For as long as there have been board games, they have been used for education. The earliest board games known were meant to entertain, but also to educate. Strategic thinking and problem solving, as well as forward thinking were common lessons in games like Chess and the Royal Game of Ur. Thinking back to my own childhood, Monopoly, Clue, and even Snakes and Ladders promoted general life lessons like emotional control in the face of bad luck, money management, deduction, and on a meta level, building and maintaining relationships with friends and family (if you can stay friends through a game of Monopoly, you’re the real winner!!).
From past to present: Turning a splash into a wave
Over the past decades, board games have turned from a ripple in the hobby world to a tidal wave. In the 80’s, about 600 new games were published each year, whereas now in the 2020’s that number has risen to between 4000 and 5000 each year and represents a market of over six billion US dollars! The hobby has become a lifestyle, with some annual board game conventions drawing in hundred of thousands of people. It’s natural that within such a large hobby, many different technical terms are introduced to help specify things in conversation, especially as ‘gaming’ as often come to be associated with video games.
Technical terms: What’s a Serious Game anyway?
There is currently no industry standard for the term Serious Games. Some people know of them as learning games, some say it is gamification of learning, others say interventions. What is correct? I can give you my opinion and understanding of the matter, as a trainer and coach, and as a game designer.
Gamification: Taking aspects of games such as scoring points, and including them in a learning environment. For example, giving a presentation and then using a Kahoot! Quiz to have participants actively play with the knowledge they have just learned.
Learning Games: These are games that require specific knowledge and build upon that knowledge. From a game design perspective, these tend to be very limited in terms of mechanics and fun for entertainment’s sake. An example might be a computer game that progresses only if you answer a question correctly. This puts the focus on learning to complete the game, but the learning and the game itself are two separate things. In essence, they reintroduce fun into the learning, but the game is simply a means of delivery for the educational goals.
Entertainment Games: This is a relatively new one for me. With the introduction of the term Serious Games, the distinction had to be made to make sure that games played as a hobby for fun were considered to be a separate entity. The current term becoming more known in this circle is ‘entertainment games’ to ensure the focus is on enjoyment. This often comes in a good balance of artwork, theme, game mechanics, among many other points.
Serious Games/Interventions: Now we come to the main issue of this post: what is a Serious Game? To my understanding, Serious Games are designed to be fun, stand-alone games, but with the pretext that something is to be learned through the game explicitly. These games are often facilitated by an expert in order to ensure that participants are enabled to enlighten themselves. An example might be my own game design, TeamBuilders™, as it is a game that could be simply played by itself without any other knowledge or any facilitation (though I’ll admit, it isn’t in the top ten fun games when played this way!). But the understanding of communication, team dynamics and team roles, as well as the ability to use it as a tool for conflict resolution and feedback/personal growth are something best done with a trained facilitator to highlight lessons, guide scenarios, and challenge participants.
Games Galore: Other games teach too!
If you are wondering whether entertainment games can be used as serious games in this wide world with over a hundred thousand games and counting, you’d be right! Games were designed originally to entertain and to practice important skills like strategic thinking, right? In fact, I love the game Bohnanza when doing workshops revolving around negotiation skills and understanding supply and demand. This is an entertainment game that can easily be facilitated to encourage serious learning goals.
Games can be designed with one or more end goals in mind, but ultimately, in my opinion, the most important aspect is less in the design and more in the implementation. If you start lecturing friends during a game night about the necessity to consider supply and demand when negotiating in Bohnanza, they will likely not enjoy themselves or learn anything at all (I speak from experience!), whereas if you take a presentation skills training and ask everyone to play games of Chess to pass the time, it is likely that not much learning will take place.
At the end of the day, a Serious Game is designed with the intent to be used as an intervention of sorts and like any intervention, the implementation is key. I think we can all agree that the best ideas are worth nothing if they die in the ideation phase. Likewise, a good Serious Game incorporates the ability for easy implementation, a fun design to entice participants, and a facilitation plan to focus on the learning goals of the game.
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