Game engine reuse for non-game applications is well established. Content reuse — taking a serious game's scenarios, NPC systems, domain models, simulation agents, and knowledge bases and redeploying them as a non-game experience platform — is not. This paper documents the transformation of the Adaptive Matrix Game (AMG), a water-focused serious game, into the Historical Experience Engine, a general-purpose platform for customer-led exploration of reconstructed past worlds. The transformation is catalogued at the subsystem level: eight subsystems transfer directly (procedural reconstruction, Regional RAG, GIS integration, Ghibli rendering, certainty shading, NPC system, time-slice switching, 38-agent simulation), four are removed (scoring, objectives, AME deployment mechanics, Genesis Gun), and three are added (narrative agency, domain parameterisation, presence-centred evaluation). The case study demonstrates that the game layer is a small fraction of the total system; the platform — the simulation, reconstruction, and agent capabilities — is the rest. The evaluation framework transforms correspondingly: game metrics (completion, score, learning outcomes) are replaced by experience metrics (presence, emotion, empathy, historical understanding, cultural appropriateness). The paper argues that serious game backends are systematically under-exploited and that designing serious games with awareness of content-stack reuse produces platforms whose value exceeds any single game deployment.
James Otto Danenberg (Thu,) studied this question.