Serious Games

Serious games are games whose goal can be applied to many other areas and not only in pure entertainment. A lot of industries generally applied serious games into their business plans like education, exam preparation, defense, medical care, engineering, and academic exploration. The term might be not familiar to a stranger because it's not all about pure entertaining video game but more about sending a message like marketing, social and learning message, which has serious outcomes.

History

Back to the time 1970s, a man named Clark Abbott wrote a book called Serious Games. However, in the 70s people don't pay enough attention to serious games and didn't think about the games like the way people do now. If we explore furtherer, a German named Craig Spell, who was an engineer for war games and created a board game with his colleagues, which was thought to be one of the first instances of a serious game. This board game had units on each side and it was used to train soldiers' strategies of warfare, which taught soldiers how to fight and battle during the war, so it has both military and education purpose in this instance. Let's move up to the time in the 1980s, there were two really popular serious games. One was in San Diego teaching geography and the other was the Oregon Trail, which is about crossing in the United States from one side to the other and people can study history as going through the process. Serious games have been used for a long time and created a profound impact on lots of people and industries.

Serious games that change the world

Microsoft Flight Simulator

Flight Simulators are the foundations of serious games and the Microsoft flight simulator is the most successful commercial flight simulator. It was designed to be a comprehensive simulation of civil aviation and thought to be the next generation of pilots. A lot of flying school use MS flight simulator for extra practice of instrument flight procedures. "As the level of reality of these games increases, it allows for experiencing and practicing a wider scope of real-life situations -- that can complement the regular flight training," says Andersson, a young first officer at SAS. [1] MS flight simulator was born in 1982 and now has updated to its 2020 version, which has hundreds of Gbs content inside.

Tiltfactor Laboratory

Tiltfactor Laboratory is a serious game research center and its motto is "Game Design for Social Change". With learning games like Pox and Awkward Moment, they teach players like the impact of anti-vaccination movements and avoiding social stereotypes. They have developed success on their board games, card games, urban gaming, etc. Their biggest success is about producing games that combat biases and stereotypes against women in STEM; increase systems-level thinking; model effective bystander intervention in cases of sexual assault; facilitate open-source metadata gathering for public institutions; create social networks to encourage altruism and prosocial behavior, and inspire new ways of thinking about health care delivery. [2]

A Force More Powerful

Breakaway Games developed a video game based on a documentary about non-violent resistance, A Force More Powerful, and it's designed to teach nonviolent methods for waging conflict using player-built scenarios.

Darfur is Dying

The game was launched on 2006 and it attracted 800,000 players between five months. In the journalistic spirit of exposing the truth, Darfur is Dying helped to lead light on the war in Darfur and the consequent human disaster. This game impacted the whole gaming industry that made people realize a great amount of information and thoughts can be within a game. Before this, games are simply tools for entertainment purposes and now people review the entire society and history because games gave people the urge to think and reflect.

Application Areas

Health Care

Traditionally, health serious games are used for doctor training of specific operations or knowledge. On the other hand, games can also be tools for a healthier lifestyle and they can be treated as nutrition in a rehabilitation process. Furthermore, doctors can use health games for patients as a training measure and learn more about possible therapy options.

Security

Serious games in the field of security are often aimed at disaster control. Public, private and municipal institutions like a federal agency or national defense department can simulate scenarios such as natural disasters, terrorism, and other emergency events. There are a lot of things to test about, like acting under specific time and pressure to succeed with fewer resources and costs. Though the disaster in a serious game might not be realistic, such training can prepare for better responses of the teams in a real disaster management department and improved their strategies and skills to cooperate with other necessary departments to employ all available resources.

Education

This is applied largely to the education industry. Students are given tasks and challenges that can only be solved by the knowledge they learned in school. This can give students better thinking about how to apply their academic knowledge to solve problems and sometimes are used for testing purposes by teachers.

Recruitment

Companies try to profile the applicants through such serious games comprehensively during the interview. This type of serious game can be designed in a great variety and recruiters can test applicants' response time and skills to solve problems under the pressure. Types of recruitment games can include finding patterns between numbers and pictures, solving math problems in different scenarios and labyrinth problems.