Towards Social Media Platform Integration with an Applied Gaming Ecosystem

The European (EU)-based industry for non-leisure games (so called Applied Games, AGs) is an emerging business. As such it is still fragmented and needs to achieve critical mass to compete globally. Nevertheless, its growth potential is widely recognized and even suggested to exceed the growth potential of the leisure games market. The European project Realizing an Applied Gaming Ecosystem (RAGE) is aiming at supporting this challenge. RAGE will help to seize these opportunities by making available an interoperable set of advanced Applied Game (AG) technology assets, as well as proven practices of using such AG assets in various real-world contexts. RAGE will finally provide a centralized access to a wide range of applied gaming software modules, relevant information, knowledge and community services, and related document, media, and educational resources within an online community portal called the RAGE Ecosystem. Besides this, an integration between the RAGE Ecosystem and relevant social network interaction spaces that arranges and facilitates collaboration that underlie research and development (R&D), as well as market-oriented innovation and exploitation will be created in order to support community building, as well as collaborative asset exploitation of User Generated Contents (UGCs) of the RAGE Ecosystem. In this paper, we will outline a conceptual approach exploring methods to first of all integrate Content Management- and Community Collaboration support including advanced portal features based on Digital Library (DL), Media Archive (MA), and Learning Management System (LMS) infrastructures with Social Network (SN) integration support technologies and on capturing support for Semantic Social Media (SSM) content. This will allow for a seamless integration of social network advantages within community portal operation. On the other hand it will support information, UGC, and knowledge sharing, as well as persistency of social interaction threads within Social Networking Sites (SNSs) that are connected to the RAGE Ecosystem. The paper reviews possible alternative architectural integration concepts, as well as related authentication, access, and information integration challenges. In this way, on the one hand a qualitative evaluation regarding an optimal technical integration approach is facilitated while on the other hand design approaches towards support features of resulting user interfaces are initiated.