PlayMancer (A European Serious Gaming 3D Environment) is a Collaborative Project, started on 1st of November 2007 and running for 36 months in total. 7 partners from 5 countries participate in the project.

The potential of games for entertainment and learning has been demonstrated thoroughly from research and clearly in the market place. Unfortunately, the investments committed to entertainment dwarfs that which is committed for more serious purposes. Furthermore, game development has become more complex, expensive, and burdened with a long development cycle. This creates barriers to independent game developers, and inhibits the introduction of innovative games, or new game genres, i.e. serious games, or games accessible to communities with special needs.

PlayMancer targets at integrating a development platform (based on existing game engines, OS etc.) with tools and mechanisms that will allow binding, integration and access of existing, new and future multimodal I/O devices, recording all interaction data and making them available on a readable way for the creation of Serious Games for Health.

This platform will be tested and validated in the domain of two applications (physical rehabilitation and behavioral and addictive disorders) with the inclusion of innovative multimodal I/O devices. An innovative characteristic of the PlayMancer platform and games is the provision of ICT support (through interfaces and tools for on line monitoring and off-line processing) of the therapists, the medical game supervisors.

The objectives of the project are :

1. to construct a next generation gaming environment, mainly augmenting the gaming experience with innovative ICT modes of interaction between the player and the game world;
2. to apply the principles of Universally Accessible Games into 3D-based games through the specification of I/O configuration, following a design for all philosophy;
3. to evaluate the proposed framework and gaming infrastructure by developing and testing a series of serious games modules as applied to two application domains: physical rehabilitation, and therapeutic support and lifestyle management programs for behavioral and addictive disorders;
4. to investigate the use of techniques for procedural content creation based on generative modelling, and thus reduce the cost of offering a full-fledged pre-designed gaming world.