use the resulting serious game. The

addition of requirements engineering requires more

creativity (Robertson, 2002), which according to

some (Nguyen et al, 2000), adds additional

complexity that ultimately may compromise the

success of the project.

The gaming industry is fully aware of the high

risk associated to game development, both

traditional genre and serious game. Therefore

attempts have been made to improve the

development methodology by addressing the

challenges raised. A first approach has been to adopt

well structured frameworks and methodologies from

software engineering community and streamline the

development process. There are numerous different

development methodologies (Wiering, 1998) to

choose from, but none is able to guarantee the

success of a project. This supports the claim “silver

bullets” do not exist (Brooks, 1987) to solve the

nightmares associated to the software process of

complex systems. It is widely accepted that software

engineering implies more than sophisticated

techniques (e.g. (McConnell, 1998)), which is the

only way to tackle the complexity of large scale

systems that are inherently multi-disciplinary

(Grimson and Kugler, 2000).

As a result, there is a growing trend is search

alternate development methodologies with some

games adopting principles from the agile software

development community (Beck et al, 2006). Such

methods promote a light-weight software process

based on iterative short cycles where software

engineering is deeply ingrained throughout. The lean

development philosophy is achieved by reducing the

requirement of supporting documentation and

relying on best practices to ultimately increase the

productivity. However, an analysis (Turk et al,

2002) of the foundational principles, along with the

necessary assumptions made about the software

process, reveals that there continues to be no such

thing as “silver bullets”. In addition, the existing

agile methods still require some maturity in order to

address their limitations (Abrahamson et al, 2003),

namely the disregard to generalization to address the

issues of reusability and lack of practical guidance

with respect to applicability.

One of the most popular and predominant agile

methods is eXtreme Programming (XP) (Beck,

2000), which proposes twelve practices to replace

the traditional development methodologies of the

software process. Although the XP methodology is

implementation oriented with much diminished

emphasis on analysis and design, a small trial study

(Wood and Kleb, 2002) demonstrated the

effectiveness of the method in the research arena

where the software process is exploratory with an

associated high degree of uncertainty to the problem

domain.

The High Moon Studios, responsible for games

such as Dark Watch, have been using SCRUM

(Controlchaos, 2006) for project management with

agile principles and XP for the actual development

(Keith, 2006). Both agile methodologies have been

adapted to fit the nature of the teams involved in the

game production. However, none of the

methodologies support geographically distributed

teams and although the risks of game development

are mitigated, the underlying problems persist to

plague the projects.

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298

4 DEVELOPMENT

METHODOLOGY IN PRIME

The potential pitfalls associated to game develop-

ment were known from the onset of the project, and

it was recognised the need for an iterative develop-

ment approach that supported both the exploratory

nature necessary in research and a high level of task

parallelization. In addition, the PRIME project is

obligated to develop a serious game that addresses

the needs of 6 end-user companies. This has proven

to be an additional challenge as the gaming aware-

ness within the corporate knowledge was very low

or even non-existent, which led to a high uncertainty

concerning the user requirements (Baalsrud Hauge

et al, 2006).

4.1 Overview

The uncertainty of the problem domain entailed the

adoption of a development approach that was based

on an iterative methodology. However, the classic

relevant development models, such as exploratory or

spiral, were not sufficiently adequate for PRIME,

neither did the methods ensure the successful com-

pletion of the entire project within 24 months.

A schematic representation of the PRIME

development methodology is depicted in Figure 1,

illustrating the iterative approach by the spiral

process (coloured in light green) with four major

milestones coinciding with the major releases of the

PRIME software. The first milestone at month 6

corresponds to a cardboard prototype of PRIME; the

second milestone corresponds to the release of the

alpha version of PRIME at month 12, coupled with

the testing and integration methodologies; the third

milestone is the beta release of the PRIME software

coupled with the PRIME-Time methodologies and

evaluation framework; and finally at month 24, the

final major version of the PRIME software is

released along with the result analysis of the

evaluation process.

Although the milestones are pre-determined, the

spiral process implies that the development is

dynamic, meaning that the nature of PRIME

software adapts to the needs of the six end-users and

what is identified by the consortium to be effective

generalisations to support strategic decisions in the

context of global manufacturing. This approach

implies that the involvement of the end-users from

the start of the project in truly a user-centred

approach.

Unlike the classic spiral development

methodology, PRIME does not have iterative stages

of specifications, design, prototype and evaluation.

A more agile approach is taken with the following

four deeply ingrained principles:

• People and communication over processes and

management tools;

Figure 1: PRIME development methodology (Oliveira, 2006 b).

SERIOUS GAME DEVELOPMENT BY DISTRIBUTED TEAMS - A Case Study Based on the EU Project PRIME

299

• Working documents and visual artefacts

(prototypes, storyboards, images, animations)

over comprehensive documentation;

• End-user collaboration over frozen functionality;

• Response to change over established plan.

In addition, the development activities are

aggregated into five well-defined strands that

operate in parallel:

• Vision. The aim of the Vision strand is to

convey a consolidated view of the project

outcome within the consortium, which is

essential in managing the user expectations and

to provide a common understanding amongst the

development team of developers, who are

geographically distributed and working in

parallel. The vision will continue to evolve as the

user centred approach integrates the feedback

from the end-users. This strand was initiated 4

months in advance from the official start date of

the project.

• PRIME-Time. The PRIME-Time strand

encompasses all the methodologies aimed at the

creation of new work environments based on the

usage of PRIME integrated into current work

environments, in both the Industrial or Academic

environments. There are nine key concepts that

are part of PRIME-Time: Player (knowledge

worker), training, evaluation, time, place, award,

motivation, monitoring and management.

• Design. The Design strand corresponds to the

activities that shape and mould the game design

of the PRIME serious game, defining the game

play and the game mechanics, along with the

underlying simulation model. The strand takes

into account the feedback from the end-users and

the concerns related to the integration of

PRIME-Time into real work environments.

• Code. This strand corresponds to many of the

traditional implementation activities, namely the

user requirements, technical specifications and

the actual implementation.

• Evaluation. The Evaluation strand covers both

the testing of the output of the development and

the validation of the initial hypothesis that

managers will gain experience within a virtual

environment that allows soft-failure.

All the strands operate in parallel, with informa-

tion flowing between them, thus influencing the fi-

nal output in terms of the PRIME software and

PRIME-Time methodologies.

4.2 Developer-End-User Partnerships

To facilitate the development process, developer-

end-user partnerships were established according to

Table 2. Each one of the developers acquired de-

tailed knowledge of their end-user during the solici-

tation and elaboration of the user requirements by

means of close collaboration. This deep synergy,

which was established in the initial phase of the pro-

ject, allows a developer to champion the interests of

the corresponding end-user whilst absent from the

developer meetings and technical brainstorming ses-

sions.

Table 2: Developer-end-user partnerships in PRIME.

End-User Developer

CRF MIP

IAI BIBA and Alfamicro

Intracom EPFL

KESZ Alfamicro

LEGO Sintef

Siemens BIBA

It was quickly identified that the lack of gaming

culture, or awareness of what a serious game was,

would add to the development challenges. There-

fore, the consortium as a whole and by means of the

developer/end-user partnerships worked to create the

game culture within the consortium, which included

the realisation of internal workshops presenting ex-

amples of serious games and holding discussions on

broad user scenarios. Although 6 partners of the con-

sortium are characterised as end-users, some of the

developers themselves are also end-users. Alfamicro

will be using PRIME as a consultancy tool, whilst

BIBA, EPFL, MIP, Sintef and Sofia will be using

PRIME as an education tool. This promoted owner-

ship and interest in the usage of the PRIME results

by all the partners within the consortium.

The developer/end-user relationships will remain

in place throughout the duration of the PRIME pro-

ject. Each pair developer/end-user holds virtual and

face-to-face meetings to carry out the necessary

work.

4.3 Working Groups

During the first twelve months of the project, there

has been one kick-off meeting (September 2005 on

Madeira Island) and three project meetings (Novem-

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300

ber 2005 in Vienna, March 2006 in Budapest and

June 2006 in Athens). The project meeting in Buda-

pest coincided with the six month milestone and the

“cardboard” demonstrator was presented to the end-

users. With just four project meetings, all the devel-

opment activities have been done together by means

of a collaborative platform and a dynamic flexible

management methodology to effectively support

creativity within a virtualised space.

With seven geographically distributed developer

partners, it was necessary to effectively coordinate

all the developers involved, which exceeded 25 in-

dividuals with differing cultural backgrounds. At the

first instance, coordination was based on a classic

management hierarchical structure with virtual meet-

ings between workpackage leaders and the corre-

sponding task leaders. The workpackage leaders

would in turn have a meeting with the Operation

Manager. Only the individuals responsible for active

tasks and workpackages needed to participate in the

meetings. This structural organization was in opera-

tion until the second project meeting (Vienna – No-

vember 2005) where it was acknowledged that there

were delays in the project. The major culprit was the

inherent “waterfall” mentality affecting most of the

developers, whom recognised the spiral process of

the PRIME development methodology, but remained

adamant about sequential task execution. It was evi-

dent that an alternative approach was necessary. In

addition, the digital platform put in place to support

electronic brainstorming was only used by a few

individuals.

The adopted solution was to set up Working

Groups (WGs), which would have a dynamic life

cycle, being created to address a particular need and

lasting until their purpose had been achieved. These

WGs consisted of small number of developers,

where each individual would be representative of

their own local team. Consequently, the number of

participants would not exceed five at the most, but

the development team consisted on average of 25

individuals from seven different organizations. On

occasion, some additional individuals would partici-

pate to a particular WG meeting, but solely as ob-

servers.

The initial two WGs were focused on the game

object model and the system object model respec-

tively. Other WGs were created, dissolved and

merged, with the current WGs consisting of (in pa-

renthesis are identified the participating partners

with the WG leaders in bold):

• Game Design WG (Alfamicro, BIBA, MIP,

Intrapoint and Sintef). This working group is the

result of the merging of the Game Object Model

and Gamer WG. Their responsibility is to

maintain and validate the Game Object Model,

the game play and the corresponding game

design. The active members of the WG are all

individuals who are considered gamers, thus

with experience in either playing extensively

games during their growing up or developing

games.

• System Design WG (Alfamicro, BIBA and

Intrapoint). This working group evolved from

the System Object Model group. The group is

responsible for the maintenance of the technical

specifications and overseeing the

implementation of the PRIME server, client and

middleware. However, the WG is driven by the

outputs of the Game Design WG.

• Simulation Model WG (Alfamicro, BIBA, EPFL

and Intrapoint). This working group is relatively

new and emerged form the System Design WG

to address all issues concerning the hierarchical

simulation model that supports the Virtual

Business Environment.

• Toolset and Artificial Stakeholders WG

(Alfamicro, BIBA and Sofia). This working

group tackles the orthogonal development

activities to the PRIME server and client, namely

the PRIME Toolset and the Artificial

Stakeholders.

• PRIME-Time WG (Alfamicro, EPFL and MIP).

This working group focuses in developing the

PRIME-Time model, identifying barriers and

developing effective adoption methodologies.

Initially there would be on average 4-6 virtual

meetings throughout a month. With the WGs, the

number of meetings increased to an average of eight

meetings a week, with some groups having more

than two meetings a week. The aim of a WG meet-

ing would be to brainstorm using supporting work-

ing documents and the existence of clear objectives

would keep the duration to less than two hours.

Once the WG concept was implemented, it fomented

the realization of additional bi-lateral meetings,

which would be more brainstorming intensive and

exceed the duration of two hours threshold.

Although each WG had a group leader, the over-

all coordination of all WG was done by someone

who assumed the role of Producer. This person be-

came responsible for driving all the development

activities and being actively involved in all the

working groups. The Producer would in turn liaise

with the Operation Manager and together, they

would identify risks and develop contingency plans

that were discussed with the Quality Risk Manager.

SERIOUS GAME DEVELOPMENT BY DISTRIBUTED TEAMS - A Case Study Based on the EU Project PRIME

301

All the supporting documentation and working

documents generated by the WG would be available

in an online document management system for easy

access by all.

4.4 Development Status Overview

The PRIME vision has been developed and matured,

providing the framework for all development activi-

ties. In addition to the development milestones,

many more activities produced results, ranging from

surveys to the PRIME portal.

At month 6 (end of month February 2006), the

release of a cardboard prototype of the PRIME client

coupled with a storyboard describing the context of

the human player interaction with the VBE. This

prototype was limited in functionality, but allowed

the end-users to interact with the demonstrator and

sign-off their approval.

In addition to the demonstrator, a Game Object

Model with 200 game entities was developed, along

with the game play encompassing the various strate-

gic decisions that a manager of a Business Unit will

take. The game design itself has gone through 3 ma-

jor iterations, taking into account the expectations

and gaming background of the end-users.

The PRIME-Time concept has been developed

and matured, thus providing a framework for the

integration of PRIME in existing work environments

and the evaluation activities.

At month 12 (end of August 2006), the imple-

mentation of the alpha version has progressed. The

feedback of the end-user organizations on the proto-

types has enriched the features and contributed to an

increase in the complexity of the problem domain.

This has led to rescheduling and reprioritization of

tasks to accommodate the minor delay introduced.

5 CONCLUSIONS

In PRIME, it was observed that technology alone is

not sufficient to enable a process, namely formula-

tion, discussion and refinement of ideas. However, it

is not sufficient either to enforce a singular method-

ology since the process is dependent on a multidis-

ciplinary team of individuals, each with their own

cognitive mental models that most likely differ from

one another. Another two important factors are the

geographic dispersion of the team and the different

contexts associated to a task. The project began with

a strict hierarchical managerial approach to the work

supported by collaborative tools, namely electronic

support for brainstorming. During the third month of

the project, it became obvious that delay was in-

curred and it was necessary to adopt an alternative

approach or risking non-completion of the project

within the designated time with the allocated re-

sources.

In the case of the PRIME team, it was necessary

to adopt a flexible project management process that

evolved according to the needs as dictated by the

circumstances. At the heart of the process was the

producer with a hands-on approach, who supports

the operational manager of the project. Although

during the first twelve months, the producer central-

ized the information flow, this has gradually

changed as the work shifts more into implementation

and the creative entropy wanes.

The producer is responsible for the coordination

of dynamic working groups, which would be re-

sponsible for a single or set of tasks for a given time

period. In addition to the working groups, there were

the end-user/developer partnerships to ensure a user

centred development approach. This pairing of part-

ners proved particularly successful with the phase of

requirement engineering, where it was very impor-

tant to guide end-users through user requirement

analysis and to inform them at an early stage of the

advantages and limitation of the simulation underly-

ing the game.

The sharing of information was done via the col-

laborative platform, which adopted principles of

agile programming community, promoting clear

communication based on working documents and

visual artefacts.

The success of the methodology has allowed the

project to recuperate the initial delay and accommo-

date the emerging problems within the development

process and the PRIME functionality. The developer

partners have initiated the adoption of the methodol-

ogy into other of their projects, in particular during

the phases where creativity is predominant and the

team is geographically distributed.

The PRIME methodology has a wider applicabil-

ity, as in the case of the designing and creating the

manufacturing processes of a new product, namely

involving the use of plastic moulds and special tool-

ing. The design and engineering of a new product

strongly benefits from a closer contact between

product designers, tool makers and product manu-

facturers. However, further research is necessary to

evaluate the effectiveness of the PRIME develop-

ment methodology in a broader case.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors thank the respective project partners, as

well as the European Commission for all scientific,

organisational and financial support. The PRIME

project is partially funded under contract number

FP6-016542 within the Sixth Framework Program-

me, Priority IST/NMP.

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