Working with Serious Games

Authors: Björn Berg Marklund

Marcus Hellkvist

Per Backlund

Henrik Engström

Marcus Toftedahl

Introduction This executive summary is based upon our forthcoming book on how to develop serious games and gamified solutions. The theories, practices, and examples explained in this summary constitutes only a small portion of the actual content found in the book. As a result of this, the summary only explains the selected content in a brief and simplified manner. The book is based upon scientific research and research projects conducted by the authors’ themselves. The book is written as a part of the EU Interreg Öressund-Kattegat-Skagerrak funded project Game Hub Scandinavia.

In the book we explain in detail, what serious games and gamification are, why they are popular, how they are used in different application areas, and what makes them effective. We also discuss the fundamentals of game development, how you start working with a serious game or gamification project, and how to design and develop them. In addition to this, we also talk about how to implement, use, and evaluate serious games in both formal and informal settings.

This execute summary will try to capsulate the experience of working with serious games and gamification and how to best develop them by highlighting and adapting some of the most essential and crucial steps found in game development today. The purpose of this summary is to make the reader more interested in what serious games and gamification are, their origin, and what they can be used for. Furthermore, the summary briefly explains the fundamentals of game development, what to think about when first starting a serious games project, and what steps are included in the development process. The summary ends with a short presentation about serious games evaluation.

With the book and this summary we intend to help serious game developers and clients to communicate better during their project by fostering a mutual understanding of the challenges and benefits of using serious games, and hopefully encourage people to examine if serious games might provide useful benefits to their working processes or their local communities.

Serious Games and Gamification Serious games and gamification are both becoming more popular and the main reason for this is that they can represent complex systems and subject matters in a new and unique way which lead to interesting and engaging learning experiences. In well-designed games, users learn based on participation and experimentation instead of passive observation. A well designed game also share certain similarities that can be found in a good learning environment such as positive reinforcement, engaging and escalating challenges, and immediate feedback.

So what exactly is serious games and gamification? The research community is not in agreement on how to define these two terms and the differences between them has become even more ambiguous over the years. Because of this, they are often treated synonymously. Even though they are described as something similar, there is a clear distinction between the two. Serious games refers to subject matters, activities, or events being transformed into a full game experience while gamification is more about attaching game elements (adding a scoring/reward system) onto an already existing activity to make it more engaging, entertaining, and motivational.

This difference can be illustrated by giving the same problem two different solutions. E.g. if we wanted to encourage people to be more mindful of their use of electricity in their homes. A serious game approach to achieve this goal could be to create a game where the player gets to walk around in a house, operating different apparatuses in a simulation of day-to-day activity, and then see how it effects their electricity meters, budgets, and the environment at large, thus allowing them to see and experience electricity consumption. The “gamification” approach on the other hand could be to simply attach a scoring system to light switches and appliances in a home, and reward the inhabitants with points depending on the duration of time that the light are turned off during daylight hours. In the former example, the real-life activity of electricity consumption management is made into a (simulation) game, and in the latter, the activity is still the same but gets framed with game-like elements intended to encourage and motivate the type of behavior and awareness we aim to promote.

Figure 1. Whereas developing a serious game is a process of transforming an activity to make it into a game experience in which participants can experiment with a subject matter in new ways, gamification is the process of creating a gamified layer that does not change the activity itself, but aims to change the end users’ engagement with the activity in some way.

This summary will be more focused towards serious games rather than gamification. The theories and practices are still relevant and useful for a gamification project.

Serious games can, and probably will have multiple definitions and purposes depending on who you talk to. However, we have decided to define the term as “games which engage the user, and contribute to the achievement of a defined purpose other than pure entertainment.” Which means that any game that has a purpose besides entertainment could be classified as a serious game. Interesting to point out is that a game’s purpose may be formulated by the user or by the game’s designer, which means that even a commercial off-the-shelf game, used for non-entertainment purposes, may be considered

3 a serious game. This is not only limited to digital games. Analogue board and card games could also be included into the realm of serious games as well.

Serious games can come in many different shapes and forms, as well as for different purposes, such as education, training, rehabilitation, information, policy making, marketing, and recruitment. This can be used in (but not limited to) healthcare, social change, advertisement, organizational training, and education environments followed by their respective sub-categories. Developing a serious game for any of these application areas entails both technological, as well as organizational challenges. In most cases these two aspects are intertwined and need to be solved in harmony. Which means that the team developing the game needs to consider who the players are, and where the game will be played to be able to create a gaming experience in favor of that. Regardless of development approach, three crucial aspects should always be considered before creating or implementing a serious game:

• Context – What application area should the game be used in? • Purpose – What is the purpose of the serious game? • Audience – Who should play the game?

In the original book we discuss strengths and weaknesses, and benefits and common challenges for five of the biggest application areas for serious games such as, education, healthcare, social change, advertising games, and organizational training. For example, games in education and healthcare may provide interesting alternatives to subject matter exploration, or lead to higher retention by making otherwise boring rehabilitation and/ or diagnostic tasks more engaging. Regardless of the application area, serious games can either be implemented in a formal or an informal way, both of which places different types of requirements on the serious game. Creating a serious game for a formal setting (e.g. classroom use) requires you to have a strong understanding of that particular setting and for the game to be useful and effective you have to consider all the different possible peculiarities associated with that exact setting. For serious games developed specifically for informal use, you instead face the challenges of creating something that is broad and adaptable and can be used effectively in multiple ways.

Figure 2. Formal and Informal settings place different requirements on a serious game project, but also presents different opportunities. A tailor-made game has a limited application area but might be easier to stream-line and develop, whereas an adaptable game might be more difficult to create but might reach a broader array of context and users.

It is difficult to make a general statement about the effectiveness of serious games, due to the simple fact that every game and its intended purpose is unique. Therefore, it is impossible to say that games are educational. In some cases they may be, and in some cases they may not be. However, previous research shows that games are a great way to promote knowledge acquisition across a wide range of topics and to a lesser degree skill and social skill acquisition and behavior change (Boyle et al., 2016). Playing games can promote a wide range of cognitive skills, such as faster and more accurate attention allocation, higher spatial resolution in visual processing, and enhanced mental rotation abilities. In addition to this, games have been speculated to be excellent tools for developing problem solving skills and to enhance players’ creativity (Granic et al., 2014). Games create a unique learning experience based on participation, which supports active, experimental, and problem-based learning (Berg Marklund, 2015) Furthermore, games can be used to encourage people who lack certain interest in various subjects by increasing the user engagement and motivation. They can also be used to illustrate something that is too expensive, dangerous, or even impossible to experience in the real world.

Despite the fact that a lot of research points to how effective serious games are, they should not be seen as a “silver bullet” that magically solve all problems. They require careful planning of their development and orchestration between different disciplines and usage contexts in order to even stand a chance against traditional teaching media and methods.

The fundamentals of game development Serious games are usually built on the foundation and partnership of game developers and clients, and their widely different frames of references, game knowledge, and subject matter expertise. Because of this, it is important for all partners to have a good grasp of each other’s fields. Having a shared understanding of both the complexity of game development and the subject area in question can help establish realistic game requirements and goals and to simplify communication between the two.

Establishing a common, reasonable goal and successfully communicating that with the rest of the team is often considered a problem for serious games development. This is simply due to the fact that the goals of the project are often subjective. For instance, games should be engaging, challenging, fun, aesthetically pleasing, or relaxing. This quickly becomes a problem because everyone is different – what one person consider to be challenging, fun, or relaxing might be considered easy, boring, or stressful for someone else.

When you create a serious game, you rarely do it in a linearly fashion. Instead, games are designed in an iterative manner (do something, test it, redo) where gameplay ideas come to life through improvisation, experimentation, and exploration. It is difficult to know how certain game mechanics and aesthetics will play out and feel before you have actually tested it. What sounds fun and challenging on paper might be boring and tedious in practice. This is not to say that you can do whatever you want whenever you want. The style of iterative development is built on solid processes with defined structures and follows a general framework of phases. This is to make sure that time and resources are well spent.

The general framework in which games are being shaped are divided into three phases: Pre- production, development, and post-release/ post-production. In the pre-production phase the team decide which platform they want to work with, which audience they are going to target, the general theme and art direction of the game, and the scope and time frames of various development cycles and so forth. Even though serious games are built iteratively some of these fundamental choices are irreversible. Re-building a game for another platform, or changing the art direction for an entire game often requires an overhaul of all assets and code. A process that is both heavily time-consuming and requires a lot of effort.

Before moving on to the development phase, it is highly recommended to prototype your game. This is to make sure that no necessary changes are needed in the future and to create a clear vision of the game and its mechanics. A prototype constitute a pivotal point in the early stages of development because it transform abstract ideas into something that can be experienced. A prototype can provide a better understanding of how the game will be played and used in the end.

Pre-production and prototyping helps the team decide on a unified vision for the end product. After that, the nit and gritty production phase can start. As described previously, even though development will need to be kept relatively flexible, having a structure for how the different iterations development is going to go through is important to establish.

Starting a serious games project Creating a “regular” game is, on its own, a very difficult process. A process that serious game involuntarily inherits. In addition to the problems and challenges commonly found in game development, creating a serious game also requires you to understand and be able to answer the what, why, who, where, and how of the project. These questions are unique to every project and it takes some solid groundwork and research to provide high quality answers. The reason this is important is because the serious game will (probably) be used within a fully functional organization with bits and pieces already working well together, competing against perfectly fine traditional media and methods. In addition to this, the serious game also has to fulfill certain promises effectively in order to be remotely successful in the first place, all while being entertaining. The answering of these questions will provide a proper understanding of your problem domain and establish the fundamental building blocks of your game.

Understanding what problem you are trying to solve with your game is a natural first step in starting a serious game project. Problems can range from something specific, like wanting a better way to teach geometry to your students or increase productivity in a specific factory pipeline, to something larger and more general, like creating an installation to entice visitors to come to your museum or creating a mobile healthcare application that is directed at the general public.

Once you understand what your problem consists of, you need to know why games would be the answer to that problem. It could be that games contain qualities that are uniquely suited for your problem or, that they can reach your target audience in a good and effective way.

Who and where refers to the target audience and in what context they will be playing the game. Both constitutes the basis of the game’s design. Students from a single classroom all have different wills, backgrounds, and interests which ultimately affect the way they interact with games. Some people will love the idea of playing games in school while others prefer reading books. Some people will understand how to play the game directly while others will struggle to even start the game. Due to all this diversity regarding audience, setting, and context. What works in one environment, does not necessarily work in another. What is fun and intriguing within one user group does not necessarily have to be true for another. A well designed serious game, aimed towards the wrong audience and context, will not work. Context awareness and understanding the importance of end-users heterogeneity is crucial for a successful serious games project.

This brings us to the last question. How will the game actually be used? Teachers, instructors, organizations, healthcare professionals, and the end users all have their own working processes and preference of how to do things. It is important to consider how these pre-exiting habits will interact with the serious game.

To facilitate a general understanding of your problem, a method called the design box, developed by (Roger and José, 2014) can be used. The method encourages developers and clients to “box in” the design of their game by thinking about it through four different perspectives: what technology would make the most sense to use, who are our target audience (or end users), what is the question or problem we are intending to solve, and which aesthetic themes should the game employ to accommodate for these factors. The design box primarily helps a project find its ultimate goal, narrow down its scope, and to establish the most necessary constraints.

Designing and developing the serious games For a serious game to be effective, it needs to be properly balanced educational content and engaging gameplay. These components are equally important and a crucial part for the serious game to be impactful. Sometimes, purposeful content is difficult to make engaging, and sometimes engaging gameplay can be distracting or harmful to an educational or informative goal. Uniting these components require frequent compromises, good communication in the team, and a good understanding of both the serious game’s subject matter, its gameplay potential, and its target end users. If the game is entertaining, but not educational, then what is the point of using it?

As mentioned previously, serious games are built in a series of small pieces, where ideas are frequently revisited, refined, or revised along the way. The reason for this is because you cannot predict the future. A game’s goal is usually something subjective “to be immersive”, or “to be engaging and entertaining”, or “to be informative”. These questions are impossible to answer without actually playing the game. Instead of building one complete gaming experience and hope for the best in the end. We develop serious games in small progressive steps and evaluate them as we go. Even if you have planned everything perfectly, it is impossible to predict the gaming experience and how the player will interact with the game. The only way to do so is to continuously playtest it. By building your serious game iteratively you mitigate risks and are able to manage requirement changes more easily. Constantly improving and refining your serious game will lead to a more robust and thought out gaming and learning experience.

The first step of development is to identify key features of the game and establish the core gameplay mechanics which should resonate well with the previously discussed what, why, who, where, and how. These key features are then prioritized after must, should, could, and won’t. Where the most essential and important gameplay mechanics are placed in the must categories followed by should and so forth. The reason for prioritizing the gameplay mechanics in such a way is to avoid feature creeps1 and to help the development team focus on what is important. A common framework called scrum is then used to implement the gameplay mechanics digitally. Since the work of creating serious games is a highly interdisciplinary process, everyone involved need to collaborate and focus on what is important. The work process should facilitate this situation within a multidisciplinary team and point to the importance of team-work and collaboration by synchronizing the disciplines and guide them in an efficient way towards a common goal.

When designing and developing a serious game it can be beneficial to utilize a participatory design process, which includes the client and/ or organization into the project. If they are not involved in the development, you risk creating a game no one wants. The client or organization has, in almost all cases, a better understanding about the subject matter, context, and target audience which can all facilitate with a better and more suitable design. When working with serious games it is important to understand the value of cooperation since it contributes with relevant and helpful information which guides the project forward.

An iterative development process is not without any risks. Despite meticulous planning and research, things can still go wrong. Some of the more common problems when working with serious game development are: poor communication within the development team, not enough play-testing, aiming too high by including way too many unnecessary features, misdirected focus, clinging to old ideas, and switching development tools mid-development.

1 Feature creep essentially means the common phenomenon of new, sometimes not entirely necessary, features slowly creeping into a game during development. 8

Implementing, using, and evaluating serious games This chapter explains the differences between implementing a serious game into a formal setting and an informal setting. What the challenges are for doing so, and how to ultimately evaluate the effectiveness of the game in each respective field.

What separates serious games used in formal and informal settings is mainly player participation. Formal settings are, by nature, structured, compulsory, and have a stronger adherence to time and space restrictions during play sessions. In a formal setting, the audience is captive and participation is mandatory compared to the more “opt-in” situation usually found in an informal setting. By introducing a serious game into a formal setting, additional requirements are added and need to be considered such as end user heterogeneity, pre-existing organizational structures and praxis, and accurate and authentic content. Informal use contexts on the other hand are slightly different, but they can pose their own challenges as they might be harder to fully understand and are, to a further extent, out of the developer’s control. When creating a serious game that is to be encountered or used at home, it is important to understand how and when people will interact with the game.

The greatest challenge of implementing a serious games (whether it is in a formal or informal way) is the fact that each situation is unique. A serious game that has been proven efficient and effective in healthcare might not work at all in schools or educational environments. This means that each application area and use context comes with different prerequisites which need to be taken into consideration before introducing the game.

There is no universal model or framework for evaluating serious games due to the fact that each and every case is unique and their purpose and pre-established goals are usually subjective. So the big question is, how do one measure the effectiveness of serious games and how can you be sure that the players are actually learning anything? We do this by proving that a game fulfills its requirements in an efficient, effective, and reliable way. For instance, test the player’s knowledge in algebra before and after playing the game. The biggest problems and challenges for serious games evaluation are related to recruitment, context and environmental issues, operationalization, and short term vs long term effects.

References BERG MARKLUND, B. 2015. Unpacking Digital Game-Based Learning: The complexities of developing and using educational games. Doctoral Thesis, University of Skövde. BOYLE, E. A., HAINEY, T., CONNOLLY, T. M., GRAY, G., MICHELA, O., LIM, T., RIBEIRO, C., PEREIRA, J., EARP, J. & NINAUS, M. 2016. An update to the systematic literature review of empirical evidence of the impacts and outcomes of computer games and serious games. Computer and Education, 94, 178-192. GRANIC, I., LOBEL, A. & ENGELS, R. C. M. E. 2014. The benefits of playing video games. The American Psychologist, 69, 66-78. ROGER, A. & JOSÉ, Z. Designing inside the box or pitching practices in industry and education. DiGRA 2014 International Conference, 2014.