Serious Games Information Center

Serious Games are digital games with a characterising goal apart from entertainment aspects. Examples for Serious Games include digital educational games, games for training and simulation, health games and games for behaviour change or social awareness games to create attention to societal relevant topics such as security, energy and climate. This paper introduces the Serious Games Information Center (SG-IC), a classical web-based information system to describe and retrieve Serious Games. The SG-IC has been opened to the public in June, 2018 and is available in German. The English version is scheduled for September, 2018. The semantic basis for the system is built by the Serious Games Metadata Format (SG-MDF, DIN SPEC 91380), which has been conceptualized in the course of a standardization activity initiated and coordinated by Stefan Gobel from TU Darmstadt and httc e.V. and moderated by the DIN institute for standardization in Germany. The SG-MDF (DIN SPEC 91380) is the first standard to describe Serious Games in a normative way. In the first part of the paper, the motivation for the establishment of the Serious Games Information Center is illustrated. In Chapter 2, the SG-MDF with its underlying structure and its relation to the LOM standard for educational learning material is described. Then, in Chapter 3, the Serious Games Information Center with the metadata-based information system (SG-MIS) is introduced and it is explained how to describe and enter Serious Games into the system (authoring/supplier/marketing side) as well as how to retrieve appropriate games (user side). Hereby, users of the information systems might be developer studios and publishers (authors) as well as intermediaries (e.g. teachers, coaches or trainers in educational settings) and end users (individuals, pupils, parents).