Serious games movement

The study also raises awareness of the benefits of using serious games in movement therapy after stroke. Article :. DOI: Need Help? We are just starting to discover the potential of games with a purpose. So why are more and more companies using games for a serious goal? And it is effective as a tool because of the following reasons:. So how does it work? Why are people more engaged when they are playing a game? And how does this improve learning? Below are four core elements that you can find in most games.

These elements contribute to both the entertainment value and the effectiveness of its serious purpose. This can be described as the decisions and actions a player has to take to overcome challenges. The interactive element of games is what makes it fun.

Contrary to books, films or other one-way learning experiences, in games the player can actually interact with the subject matter.

This allows them to experiment and play with different outcomes of their actions. This is the very nature of how humans learn. Kids learn by interacting and experimenting with the objects around them, sometimes resulting in an injury from a hot stove or bruises from falling down the stairs. Games allow players to experiment with real life situations without the dangers, consequences or material damage of the real world.

Explaining divisions is always more fun when it involves pie or pizza. A metaphor can help visualize complex subjects. Games are also using metaphors to give purpose to their gameplay. A context for the actions and decisions a player has to take. The story and setting of a game are also very powerful tools to create an immersive experience for the player. Players are more involved with the characters in a game and what happens to them when they care for them.

This appeals to our basic motivation to explore and gain new experiences. So besides using metaphors to explain complex subjects, the story and setting of a game greatly increase engagement, immersion and retention of players. An important aspect of learning is that the posed challenge matches the current skill level of the student.

If an 8 year old has to learn advanced mathematics, they will not have the required knowledge to do so and lose motivation very quickly. Games use a lot of different progression systems to be able to engage and retain players from all skill levels. Most games have a difficulty setting for example. Some games even adapt the difficulty automatically to the player. Besides matching the challenge with the skill level, games are also very rewarding. When a player conquers a certain challenge, this triggers a release of endorphins which makes the player feel better about themselves.

Players will want to keep on playing to keep the endorphins flowing. If you're interested in longboats, click here and you get the top links for longboats. The game remains an entertainment experience, but it's really motivating you. It's not like, you like chemistry; here's a game for chemistry. Basically here's the entertaining experience that covers a lot of ground;; it's very interdisciplinary.

Typically teachers look at the interdisciplinary pockets in these games and say, 'you know, let's do a game about chemistry,' or about this or that. That's a very hard game design problem The best games will probably be very interdisciplinary and cross all these boundaries.

The chemistry teacher will like a little segment of it or the history teacher will like a little segment, and the kid going through there will be motivated by the different aspects. It's very hard to package a really compelling experience into one disciplinary boundary. The learning which games foster, in Wright's model, is "undisciplined" in the best sense of the world -- the child is encouraged to pursue their interests where-ever they lead without regard to the way schools divide up content or time.

And different kids might pursue different interests side by side within the same game learning from each other. We can read Wright as arguing for multipurpose game environments which are not restricted by the configurations of knowledge we find in school syllabi or textbooks.

Second Life looks something like the world Wright is describing -- a space where many different groups are conducting educational experiments of all kinds and where those educational experiences take place alongside a variety of other kinds of experiments in social, political, or economic interactions.

We can also see something of the multidisciplinary approach to games and education through the work of Whyville , an online game world set up to get young girls interested in science but which introduced an in game economic system to reward points for participation in the various science activities.

The Whyville team has discovered that the economic transactions -- and the production of stuff for trade -- does not simply motivate the other learning activities; they become important sites of learning in their own right, helping girls conceptualize themselves as entrepreneurs as well as scientists. Wright's notion that we might simply annotate a traditional game, providing a series of links to other sources of information which might enhance the game play experience, represents another way of thinking about gaming as a process which is not contained within the game itself.

I recall Kurt Squire describing the work he has done with the use of Civilization in high school world history classes; he suggested that he would sometimes catch students coming into class early and "cheating" by scanning through their textbooks for information which might help them perform better in the game. In that sense, the best games encourage us to look for information beyond their borders as we try to solve the problems they contain.

Educators might also benefit from tapping the participatory impulses within games culture -- especially by harnessing gamers interest in modding and machinema.

I have already discussed in this blog the ways that projects such as MyPopStudio or our Cantina Improv exercises have encouraged young people to learn how culture works by taking media texts apart and remixing the pieces. The Education Arcade at MIT is one of a number of academic research groups which has found modding to be an effective approach to quickly generating educational games.

For example, we took the fantasy role play game, Neverwinter Nights , and transformed it step by step into Colonial Williamsburg on the eve of the American Revolution for a game which could be used to teach American History. This approach allows us to get a game produced quickly and cheaply by building on the existing framework and programming Bioware had provided. We were even able to reprogram the game in significant ways, such as creating a system for interaction with the nonplayer characters that acknowledged the role of class, gender, race, and political divides in colonial society.

Yet, there were other constraints on what we could get the game engine to do which meant that the commercial game left some imprint on the finished title. And we faced more difficulty than we might have imagined getting this game into schools because schools had to buy the existing commercial game before they could play our mods and there was resistance given the "dark arts" themes running through Neverwinter Nights. Ironically, at the present time, most of the games most open for modification almost all have contents which will be objectionable in school settings.

Russell Francis , an Oxford University researcher who was working with us on Revolution, pushed this notion of modding one step further -- having students translate their game play experiences into short machinema films which functioned as a kind of in character diary to recount their impressions of what has taken place. We have found this practice extremely valuable in helping students to pull together information from multiple sources to express what they have experienced and learned through their game play.

It has also proven very helpful for the design team as we try to understand what features of the game encourage or get in the way of individualized learning. A group of my students, Dan Roy and Ravi Purushotma , have been experimenting with modding some basic platform games -- The Sims 2 and Grim Fandango -- in order to turn them into resources for language learning. The games which are produced for the global market already contain multiple languages inside them: all it takes is the flip of a switch to localized them for different markets.

Dan and Ravi have explored the benefits of reprograming these games to allow players to play with them in a foreign language or even mixing and matching English and Spanish language features to provide scaffolding as they are mastering the second language. In each of these cases, the educational payoff comes not from playing the game but rather from working through the process of identifying how to transform a body of knowledge into a game play experience for someone else.

Katie Salens, Eric Zimmerman, and James Paul Gee are currently collaborating on a new project, Game Designer, being produced for the MacArthur foundation to give young people basic literacy in game design. Here, again, it is the process of game design and not the product of a finished game that facilitates engagement and learning. The serious games movement might also learn from the concept of transmedia entertainment -- thinking about how to shape a flow of information that extends beyond a single platform.

One clear example of this kind of serious gaming would be the kinds of alternative reality games that Jane McGonigal has discussed.