Supervision : Jean-Marc LABAT

Co-supervision : CARRON thibault

Serious game architecture and design: modular component-based data-driven entity system framework to support systemic modeling and design in agile serious game developments

For the last ten years, we witness how the inherent learning properties of videogames entice several creators into exploring their potential as a medium of expression for diverse and innovative (serious) purposes.
Learning is at the core of the play experience, but it usually takes place at the affective and psychomotor domains. When the learning targets the serious content, cognitive/instructional designers must ensure its effectiveness at the cognitive domain. In such eminently multidisciplinary teams (game, technology, cognition, art), understanding and communication are essential for an effective collaboration from the early stage of inception.
In a software engineering approach, we focus on the (multidisciplinary) activities of the development process rather than the disciplines themselves, with the intent to uniform and clarify the field. Then, we propose a software foundation that reinforces this multidisciplinary model thanks to an underdesign approach that favors the creation of collaborative design workspaces.
Thereby, Genome Engine can be considered as a data-driven sociotechnical infrastructure that provides non-programmer developers, such as game designers and eventually cognitive designers, with a means to actively participate in the construction of the product design, rather than evaluating it once in usage time. Its architecture is based on a component-based application framework with an entity system of systems runtime object model, which contributes to modularity, reuse and adaptability, as well as to provide familiar abstractions that ease communication.
Our approach has been extensively evaluated with the development of several serious game projects.

2009-2013 Publications

• 2013
  • B. Capdevila : “Serious game architecture and design: modular component-based data-driven entity system framework to support systemic modeling and design in agile serious game developments”, thesis, phd defence 12/18/2013, supervision Labat, Jean-Marc, co-supervision : Carron, thibault (2013)
• 2011
  • B. Capdevila, B. Marne, J.‑M. Labat : “Conceptual and Technical Frameworks for Serious Games”, Proceedings of the 5^th European Conference on Games Based Learning, Reading, United Kingdom, pp. 81-87, (Academic Publishing Limited) (2011)
• 2010
  • A. Yessad, P. Thomas Benjamin, B. Capdevila, J.‑M. Labat : “Using the Petri Nets for the Learner Assessment in Serious Games”, Proceeding of the 9 th International conference on Web-based Learning, vol. 6483, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Shanghai, China, pp. 339-348, (Springer) (2010)
• 2009
  • B. Capdevila, J.‑M. Labat : “Knowledge Management Approach to Support a Serious Gme Development”, IEEE International Conference on Advance Learning Technologies, Riga, Latvia, pp. 420-422, (IEEE) (2009)