SGS Feature: 'Serious Hype, Serious Opportunities'

Today's main feature written for Gamasutra sister site Serious Games Source, which deals with games created for training, health, government, military, educational and other uses, features a look at the hype and interest surrounding the emerging serious games market. Specifically, IT University of Copenhagen researcher and Powerful Robot Games co-founder Gonzalo Frasca examines what he calls an “exaggerated, undeserved amount of attention” being paid to serious games, and discusses reasons why the hype should be dismissed. In this excerpt, Frasca discusses some of the reasons why serious games are so prone to generating this elevated hype and media attention: “The reasons for this hype are multiple. One of the them lays in the so-called military-entertainment complex. The fact is that the military have been highly successful with their recent incursions on serious games. More importantly, since they have an obscene amount of money to burn, they have provided many of the resources that encouraged the emergence of the current serious games trend. But of course they have all the right to do this: they have been at the forefront of serious games thousands of years before the invention of the computer.” He later adds: “Serious games also make good headlines. Actually, too good. They are quite similar to the promises that fill up my spam folder. “Play games and get smarter” sounds almost as tempting as “Make 150k while working from home”. Can videogames be the magic solution to all our educational needs? Of course not. Can they help us to improve the situation? Hell, yeah!” You can now read the full Serious Games Source feature on the subject, including more thoughts from Frasca concerning serious games and their associated hype (no registration required, please feel free to link to this feature from external websites).