Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
gamers need to solve. The term
serious
was derived from the topic
Serious
Games
, written by Clark Abt and released by Viking Press in 1970.
As you learned in Chapter 1, military leaders use games like
Kriegspeil
to help
train troops. The business sector has also embraced gaming as an approach to
training methods for all kinds of jobs, from accountants to surgeons to human
resource managers and so on.
Because people do learn from playing games, developing games that help
them solve problems and thereby better society or improve workers' job perfor-
mance is becoming big business.
The Serious Games Initiative, a summit for game designers, first met at the
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., in 2002.
Its purpose is to provide a forum where designers can discuss serious game design.
the term
gamifi-
cation
has been
coined by serious
game designers to
describe how players
use the mechanics
of the game to help
solve problems.
educational Games
When designing educational games, you want to focus on making a fun game.
If the design isn't fun, students won't play, and no learning can take place.
Incidental learning
is a phenomenon associated with playing games. Marc
Prensky, noted author of
Don't Bother Me, Mom—I'm Learning
(Paragon House,
2006) and
Teaching Digital Natives
(Corwin, 2010), says of gamers, “They learn
to make good decisions under stress, they learn new skills, they learn to take
prudent risks, they learn scientific deduction, they learn to persist to solve dif-
ficult problems, dealing with large amounts of data, they learn to make ethical
and moral decisions and to even manage, in many games, businesses and other
people.” Prensky points out, quite well, that the conditions a game sets up offer
learning opportunities even if the game doesn't appear to teach, reinforce, or test
specific knowledge.
In the early 1990s, when home computers were becoming more common
and educational games were being designed for that market, the creativity fell
off substantially. Too often, games were designed as “drill and kill” games and
earned the unfortunate moniker of “chocolate-covered broccoli.”
Since then, the educational-games industry has been going through a sig-
nificant learning curve. Many contend the industry is still learning how best to
design games that can teach but are also fun to play.
Online sites that group several game choices together are contributing sig-
nificantly to advancing good digital game-based learning. Students, parents,
and instructors can peruse these sites and read reviews about the games, under-
stand the teaching objective for each game, and then play for free or try before
they buy.
the goal for educa-
tional game design
is not to teach, but
to have fun. Learning
is a byproduct
of repeating the
gameplay.
