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Serious Games: Too Broad a Term to be Meaningful
Serious Games are big at the moment, but are we lumping too much under the one heading? I explore what a serious game actually is.
A while back, I wrote a piece on the difference between serious games, games and gamification. It was simple, but covered the important areas of what makes them different from each other. Since then, I have had more involvement with serious games (recently helped as one of the judges for the Serious Play Awards for instance) and it has started to dawn on me that we are still confused as to what they actually are.
Yesterday, Mattie Brice posted the following on twitter
Hey y'all, tell me the most popular serious games you know of — Mattie Brice (@xMattieBrice) September 23, 2013
Soon after, Raph Koster replied with
@xMattieBrice Oregon Trail, http://t.co/cbAG7SzEBf, America's Army/Full Spectrum Warrrior, MS Flight Sim, FoldIt — Raph Koster (@raphkoster) September 23, 2013
It was an interesting mix and one that I really like. I love that he has included MS Flight Sim, for instance. My first response was Darfur is dying and Plantville (which I have spoken about in the past).
However, what got me thinking was just how broad this mix was. It went from teaching games, to simulators to games that tried to get across a deep meaning and lesson about the hardships people are facing in the world. Is lumping all of these under the banner of serious games doing them a disservice?
Ian Bogost recently did a talk about serious games, he expressed the idea that really what we want to talk about is ‘earnest games’. His big issue with serious games was that