Serious game

Draft

<pageby nominor="false" comments="false"/>

Introduction

Serious games have a long history. A good example are military games. Today (since the late nineties), "serious game" most often related to a kind of educational computer game or a kind of educational computer simulation.

We suggest the following definition: A serious computer game is a computer simulation or a microworld that is designed and implemented according to gameplay principles. In addition, a serious computer game may use game technology.

The main purpose of serious games is education and training. Other areas of use include advertizing, political and religious propaganda, health (helping people in various ways with health issues), military, etc.

See also:

• gamification
• gameplay and playability
• microworld
• simulation

History

Serious computer games go back to the 1970's (Abt, 1970), and mainly appeared under names like "educational game", "business game", "gaming and simuluation", "simulation", "edutainment", political games. However, there are subtle differences with respect to modern main-stream serious games, for example:

• The "fun" aspect usually was less developed in simulations
• Older serious games did less often use so-called gaming engines
• Educational games did often just implement a rewards system and were probably not as engaging as real video games
• Edutainment refers to games that (maybe) would develop cognitive skills with younger children, mainly commercial CDs
• Serious games most often play in real world settings and the target audience is rather adults as opposed to smaller children in edutainment or older educational games.

Recently, so-called gamification gained attention in some circles. "Gamification" mainly uses simple reward systems that are supposed to engage users in activities. It's inspired by "boy scout" badges and actually implements badging systems.

Examples

• 1066 (by Channel4)

Links

Overviews

• Serious game (Wikipedia)

Indexes of serious games

• Serious game (Wikipedia), includes a longer list at the end of the article

• Jeux pédagogiques List of entries in french made by our students

See also:

• Computer game
• Simulation

• Twitchspeed (Marc Prensky's website)

Bibliography

• Abt, C. (1970). Serious Games. New York: The Viking Press.

• Aldrich, Clark (2009). The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games. Pfeiffer. pp. 576. ISBN 0-470-46273-6.

• Alvarez J., Rampnoux O., (2007). Serious Game: Just a question of posture?, Artificial & Ambient Intelligence, AISB'07, Newcastle, UK, April 2007, 420-423

• Baranowski T, Buday R, Thompson DI, Baranowski J. (2008). Playing for real: video games and stories for health-related behavior change. Am J Prev Med. 34(1):74-82.

• Lang, F., Pueschel, T. and Neumann, D. (2009). "Serious Gaming for the Evaluation of Market Mechanisms", Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) 2009.

• Prensky, Marc (2001). Digital Game-Based Learning, McGraw-Hill.

• Reeves, Byron; Reed, J. Leighton (2009). Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete. Boston: Harvard Business School Publishing.

• Thompson D, Baranowski T, Buday R et al. (2010). Serious Video Games for Health: How Behavioral Science Guided the Development of a Serious Video Game. Simulation Gaming vol. 41 no. 4 587-606.

• Zyda, M. (September 2005). "From visual simulation to virtual reality to games". IEEE Computer.

Acknowledgment

The first drafts of the article are strongly based on the Serious game article.