SXSW Panel 7: Serious Games
by Brian Reich | 11 Mar 2007, 3:00am
Gaming is one of the fastest growing, most influential industries in the technology/entertainment space. Most of the attention, naturally, goes towards entertainment games (first-person shooters, sports games, adventure games, etc.) because they bring in the big bucks. But there is a whole other genre of games though that deserves all of our attention: serious games.
The panel (John Purdy of Red Knight Learning Systems, Lauren Davis of the Liemandt Foundation, Paul Medcalf of Blockdot (disclosure: I just finished working with Blockdot on the development of the LindtGoldBunny game) and Melinda Jackson of Enspire Learning) that SXSW pulled together had a lot of experience building serious games, but not a lot of insight to offer on why they work or how to make them effective.
What did they tell us? Here is a quick brain dump from my notes:
- Serious games push an audience to learn something, or participate in some kind of engaging activity (even an engaging entertainment activity) and getting that player to the point where they are challenged, want to go back, want to be playing that game. Of course, somewhere along the way, you learn something. There are many different kinds of serious games: Education, Games for health, Games for change, Corporate, Military and government, Political, Healthcare, First responders and even Advergames.
- If a picture is worth a thousand words, animation is worth a thousand pictures, and a game is worth a thousand animations (i.e. a billion pictures)
- The ultimate goal is to provide a learning experience, but you have to entertain your audience if you want them to play. You need to get that entertainment value, capitalize on the fun factor to get people in there to play (and ultimately learn).
- When a designer is putting together game components they are looking for the most addictive elements possible to engage someone. The outcomes of a serious game are different however, because you have to make sure people learn the broader curriculum. The game designer may have to make trade-offs and shelve something that would be more fun in favor of something that the game absolutely has to teach. The ultimate goal is to balance them together.
Final thought: This panel was sadly under attended. Serious games can have as great, if not a greater impact on our society than games that are simply for entertainment. The money is in the non-serious games space so that’s where all the attention is focused. But, the real learning and innovation will probably be in the serious games space for some time to come.
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