Serious Games
Definition:
A game designed with the purpose of education, training, or behavior change rather than pure entertainment.
Summary of Serious Games
Before going into the class I already had some idea about how serious games are from one of my parents who had to play a serious game for their training. It was interesting because it was a game about looking out for fraudulent emails and the general tells that the email is fake and what you should do when you find one. So I had a base understanding with how the game is more of a tool for a company to use rather than for entertainment.
Over the Semester
But when I got into the semester I got to learn so much more about serious games and that 2020 the market size was valued at roughly 6 billion dollars and is increasing each year along with the amount of serious games now with over several hundred are being released each year.
Interesting Changes
I also learned over the semester on what types of serious game where being produced and what is not being prioritized with some of the interesting growths being the rise of Advertising/Corporate, government, and military games with he rapid decline in education serious games.
The GDD 3600 Developing Serious Games Class
Class Discussions
To start the class had many discussions both in and out of the class. One of them being was what was the first thing you could contribute learning from a video game where the discussion of people learning certain aspects of math, physics, ethics, organization, and other life lessons. Plus these were not even serious games either which showed all of us that even though we were playing games for entertainment, the engagements and instructiveness had helped all of us in someway of learning something new. We would also go over several other discussions like, what is the most significant change do you see today with serious games, how some simulation video games that we play for entertainment can be classified as serious games where you are meant to learn something like Kerbal space program and even going over what makes a game a game.
Class Project
Along with class discussion we had some different projects we had to do over the semester in which the first one was to create a simulation game of a rover robot trying to find life on a planet. There was no rules in stating how the rover was suppose to find life and all that was stated was that we had to create some required obstacles and problems for the robot to overcome. So when it came time to show our games the result was astonishing with so many people having different solutions to the same problem. Some students had the robot immediate know where the life is and run towards it, while others have the robot sontinuosly search in some type of pattern until they find life. Mine was slightly different where I had my rover follow preset waypoints that would comb the planet until it eventually find life so there was no randomness and patience was the only thing needed.
Class Examples
This was part of the many discussion we had in class where we made an Octalysis Analysis graph which is a tool used for figuring out what kind of serious game you have with the focus on looking at eight core human drives and motivation behavior with the cores being: Epic Meaning, Empowerment, Social Influence, unpredictability, Avoidance, Scarcity, Ownership, and Accomplishment.
Spaceship Packing Simulation
Above is one the projects (a prototype I personally made) that I have worked on in class where I have made a basic packing simulator with random blocks and a grid to store the blocks where the blocks would be equipment that an astronaut or space craft would need for a certain flight with how much weight and the cost also being displayed.
The Future of Serious Games
With the increase in market growth for serious games and the amount that are being produced their is no question that serious games will get more and more complex as time goes on. With the advancement in augmented reality and virtual reality, serous game can not benefit from this technology and become more informative allowing for more visual learning along with becoming more interactive with virtual reality allowing it to be possible. Even the development of AI will help lead to more complex and highly requested games allowing for more realistic simulations with giving feedback and possible challenges for the people training.
We need your consent to load the translations
We use a third-party service to translate the website content that may collect data about your activity. Please review the details in the privacy policy and accept the service to view the translations.