This research center is auspiced by the Department of Digital Aesthetics and Communication and includes researchers with backgrounds within the Arts and Humanities, Psychology, Sociology, and Design. The center is largely concerned with the analysis of gaming and game design cultures, textual and theoretical analysis of game design and game play. The site appears to be rather lacking in recent updates but there are links to a large number of publications published up until 2005 here.
The real interest in this center is however the link to one of their research projects; The educational potential of commercial game technology. This link leads to the site of a commercial game developer, Serious Games Interactive (based in Copenhagen) and their product Global Conflicts: Palestine.
Global Conflicts is a 3D game based in a ‘photo realistic’ 3D representation of Palestine that places the user as a young Journalist just posted to Israel to cover the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Using all the recognizable features of a First Person Shooter the game sees the principle character move about the environment and engaging with characters, covering events, writing headlines , stories, taking photographs and assembling them into an ongoing coverage of the conflict. The aim is to provide and educational experience that approximates all the qualities deployed in contemporary games including their depictions of war and conflict. Here however the depiction of violence is directly mirroring the real world events of a current conflict, highlighting the the tendency for games generally and the FPS genre specifically tendency to ignore complex socio-political issues in preference to a kill or be killed representation of conflict. GC is not however making a statement about gaming – it is rather aiming to use gaming as a means of affective engagement in the service of achieving an ‘educational outcome’.
Global Conflicts is built with the UNITY engine for game development, developed by OTEE a company also based in Copenhagen. The GC project is supported by the EU Media Programme, The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark, The Danish Ministry of Education, The Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation, and The IT University of Copenhagen (in which the Center for Computer Games Research is based).
GC is not yet available for either purchase of demonstration and could of course be vaporware…..An very interesting project nonetheless…