Serious Games

Events

Serious Games

Inspired by Jane McGonigal’s TED talk on Serious Games and David Helgason’s declaration of the 'Year of Gamification', Serious Games will examine how games and games technologies are being brought into ‘serious’ areas, and serious tasks are being made more game-like.

Can games change your business and change the world?

Games have been present throughout history and across all cultures; they are an essential part of the human experience. While video games have historically been the subject of concern and dismissed as trivial or ‘childish’, they are increasingly becoming tools to achieve ‘serious’ objectives such as education, technical training, and collaborative problem solving.

As Clay Shirky describes in his book ‘Cognitive Surplus’, we are seeing a shift from passive consumption of media to more active engagement, with production and sharing by consumers. Shirky describes how the 20th Century was characterised by an enormous growth in free time, billions of hours a year spent watching television. Games are inherently interactive, with other players or the games themselves. So will games be one of the routes through which this radical change takes place?

The Serious Games event looked at how the following approaches offer tools to tackle challenges beyond pure entertainment.

This page holds a collection of examples, links and videos that relate to the topics we discussed at the event. If we have missed something, please let us know of case studies, talks or articles that you think are relevant.

Links and Resources from the event

Here are a few of the examples and resources that our speakers mentioned at the event. If you have others, please let us know: hottopics@nesta.org.uk

Alex Fleetwood mentioned a book that describes the importance of play: 'The evolution of childhood' by - Melvin Konner.

Jesse Schell gave a great talk earlier this year on game design and the changing environment, including gamification, which is linked on the right panel.

Mary Matthews used a four dimensional framework that was developed by the Serious Games Institute. More about this framework is available in a paper in the British Journal of Educational Technology, 'Learning as immersive experiences'.

Mary also referenced the feedback screen from her Toyota Prius, which has encouraged her to try to beat her fuel-consumption score by accelerating and decelerating more slowly. As an unintended consequence, she said, she had become a more courteous driver.

Alex used Tate Trumps as an example of a Serious Game with game design at the centre.

Re-mission is a game developed by HopeLab, a non-profit organisation to help teenagers with cancer. Its efficacy has been evaluated with a randomised research trial, and found that it improved treatment adherence and increased cancer-related knowledge.

SuperMe is a game designed to teach resilience, and how to cope with obstacles in life. It was produced by Somethin' Else Sound Directions as part of a Channel 4 Education project.

The school in New York organised around game principles is Quest to Learn.
The Economist wrote an article about it last year: 'Games Lessons' (subscription required)

Think Public created The Good Gym: connected people who want to get fit with older people who need visitors. The idea emerged from Social Innovation Camp in 2008 and is running in Tower Hamlets.

Dan Hon is a co-founder of Six to Start and is now at Wieden+Kennedy.

Sebastian Deterding designs and researches user experience, persuasion and governance in games and the web.

He presented at the Playful conference in London on 'Gamification and it's discontents' and the 'badge measles' that are taking over.

Playful hosted a lot of discussion around the issues of gamification. Read the write-up.

PlayStation Game Runners
An experimental project whereby PlayStation, members of the public and young people from diverse backgrounds come together to create social games. There are three games in development: Flags, Blocks and Hoops. Blocks, voted most popular, is a three-dimensional game of strategy and precision movement in which opposing players take it in turns to place a blocks in a 2 x 2 tower. When a player places a block, the symbols on all touching faces must match. As the blocks are stacked, players must not let the tower topple. The games aim to integrate social engagement and game design with the close involvement of young people.

Positive side effects

In an effort to counteract the backlash against the possible damaging effects of video games, work has been done to incorporate positive side effects into entertaining games. The following are examples of interesting and exciting developments in the area of positive side effects:

Creativity

The game Little Big Planet is being used along with Spore as a platform for the President Obama’s initiative on digital learning, challenging people to come up with new ways of learning about science, technology and maths. http://www.dmlcompetition.net

Moshi Monsters also aims to encourage creativity and problem solving. Michael Acton-Smith says “there’s a stealth education element to the game”.

Hand and eye co-ordination

A strong link has been established between game playing and hand-eye co-ordination, reaction times, and dexterity. A study of an elite surgical training course at Beth Israel Hospital showed that game players were more effective surgeons and game skills were closely correlated with surgical training performance. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17309970

Education

Games can also be a jumping off point for accessing other forms of knowledge, as Daniel Floyd and James Portnow explain in this great video and article on Tangential learning. The game doesn't have to be primarily educational to spark someone's interest in learning about Japanese history, or Greek armies, making it more likely that they will self-educate.

Reusing technology

The next step for games is in taking design and graphical elements and reusing them for other purposes. Many games ‘engines’, which help to create the 3D environments have been harnessed in areas such as medicine, engineering and architecture. The following are examples of ‘reused’ gaming technologies:

Training simulations

Simulators are one of the oldest ‘serious’ uses of computer game technology and more powerful machines and sophisticated graphics have continued to improve their realism. This has made more complicated simulations possible, such as medical simulators to train surgeons, or educational simulators such as the Visible Body, a three-dimensional anatomy programme.

Another healthcare example is the proof-of-concept game Patient Rescue for training junior doctors, created by Blitz Games. It uses medical data to provide simulated patients, and asks users to make treatment decisions then provides feedback on the patient’s progress. Mary Matthews from Blitz Games will be speaking at the event.

Image making

The graphical capabilities of games companies have been brought to bear on CGI projects with games engines such as Unity used for visualising architecture projects, as ZeroFractal has been doing, or for data visualisation and presentation.

Learning

Electronic Arts collaborated with Carnegie Mellon University to share the creative assets for ‘The Sims' game to assist with the development of Alice, a programming environment for teaching computer science.

Increasing engagement

Perhaps the most powerful way that games can influence other arenas is by bringing the elements that compel us to play games to other activities, increasing our commitment and engagement.

Saving the world

Jane McGonigal has helped create the ‘serious’ game ‘World without oil’, which imagines the first weeks of a global oil crisis, and challenges players to solve the problems arising from it. Watch her TED talk on ‘Serious Games’ to find out more about her vision to ‘save the world’ by harnessing the collective efforts of gamers.

Addictive activities: points and rewards combined with interaction

Foursquare is connecting people and generating a database of reviews and tips, in part by allocating points, medals and mayorships to ‘players’ of its game who login and add content. This is an example of applying the rules and rewards of games to everyday activities, increasing engagement in the application.

Play as a way to make mundane tasks fun

The incentives and rewards that come from games are being used by a wide variety of companies to make mundane but necessary tasks more engaging. Nintendo made home fitness into entertainment with the Wii Fit. Mint, an online finance start-up in the United States, has added a ‘Financial Fitness’ element that rewards you for accomplishing tasks such as spending less than you earn, or taking out a savings account. There is even a to-do list application that will reward you with ‘hit points’ as in a role-playing game (Epic Win).

Margaret from Hide & Seek, a colleague of Alex Fleetwood, makes the case that this ‘gamificiation’ is often ‘pointsification’, without adopting any real game elements.

PlayStation Game Runners is an experimental project whereby PlayStation, members of the public and young people from diverse backgrounds come together to create social games. There are three games in development: Flags, Blocks and Hoops. Blocks, voted most popular, is a three-dimensional game of strategy and precision movement in which opposing players take it in turns to place a blocks in a 2 x 2 tower. When a player places a block, the symbols on all touching faces must match. As the blocks are stacked, players must not let the tower topple. The games aim to integrate social engagement and game design with the close involvement of young people.

NESTA's work on Games

NESTA’s Policy & Research, Programmes and Investments teams have all been involved in projects relating to games. Here are some examples of this work:

Playmakers was an experiment in public games and new technologies, done in co-operation with NESTA, Think Public and Hide & Seek. Alex Fleetwood from Hide & Seek will be speaking at the event.
Six to Start – supported in part by NESTA investments, Six to Start has developed Smokescreen, a game about life online and who to trust. Smokescreen won the 2010 Best Game Award at SXSW.
MeTycoon – supported through NESTA’s idiscover programme is a pilot game to engage young people with careers information.
NESTA’s Creative Industries research team has generated a series of publications on the games industry and is currently involved in a skills review of the sector.
NESTA hosted an event on The App Economy earlier this year, followed by a report by David Rowan entitled ‘What’s app?’.
NESTA conducted a pilot Games Mentoring programme to investigate how best to support video games developers to improve their business skills. This led to the publication of NESTA’s report, ‘Playing the Game: Insider views on video game development’.

Recommended blogs, videos and presentations

Jesse Schell's blog.
Gamification 101: An Introduction To The Use Of Game Dynamics to Influence Behavior, white paper by Bunchball
Presentation: Work Sucks - Games are great, by Byron Reeves, the Paul C. Edwards Professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University, and cofounder of the H-STAR
Interview: VC Tim Chang at VentureBeat's GamesBeat@GDC conference, on where the investment opportunities lie.
All the World's a Game, and Brands Want to Play Along: article in AdAge
Blog posts by Hide&Seek