Impact

The primary stakeholders in the REPLAY project (beyond the project partners) are the end users. As the project is currently in the middle of the testing phase, the impact on these end users will not be fully known until all results from this process have been collated and analysed. However, we do have some early indications of how the project may have an impact on the work of teachers and professionals working with marginalised young people and, as a consequence, what the impact may be on those young people.

First of all, the evidence suggests that the REPLAY tool will become a valuable part of anti-social behaviour programmes; there are very few similar products in the market. Furthermore, the financial costs of developing highly immersive video games are minor when compared to the ones for the development of this sort of niche games. By focussing on addressing anti-social behaviour and creating a genuinely playable, immersive game, REPLAY has the potential to bring significant value to all professionals working with marginalised young people across the world. The potential of the technology to let young people express themselves and to create a genuinely ‘youth friendly’ context in normally difficult discussion fields is already proven. By creating this environment and by providing the appropriate follow-up tools, young people at risk of being marginalised due to their behaviour can be helped onto a more positive path. Their own engagement in the gaming experience has already been proved.

For the project partners, the technology creates a number of positive opportunities for further development and for future commercialisation. The gaming platform itself has been built in a modular way to facilitate easy replacement of content and activities. This means that many different versions of the game can be developed cheaply and quickly therefore opening up a huge range of market opportunities beyond the behavioural sector (some of which are already being explored). If the principle of creating a highly playable, immersive gaming environment into which high value pedagogical content is implanted can be proved within the REPLAY project (and early indications suggest that this has been proved), there are many other application areas that can be explored including games for autistic children, language-learning games, soft-skills games and so on. In addition, the project has also created a ‘human joystick’ which increases the immersion of the player in the game by adding a physical element to the game play. This human joystick can also be used in conjunction with other games and on other platforms and therefore represents a further benefit to the project partners.

Track record of sharing

The Replay project will be a first experience applying serious games as a preventive tool in Anti Social Behaviour programmes in schools and re-education centres. This could be a reference for other initiatives related to the use of videogames to support preventative programmes and therapies with young people at risk to be marginalised.

Lessons learnt

Although the market for so-called ‘serious games’ has grown rapidly over recent years, there is still much to learn about what makes a successful educational game.

The dynamic between the immersion and playability of the game and the didactic content embedded is critical in the success of a game like REPLAY. Furthermore, the game itself needs to be pitched at a level that the player feels is both hard enough to be a challenge and easy enough to complete. In addition, a game like REPLAY will not be played continuously or for long periods of time by the player, designed, as it is, to be played in collaboration with a teacher or professional as part of a wider behavioural programme. This makes it fundamentally different (as a game) from the sorts of games that young people are used to play and that are based, predominantly, on the assumption that the player will have many hours if not days to master the different stages of the game. Finally, developing a game for implementation into an educational or rehabilitation context creates a number of practical challenges that need to be taken into account if the game is to become a successful commercial application.

With all this in mind, the main lessons learnt from the REPLAY project are as follows:

• Young people have a very high ‘game literacy’ – for any serious game to be successful on any level, it needs to approximate in terms of game play and immersion the sorts of games young people are used to play with. It is too easy to lose the game element and just be left with the serious element. If this happens, engagement in the game will disappear.
• Finding the right level, in terms of playability and the difficulty of the content, is critical in the success of a serious game. If the game is either too easy or too hard, the player will quickly lose interest (if the game is too easy) or become demoralised (if the game is too hard). The best solution to this, within the REPLAY context, is to ensure that the game can be pre-configured both in terms of content and playability, for the specific player who is about to play (and that this configuration can be changed quickly in accordance with the player’s ability).
• A game of this sort, that will not be played for long or very frequently, needs to be designed with this in mind. This means that the set-up and scenario need to be immediately engaging without being too complex, the goals of the game needs to be easily articulated and the basic functions of the game need to be easily mastered. The time available for each player to learn how to play the game will be short so they need to be able to engage and become proficient quickly.
• The pressures within the context of behavioural programmes in schools and rehabilitation centres are significant in terms of time, resources, budget and, sometimes, technology. Therefore, any final product designed for this market needs to be developed with the realities of the market in mind. It is, for example, highly unlikely that an individual student within a school context will be able to receive more than an hour one-to-one attention from a member of the staff within a given time period. Much of the behavioural work that is done within this context happens in groups. REPLAY is designed to be run one-to-one. Therefore, if we are to end up with a fully implementable commercial product, we need to develop REPLAY with a clear understanding of the practical factors that will, in the end, govern any purchase within an educational institution.