Summary- Serious Gaming (INFOSEGA)

Serious Gaming
Lecture 1 – Introduction + Serious Games Applications
What are (serious) games?
 A game is a system in which players engage in an abstract challenge, defined by rules,
interactivity, and feedback, that results in a quantifiable outcome often eliciting an
emotional reaction.
 Generally, games must have:
o goals (in-game)
o rules
o feedback to players
o free choice to engage in play
 Serious games do not have entertainment, enjoyment, or fun as their primary
purpose”.... and at least one additional goal.
 “this is not to say that serious games are not entertaining, enjoyable, or fun, .....
 Domains and applications
o Education
o Healthcare (e.g., training doctors)
o Health & wellbeing
o Emergency management
o Behaviour change
o And others…


Lecture 2 – Basics of Serious Games, User-Centred Design
Definitions and concepts
 Play vs game
o Playing is a purposeless, intrinsically motivated human activity without explicit
rules
o Gaming is a purposeless, intrinsically-motivated human activity based on
explicit rules.
 A ball: add rules and a goal  make it a game
 A game is a system in which players engage in an abstract challenge, defined by rules,
interactivity, and feedback, that results in a quantifiable outcome often eliciting an
emotional reaction.”
 Generally, games must have:
o goals (in-game)
o rules
o feedback to players
o free choice to engage in play
 Games that use some kind of computing machinery (e.g., a personal computer, a
smartphone or a piece of electronics dedicated for playing games such as a video game
console) are called digital games
 A serious game is a digital game created with the intention to entertain and to achieve
at least one additional goal (e.g., learning or health).

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, o “Games that do not have entertainment, enjoyment, or fun as their primary
purpose”
 Related but different concepts
o Gamification means to add game elements to a non-game area.
 Duolingo: app with gamification. App itself is not necessarily a game
o Games with a purpose denote games designed to exploit crowdsourcing in
order to achieve a non-game purpose. e.g. people developed it so humans solve
puzzles that contribute to research; game is used for a specific purpose (citizen
science)
o An entertainment game is a digital game that has exclusively the goal to
entertain the player
 Why serious games
o Making content more enjoyable
o Increase user motivation
o Reach users on an emotional level
o Effective goal achievement (e.g., learning) Simulation beyond the real world
scope
o Adaptive difficulty and immediate feedback

Goals in serious games





 Learning goal
o What players should learn through playing the game.
o The goal is not always really “learning”, e.g., games aiming behavior change à we
can still use learning goal as a broad term.
o Other common (mostly synonymous terms): learning objective, learning
outcome, “serious” goal, “serious” content, educational goal, or characterizing
goal.
o In most cases, this is why we develop a serious game
 What Players Learn Incidentally is Not Always Learning Goal
o Playing games can have benefits for players (e.g., social, emotional, cognitive
benefits, relaxation, recovery)
o We can learn things “incidentally” (e.g., learning history when playing
Civilization).
o This does not make them “serious games” A serious game is developed with the
learning goal as a core design objective




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, Characterizing Goals for Competences




o
o The characterizing goals of serious games can be matched to competence
domains, e.g., cognition and perception, emotion and volition, sensory-motor
control, personal characteristics, social attitudes, and media use.
o not very specific
 Defining Learning Goals
o What can people do after playing your game?
o Who? (target audience?)
o What? Consider different levels of knowledge (e.g., Bloom’s taxonomy)
o SMART—Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound




o
o
o Bloom's Taxonomy: classification system of cognitive skills used to define and
organize learning objectives. It categorizes skills into six levels, ranging from
simple to complex
 Player Experience Goals
o The intended experience that players have when playing the game.




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, o Player experience “denotes the individual and personal experience of playing
games” that is related to different factors (e.g., enjoyment, immersion,
satisfaction of needs).
 Player experience




 Motivation




 Flow





 Dual flow
o The concept of dual flow is characteristic of, and unique to, serious games.
o The appropriate balance of task difficulty and skill level ensures that the double
mission of serious games is accomplished: being both effective and attractive.



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