Serious game

A serious game or applied game is a game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment.[1] The "serious" adjective is generally prepended to refer to video games used by industries like defense, education, scientific exploration, health care, emergency management, city planning, engineering, and politics.[2] The idea shares aspects with simulation generally, including flight simulation and medical simulation, but explicitly emphasizes the added pedagogical value of fun and competition.

History

The use of games in educational circles has been practiced since at least the twentieth century. Use of paper-based educational games became popular in the 1960s and 1970s, but waned under the Back to Basics teaching movement.[3] (The Back to Basics teaching movement is a change in teaching style that started in the 1970s when students were scoring poorly on standardized tests and exploring too many electives. This movement wanted to focus students on reading, writing and arithmetic and intensify the curriculum.[4]) Serious games are a subgenre of serious storytelling, where storytelling is applied "outside the context of entertainment, where the narration progresses as a sequence of patterns impressive in quality ... and is part of a thoughtful progress".[5]

The early 2000s saw a surge in different types of educational games, especially those designed for the younger learner. Many of these games were not computer-based but took on the model of other traditional gaming system both in the console and hand-held format. In 1999, LeapFrog Enterprises introduced the LeapPad, which combined an interactive book with a cartridge and allowed kids to play games and interact with a paper-based book. Based on the popularity of traditional hand-held gaming systems like Nintendo's Game Boy, they also introduced their hand-held gaming system called the Leapster in 2003. This system was cartridge-based and integrated arcade–style games with educational content.[6]

By 2010, serious games had evolved to incorporate actual economies like Second Life, in which users can create actual business which deal in virtual commodities and services for Linden dollars which were exchangeable for US currency. In 2015, Project Discovery was launched as a serious game. Project Discovery was launched as a vehicle by which geneticists and astronomers with the University of Geneva could access the cataloging efforts of the gaming public via a mini-game contained within the Eve Online massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). Players acting as citizen scientists categorize and assess actual genetic samples or astrological data. This data was then utilized and warehoused by researchers. Any data flagged as atypical was further investigated by trained scientists.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Djaouti, Damien; Alvarez, Julian; Jessel, Jean-Pierre. "Classifying Serious Games: the G/P/S model" (PDF). Retrieved 26 June 2015.
  2. ↑ "Serious Games". cs.gmu.edu. Retrieved 26 June 2015.
  3. ↑ Rice, J. W. (2007). "Assessing higher order thinking in video games" (PDF). Journal of Technology and Teacher Education. 15 (1): 87.
  4. ↑ "Education Update"; Back To Basics; Dr. Carole G. Hankin and Randi T. Sachs; 2002
  5. ↑ Lugmayr, Artur; Suhonen, Jarkko; Hlavacs, Helmut; Montero, Calkin; Suutinen, Erkki; Sedano, Carolina (2016). "Serious storytelling - a first definition and review". Multimedia Tools and Applications. doi:10.1007/s11042-016-3865-5.
  6. ↑ Gray, J. H.; Bulat, J.; Jaynes, C.; Cunningham, A. (2009). "LeapFrog learning". Mobile Technology for Children: Designing for Interaction and Learning. By A. Druin. Morgan Kaufmann. p. 171. ISBN 9780080954097.

Further reading


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