Market Focus - Higher Education
Adoption of GBL in higher education is not yet widespread, although there is a clear market for its implementation. The biggest hurdles to adoption are perhaps:
It’s true that Producing “Triple A” games for integration into specific higher education courses tends to be prohibitively expensive (and extremely challenging) from instructional design, programming, and digital media creation perspectives. Thankfully, good design and gameplay often trumps “Triple A Fidelity”, and many solid games have already come out of private companies like Toolwire and Muzzy Lane, as well college and university game design centres like the Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center and the New York University Game Center.
- unfamiliarity with the method as a whole;
- cultural barriers for faculty, and among parents;
- prohibitive development costs;
- lack of tried-and-true publishing and distribution channels; and
- difficulty of matching engaging game design and storytelling with course-specific learning objectives.
It’s true that Producing “Triple A” games for integration into specific higher education courses tends to be prohibitively expensive (and extremely challenging) from instructional design, programming, and digital media creation perspectives. Thankfully, good design and gameplay often trumps “Triple A Fidelity”, and many solid games have already come out of private companies like Toolwire and Muzzy Lane, as well college and university game design centres like the Carnegie Mellon University Entertainment Technology Center and the New York University Game Center.
“We have made huge strides [in GBL] compared to where we were just a few short years ago. This notion of using digital media as an interactive game form is new, collectively speaking. It is going to evolve at light speed, and … I think we are always going to see new platforms, new technologies. It is not going to slow down anytime soon.”
-Andy Phelps, director of the MAGIC and executive committee member of HEVGA