The RAGE Software Portal: Toward a Serious Game Technologies Marketplace

Wim Westera, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón, Rui Prada, Kam Star, Andrea Molinari, Dominic Heutelbeck, Paul A. Hollins, Rubén Riestra, Krassen Stefanov, Eric Kluijfhout

Abstract: This paper presents the RAGE marketplace portal (gamecomponents.eu), which is intended as a hot spot and neutral single point of access for serious game technologies. The portal aims at fostering collaborations and the exchange of technical artefacts and associated knowledge and resources between different stakeholders in the field of serious gaming (e.g. educators, developers, researchers, publishers, policy makers and end-users). After a brief introduction to the H2020 RAGE project, the flexible design of the marketplace portal and its underlying software repository are presented. A concise overview is given of the initial set of advanced game technology components created by RAGE, that are currently exposed in the portal. For empirical validation of these components, we have developed 7 serious games based on subsets of these components, which were then tested in educational practice with several hundreds of end-users. This game components portal want to be a neutral hub not dependent on any technology or provider and therefore it is open for new game technologies submissions. We envision this marketplace as a knowledge and game technologies hub to support and amplify serious game development.