Serious game
In short A complete game made mainly to do something other than entertain, such as teach, train, inform, or persuade.
Definition
A serious game is a complete game built mainly for a purpose other than entertainment: to teach, train, inform, persuade, heal, or produce useful work. The term is older than video games. Clark Abt used it in 1970 for classroom and policy games played with paper and dice, and it returned in the early 2000s for digital work funded by armies, hospitals, schools, and charities. What makes a game serious is its intent and its measure of success, not its tone or its form. A serious game keeps everything a game has; it simply answers to someone outside the game, who will ask afterward whether the player learned, changed, or contributed something.
Not to be confused with
- Gamification
Gamification adds points, badges, and other game elements to an activity that stays a non-game, while a serious game is a whole game in its own right.
- Educational game
An educational game is one kind of serious game, the kind aimed at teaching a subject; serious games also train, persuade, treat, and crowdsource.
- Games for change
Games for change are serious games aimed at social issues and tied to a particular community and festival, so the label is narrower than serious game.
- Simulation game
A simulation game models a real system for the pleasure of running it, and only becomes a serious game when it is built or used to achieve an outside goal.
Where the game lives
- rules: used
- goals: used
- feedback: used
- uncertainty: used
- choice: used
- play: used
A serious game keeps every structure a game has; what changes is who it answers to, since success is measured by an outcome beyond the game rather than by the fun of playing it.
used dropped · What the six structures are
Examples
America's ArmyU.S. Army, 2002
A free online shooter built as a recruitment and public-relations tool, often cited as the start of the modern serious games wave.
FolditUniversity of Washington, 2008
A protein-folding puzzle whose players produced structures useful to working scientists.
Re-MissionHopeLab, 2006
A shooter set inside the body, designed to help young cancer patients stick to their treatment, and tested in a randomized trial.
A serious game is the umbrella under which most of this family sits. An educational game teaches, a training game builds job skills, a persuasive game argues, and games for change address social issues. What it is not is gamification, which borrows a game’s parts without building a game.
In the essays
Where the game lives
Six structures—rules, goals, feedback, uncertainty, choice, play—map any game-like thing; the missing ones explain why it does or doesn’t feel like a game.
Gamification is not a game
Gamification usually borrows the visible parts of games—points, badges, streaks—and drops what makes them work: real choice, uncertainty and voluntary play.
Sources
- BookSerious Games. Viking Press, 1970. The book that gave the term its first sustained use, for non-digital games in education, government, and industry. Reading list
- BookSerious Games: Games That Educate, Train, and Inform. Thomson Course Technology, 2005. Reading list
- ArticleFrom Visual Simulation to Virtual Reality to Games. IEEE Computer, 2005. Offers a widely quoted definition of serious games as mental contests with goals in training, education, health, policy, and communication.
- PaperA video game improves behavioral outcomes in adolescents and young adults with cancer: a randomized trial. Pediatrics, 2008. The clinical trial of Re-Mission.