Defining Serious Games

[Katrin Becker]

I realize this may (re)opening a can of worms, and I admit I am a latecomer to this forum (tho not to serious games).

I just noticed the definition of serious games that is posted on the main page and I wonder why this definition differs from the one generally accepted by the Serious Games Initiative?

Serious Games are games intended for purposes other than pure entertainment. (The definition has been kept purposefully broad).

The definition on the site is: "Serious games (SGs) or persuasive games are computer and video games used as persuasion technology or educational technology. They can be similar to educational games, but are often intended for an audience outside of primary or secondary education. Serious games can be of any genre and many of them can be considered a kind of edutainment."

Not all serious games are persuasive games, and educational games are in fact part of the serious games space, and there are educational games that are not created for formal educational settings.

Educational games *are* serious games, but 'edutainment' has negative conotations in some circles and it might be helpful to avoid the term.

I realize that 'a rose by any other name....', however, it turns out that labels do affect how people judge things.

[Ken Rigby (MellaniuM, Tele3dworld)]

I believe we are to engrossed in producing something for the commercial market.

The real benefits are going to be for the bedridden and bored community which nobody seems to care about. Creating a virtual realistic environment for these unfortunate members of our community to still relate to the rest of us is shurely a noble cause. Just because they got old or infirm should not be the reason for them to be excluded from society.

We need to create there past and the present for when we finish up in the same condition.

Arguing semantics is a bit frivolous when so much can be done to help.

[Kevin Corti]

Hi Ken,

I don't want to sound like a complete git but 'noble causes' tend not to enable people to pay their mortgages. This space has been, to a certain extent, seed-funded by charitable foundations and government grants, especially, it seems, in the US. That is fine but if we are to build a sustainable industry (encompassing solutions to all sections of society) then 80% of the progress needs to be funded by commercial clients on commercial terms. My message is thus; if we don't learn how to communicate with industry and how to best serve their needs (solve problems for them) then this space will shrivel and die.

[AC]

I think a key to long term growth in this area is universities. They are the places that should be pioneering new technologies, especially education technologies. Unix is a good example of a technology that didn't look set to be a wide spread business OS. However it became a de facto standard in higher education and so graduates took it into industry.

Just imagine if every graduate in the country had some experience of games based elearning as part of their course. As well as a trickle up into industry surely there would be a trickle down into schools. Channel 4 tell us primary schools are forgetting to teach children to read ! What is the point of funding games projects here when the money would be better spent on promoting phonics. Are government grants targeting games for higher education ?

[Kevin Corti]

Hi Adrian,

Again, sorry to sound downbeat (I prefer 'pragmatic') but I see very little external effort/support to enable the market to create GBL products for the schools market. I agree it is an area which can potentially benefit enormously - just look atthe work that BECTa did several years ago and which FutureLab built upon - but the very real challenge here is that GBL product development is not cheap, the developers are not well-funded and it is an exceedingly fractured market place. Small companies cannot afford to incur the research and development costs, the curriculum is so deep and wide that many many products would need to be created and ultimately each school is an independent budget holder. That means that you need to target, for example, 5,500 secondary schools in the UK independently. They are also not cash rich. As an overall market they represent what seems a huge market (even if you sold 1 product to 10% of them) but you cannot reach each school indirectly in any cost-efficient way (at least we haven't managed to) so you end up with no funding for R&D, a small price point per school, expensive sales costs per sale = no commercial viability.

I, and many others, would like to see regional or even national government education departments funding big projects for the benefit for a large mass of schools. That way it could happen but I am not holding my breath.

Universities are a similar beast. For a uni to find the budget to create a SG it has to find external funding (EU, RDA etc) and has to be able to justify the cost per student. A £250k product developemnt (i.e. something pretty ambitious) would need to address an awful lot of students over an extended period to be justifiable. Universities coming together to develop generic products (e.g. a game for economics undergraduate education) would seem to be a way to make this happen but given that the universities are really in competition with each other for student intake that pressure seems to mean that this isn't practical either.

I believ strongly in market forces, i.e. entrepreneurs spot an opportunity and somehow find the cash to develop something from which they can get a good return, but the fact that very few companies have been successfull in the education space seems like very strong evidence that government intervention is needed as school, FE and HE levels.

On UNIX (like Linux, Moodle and Web CT etc) I have to say that my observations are these flourish because they are free (or very low cost) to acquire and because there is cheap labour (students, researchers etc) in universities to deploy these apps/OSs. People are constantly talking about an open source 'game engine' but it would be impossible to create a single application architecture that handled every kind of game and simulation genere which was usable by non-programmers...we would need several specialist platforms and then the end users need a complex team of many skill types to do anything useful with it.

[Ken Rigby (MellaniuM, Tele3dworld)]

I think this Page sums it up

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_121/2575...

[Ken Rigby (MellaniuM, Tele3dworld)]

What is a "serious game?" Well, here's Wikipedia's definition:



A serious game is a software application developed with game technology and game design principles for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment.

[Ken Rigby (MellaniuM, Tele3dworld)]

# Where does the term “serious games” come from?

The Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars coined the term ”serious games” which defined and mobilized a loose-knit collection of game developers, educational foundations, grassroots organizations, human rights advocates, medical professionals, first responders, homeland security consultants, and assorted others around a common cause. These people, along with many others who are interested in serious games have been attending the Game Developers Conference which holds a summit on serious games twice a year. In coming together for a common cause this group has actively promoted the idea that serious games can teach just as well as books, film, or any other medium. Josh Schollmeyer explains that “games let us create representation of how things work in a medium that’s built to do exactly that” (2006, p. 35). In other words, one of the best ways to understand and learn about the operation of machinery or certain phenomena can be learned through the simulation of games that allow the user to interact with the model of how a system works.