The Way Ahead for Serious Games

Despite the fact that people have been playing games since before recorded history, the field of Serious Games—as a scientifically valid and viable area of investigation and application—is really in its infancy. In fact, the rise in availability and popularity of video games is a relatively recent phenomenon and actual applications of video game technology to serious pursuits are relatively rare. That said, I believe that Serious Games are coming into their own, and predict that the next few years will witness an explosion of new games, design features and guidelines, success stories, and scientific findings regarding their effectiveness. How quickly and fruitfully this happens depends, in part, on how well the community of researchers, designers, developers, evaluators, and end users can come together to systematically conceive of, and deploy games for serious purposes. Haphazard attempts—i.e., those that do not build on the findings of others’ experiences—will retard the speed at which viable games are consistently produced. Likewise, rigorous evaluation of those games that are developed cannot be neglected or future developers will likely fall prey to the same problems and pitfalls as their predecessors.

Establishing a Science of Game Based Learning

Using video games to train and educate is a notion that is gaining traction among gamers, parents, and serious educators alike. Unfortunately, to date there have been few rigorous studies to determine whether games can be effective learning tools. Given their inherent features, the authors feel certain that games can teach, and they are interested instead in addressing the question of how best to design games that will optimize learning. To accomplish this goal, the authors offer a simple framework for organizing variables and then discuss findings from psychology and education as a basis to formulate a research agenda for game-based training. In doing so, they hope to stimulate researchers to conduct appropriately controlled experiments that will begin to provide insight into how various features affect motivation and learning. In this way, a true science of educational games can be formed.

Influencing Physical Activity and Healthy Behaviors in College Students

Physical inactivity is largely preventable through education, individual, and/or community-based interventions. Yet, in the college-age population, traditional interventions (e.g., lecture-based academic courses) may not fully meet their social and learning needs. Here, the authors report on a study regarding the effectiveness of an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) – called The Skeleton Chase – in influencing physical activity and wellness of college-age students. A growing game genre, an ARG is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform and involves multiple media (e.g., game-related web sites, game-related blogs, public web sites, search engines, text/voice messages, video, etc.) to reveal a story. The authors’ initial results are extremely promising relative to the impact on physical activity, as well as tangential learning such as teamwork and problem-solving. They also report students’ reactions to the game itself, highlighting game design strengths and weaknesses that may inform game designers.

Games for Peace

This chapter presents an investigation on decision-making in a dynamic and complex situation, the solution of international conflict, and the achievement of peace. The authors use an award winning video game to collect behavioral data, in addition to questionnaire surveys given to players. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the most difficult political problems of our times, and PeaceMaker represents the historical conditions of the conflict and provides players with an opportunity to resolve the conflict. Students in an Arab-Israeli history course played PeaceMaker from the perspectives of the Israeli and Palestinian leaders at the beginning and end of the semester. The authors recorded and analyzed their actions in the game and information on their personality, religious, political affiliation, trust attitude, and number of gaming hours per week. Results indicate the number of actions taken in the game alone cannot distinguish between good and bad performers. Rather, individual identity variables such as religious and political affiliation, personal affiliation to the conflict, and general trust disposition relate to the scores obtained in the game. They discuss the implications for policy and general conflict resolution and present their ideas for future research.

Kinesthetic Communication for Learning in Immersive Worlds

Despite the maturation of the video games medium, most self-identified learning games take the traditional but flawed approach of transmitting fact-based content to the user, frequently through the superimposition of “drill and practice” quizzes on top of interactive game-play that has little inherent relationship to the subject matter. A model is described for a Spanish-learning video game that adopts a different approach, through a close integration of the learning content and the game world context, and through the application of a motion-based controller that provides the user with an innovative and pedagogically potent mechanism for communicating with the learning system. Foundational research is discussed pertaining to kinesthetic learning techniques and their potential for language acquisition. A proof-of-concept is detailed, in which the user demonstrates learning by executing appropriate gestural responses to commands or questions spoken by non-player characters. Language mastery is essential to the user’s success in the immediate game environment, and also to resolving the game’s underlying narrative.

How Games and Simulations Can Help Meet America's Challenges in Science Mathematics and Technology Education

The quality of the U.S. workforce is critical for a competitive economy in today’s fast-paced, tightly connected global economy. Given current trends the quality of the U.S. workforce, measured in educational attainment and knowledge of key concepts in science, mathematics, and engineering will actually decline in coming years. Conventional methods will simply not be adequate to the enormous task of improving this situation. The technology and management tools that have been used so successfully to increase both quality and productivity in other service enterprises can play a vital role in improving science and mathematics education and training.

An Adventure in Usability

Usability testing can be used as an effective tool throughout the design and development of a serious game. User responses to the usability measures can help designers meet the challenges of creating a game that is educational, playable, and entertaining. However, there are a multitude of measures to choose from, some empirically created and tested and some created by developers to test a single game. This chapter will provide a broad overview of usability, two major methods of conducting usability testing and how usability can be applied to testing, and more importantly, improving games. Two possible usability measures are discussed from a game evaluation standpoint and compared highlighting on which aspects of usability heuristics they focus.

Pervasive Health Games

Prevention and therapy of emerging lifestyle diseases are strongly linked to daily behavior, physical activity, and knowledge of healthy life. The potentials of serious game applications in a health context for user’s motivation, education, and therapy compliance is investigated and so far widely accepted. Pervasive Health Games (PHGs) combine pervasive computing technologies with serious game design strategies, in order to unfold user’s playground to the city and therefore to their everyday life. The following article presents the typology of PHG within Games for Health as an interdisciplinary working field consisting of health care, psychology, game design, sports science, and urban research. A brief introduction to the theme is illustrated with a conceptual “showcase,” a pervasive game concept for young diabetics.

Application of behavioral theory in computer game design for health behavior change

Serious games are gaining profile as a novel strategy to impact health behavior change in the service of national health objectives. Research has indicated that many evidence-based programs are effective because they are grounded in behavioral and motivational theories and models such as the PRECEDE model, the Health Belief Model, Social Cognitive Theory, the Theory of Reasoned Action, the Transtheoretical Model, Attribution Theory, and the ARCS model. Such theories assist in understanding health behavior problems, developing salient interventions, and evaluating their effectiveness. It follows, therefore, that serious games can be made optimally effective in changing health behavior if they are also informed by these theories. A successful intervention development framework (Intervention Mapping) provides a means to enable game developers to use theory to inform the design of effective games for health. This chapter describes useful theories and models for health game design, introduces the intervention mapping process, and describes a case study of a theory- and empirically-based serious health game intervention that has used these approaches and has been rigorously evaluated.

Re-Purposing a Recreational Video Game as a Serious Game for Second Language Acquisition

Serious games designed for educational purposes promote acquisition of knowledge and skills that are valued in the both the virtual realm and the real world. However, the million dollar question is how do we design serious games that produce positive learning outcomes without sacrificing the element of fun? The authors’ answer is simple but no less profound. Don’t recreate the wheel; instead use it to create new technology! Using this premise, they re-purpose the recreational Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) EverQuest® II as a serious game, leveraging the entertainment value and readily accessible developer tools to promote learning in the context of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). They outline the process of transformation, first identifying the affordances attributed to MMORPGs and then evaluating the impact of gameplay experiences on SLA. Promising results from experimental studies reveal that in-game social interactions in the target language between native speakers and non native speakers provide a higher degree of engagement and significantly increase second language vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension skills compared to traditional classroom instruction. They conclude with the design of two game modules that promote vocabulary acquisition, reading comprehension and conversational fluency.