Towards Social Network Support for an Applied Gaming Ecosystem

The EU-based industry for non-leisure games (applied games) 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 technology assets, tuned to applied gaming, as well as proven practices of using asset-based applied games in various real-world contexts, and finally a centralized access to a wide range of applied gaming software modules, 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 the contents of the Ecosystem. In this paper we will outline a conceptual approach exploring methods to first of all integrate content management and community collaboration support portal technologies based on Digital Library (DL), Media Archive (MA), and Learning Management System (LMS) infrastructures with social network support technologies. This will allow for a seamless integration of social network advantages within community portal operation. On the other hand it will support information, content, 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.