Inside the Challenge: How SGS&C Uses Box Cloud Service

As a prospective game entry candidate, you might have wondered how the Serious Games Showcase & Challenge (SGS&C) team deals with all the serious games it receives.  Well, it is not easy, but it is easier than it was before.

At one time, the SGS&C team used an FTP server to receive games and distribute them to evaluators.  This was a full-time job during submissions season for Intern Robert Aviles who is now graduated and an industry member of the SGS&C Team.  “We only had ten login accounts available,” said Aviles. “This required us to issue and revoke access after the entrant uploaded their game so that we could issue the account to the next game entrant.”  Game entrants and evaluators had to deal with FTP clients.  “This usually wasn’t a big deal for game developers, but we had to do a lot of customer support with evaluators who weren’t familiar with this software and sometimes could not install it on workplace systems” explained Steve Slosser, Submission/Candidate Management Committee Lead.

Last year, the SGS&C Team had the privilege of having Box Inc. sponsor the Submission System.  Box is an online file sharing and Cloud content management service for enterprise companies.  The company has a freemium business model for personal accounts  providing 5 GB of free storage.  The service boosts user account management, access permissions and data encryption making it a highly secure approach to protecting game entrants intellectual property.  “We always need to ensure that we don’t compromise the trust that entrants are putting in us to not give unauthorized access to their games” says  SGS&C 2012 Industry Lead Peter Smith.  The system is also easy to use and manage for entrants, evaluators and the SGS&C team alike.  The SGS&C team looks forward to having Box sponsor the Challenge Submission System in 2013.

Check back for more of this occasional series Inside the Challenge.