Serious game

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Introduction

Serious games induce some kind of affective or motor learning at any level.

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.

According to Susi et al. (2007) serious games are games that “engage the user and contribute to the achievement of predefined objectives”

We suggest the following technical definition for serious computer games: 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 that has been developped for recrational purposes.

The main purpose of serious games is education and training. Within education, there are many different subtypes, e.g. drill and practice games on one end and so-called "epistemic games" that help players learn to think like professionals on the other.

Other areas of serious gaming use include advertizing, political and religious propaganda, health (helping people in various ways with health issues), military, etc.

See also:

Learning effects and assessment

“Can games be used to support meaningful learning? Most likely the answer is yes, conditional on more research being conducted in this area. In general, we believe that (a) learning is at its best when it is active, goal-oriented, contextual-ized, and interesting (e.g., Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; Bruner, 1961; Quinn, 2005; Vygotsky, 1978); and (b) learning environments should thus be interactive, provide ongoing feedback, grab and sustain attention, and have appropriate and adaptive levels of challenge— i.e., the features of good games (e.g., Prensky, 2001; Salen & Zimmerman, 2004).” (Shute et al. 2010: 137)

The Summit on Educational Games, page 18 identifies the following features of optimal learning environments and note that gameplayers implemented many of these features in gameplay:

  • Clear learning goals
  • Broad experiences and practice opportunities that continue to challenge the learner and reinforce expertise
  • Continuous monitoring of progress, and use of this information to diagnose performance and adjust instruction to learner level of mastery
  • Encouragement of inquiry and questions, and response with answers that are appropriate to the learner and context
  • Contextual Bridging: Games and simulations can close the gap between what is learned and its use.

The same report also identifes the kinds of knowledge and skills that might be taught effectively with games and simulation. The list includes knowledge and skills that are hard to teach and train in other ways.

  • Higher order skills such as strategic thinking, resource management mastery, interaction withsystems, multi-tasking and decision making within complex situations and changing scenarios, learning to compromise and to make trade-offs, manage complex relationships, exercise leadership, collaboration and team building
  • Practial Skills Training in a safe environment, such as operating complex machinery, laboratory work, marketing techniques
  • High Performance Situations
  • Rarely used skills
  • Developing expertise
  • Team building

Shute et al. (2010), in order to respect learning though games, suggest to “focus on propose using ECD (Evidence-centered design), stealth assessment, and automated data collection and analysis tools to not only collect valid evidence of students’ competency states in game environments, but to also reduce teachers’ workload in relation to managing the students’ work (or “play”) products.” (Shute et al. 2010: 158).

It is difficult to draw a clear border between serious games and simulation and between serious games and edutainment. The difference between a serious games and a simulation is that serious games rely on key elements of computer gaming, i.e must be based on good gameplay and playability.

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 may be some subtle differences with respect to modern main-stream serious games, for example:

  • The "fun" aspect usually was less developed in simulation games
  • 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.

Genres

Serious games are not necessarily labeled as such. Many synomyes are used, e.g. immersive Learning Simulations (ILS) or game-based learning software.

A natual list

Below is a provisional list of genres. Some can overlap, i.e. a game can be a kind of several genres.

  • Construction games: include several subgenres
    • Building games (e.g. roads, bridges, buildings, ...) where players acquire some underlying principles and/or skills.
    • Simulation games like SimCity where players could develop more abstract knowledge like planning or understanding a system.
  • Edutainment: include games that may teach something to children or at least not harm them ... Usually commercial CD ROMS.
  • Health games: include a broad range of games
    • Exergames: help people exercising and often includes technology that tracks body movements, body reactions, or use of mechanical devices. In addtion, such games often use input devices like a wii fit board or the Kinect.
    • Assessment games
    • Therapeutic games
    • Prevention games
  • News games: apply journalistic principles to the creation of a game (Newsgame, Wikipedia). Its purpose is often to sensitize people about a recent situation.
  • Games for change, games for good etc.
  • Simulation

Taxonomies

Caspian learning, retrieved 16:33, 10 October 2012 (CEST) identifies:

  • Egocentric Sims
  • Branching Story Sims
  • Real Time Strategy Sims
  • Exocentric Sims
  • Episodic Sims
  • Resource Management
  • Virtual Worlds
  • Device-based Sims

Ben Sawyer and Peter Smith, in their 2008 Serious Games Taxonomy (broken link), used two dimensions:

  1. Content: Games for Health, Advergames, Games for Training, Games for Education, Games for Science and Research, Production, Games as Work
  2. Sector: Government & NGO, Defense, Healthcare, Marketing & Communications, Education, Corporate, Industry

Crosstabulated, this lead to the following table:

Sawyer & Smith Serious games taxonomy 2008: Source: Understanding "Serious" Games

Examples

Political sensibilization, education and propaganda

Many of these games are playable through a web browser. Some of these may require a plugin, e.g. Flash or a more exotic format like Unity

  • Amnesty the Game “Using your wits, drive and passion you have the opportunity to save six prisoners condemned to death, help spread the message of justice and human rights, and support Amnesty International’s fight against Capital Punishment!”

Links

Overviews

  • Serious Games Taxonomy by Ben Sawyer: Digitalmill, Inc. & Serious Games Initiative and Peter Smith: University of Central Florida, RETRO Lab.
Slides


Reports

  • Summit on Educational Games, Harnessing the power of video games for learning. Web site includes a Fact Sheet, PPT, and Full report, Federation of American Scientists, 2005. Still good reading.


Indexes of serious games

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

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 11:40, 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 11:40, 5 October 2012 (CEST)
  • HealthGamesResearch.org: “Health Games Research is a national program that provides scientific leadership and resources to advance the research, design, and effectiveness of digital games and game technologies that promote health. It is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Pioneer Portfolio and headquartered at the University of California, Santa Barbara.”, , retrieved 11:40, 5 October 2012 (CEST)

conferences and proceedings

  • SGDA 2012 (list of contributions, but (Access restricted)
    • Minhua Ma, Manuel Fradinho, Jannicke Baalsrud Hauge, Heiko Duin, Klaus-Dieter Thoben (Eds.): Serious Games Development and Applications - Third International Conference, SGDA 2012, Bremen, Germany, September 26-29, 2012. Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 7528 Springer 2012, ISBN 978-3-642-33686-7
  • ICEC 2012. International conference on entertainment computing. (no proceedings so far).

Resource sites and pages


Informal literature


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.
  • Bergeron Bryan (2006). Developing Serious Games Game Development Series, Charles River Media.
  • Blunt, R. (2009) Do serious games work? Results from three studies, eLearn Magazine, December 1
  • 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.
  • Marsh Tim, Chuang Xuejin, Li Zhiqiang Nickole, Scot Osterweil, Eric Klopfer and Jason Haas, (2011). Fun and learning: the power of narrative, in: FDG, Bordeaux, France, pages 23--29, ACM.
  • 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.
  • Ritterfeld Ute; Michael Cody and Peter Vorderer (2009). Serious Games: Mechanisms and Effects, Routledge, ISBN 0415993709
  • Shute, V. J., Masduki, I., & Donmez, O. (2010). Conceptual Framework for Modeling, Assessing and Supporting Competencies within Game Environments. Technology Instruction Cognition and Learning, 8(2), 137–161. Retrieved from http://myweb.fsu.edu/vshute/pdf/TICL2010.pdf
  • Shute, Valerie J, Iskandaria Masduki, and Oktay Donmez. 2010. Conceptual Framework for Modeling, Assessing and Supporting Competencies within Game Environments. Technology Instruction Cognition and Learning 8, no. 2: 137-161. http://myweb.fsu.edu/vshute/pdf/TICL2010.pdf.
  • Susi T.; M. Johannesson, and P. Backlund, (2007). "Serious Games – An Overview," School of Humanities and Informatics, University of Skövde, Sweden, Technical Report HS-IKI-TR-07-001, 2007.
  • 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.
  • Yusoff, A.; Crowder, R.; Gilbert, L.; Wills, G.; , "A Conceptual Framework for Serious Games," Advanced Learning Technologies, 2009. ICALT 2009. Ninth IEEE International Conference on , vol., no., pp.21-23, 15-17 July 2009 doi: 10.1109/ICALT.2009.19, Abstract/PDF


  • 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.

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