Serious game

Draft

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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
• Computer game

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

People and organizations

• SeriousGames.org: “The Serious Games Initiative is focused on uses for games in exploring management and leadership challenges facing the public sector. Part of its overall charter is to help forge productive links between the electronic game industry and projects involving the use of games in education, training, health, and public policy. The Serious Games Initiative was founded at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C.”, retrieved 11:27, 5 October 2012 (CEST). At this date, the website was empty (only a home page)...

• Games for Health “Founded in 2004, the Games for Health Project supports community, knowledge and business development efforts to use cutting-edge games and game technologies to improve health and health care. The Pioneer Portfolio of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is the lead conference sponsor and a major supporter of the Games for Health Project.”, retrieved 11:27, 5 October 2012 (CEST)

• Twitchspeed (Marc Prensky's website)

Informal literature

• Serious Games: Improving Public Policy Through Game-Based Learning and Simulation, Wilson Center (undated)

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.