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Working with Serious Games

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Working with Serious Games Authors: Björn Berg Marklund Marcus Hellkvist Per Backlund Henrik Engström Marcus Toftedahl 1 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. 2 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. 4 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. 5 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.
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