Top 3 tips to make your serious games effective

In this article we’re going to run you through our top 3 tips to make your serious games, or programmes of serious game based training, effective.

There are some key principles to consider when customising serious games. With them being used more frequently with more success, certain formats, tropes, and tactics have proved repeatable in certain business functions and industries. While this doesn’t always mean they’re a sure thing, they can, in certain scenarios, prove to be a far more engaging solution than traditional methods.

Ultimately, every new scenario in which a serious game is introduced is a new frontier. It’s exciting, full of possibilities, but it’s also venturing into unexplored territory. Effectiveness will inevitably vary. For example, just because a serious game format worked to engage students in one topic, doesn’t mean it’ll work first time out the gates when applied to the study of another. There might be a process of fine-tuning, or the rollout may have been rushed based on a similar game’s success in another area. Every serious game needs to be planned correctly, with the user experience (UX) and desired outcomes carefully considered at every stage of development.

What is a serious game and what are they for?

A serious game is a game designed for a serious purpose. It’s not just for fun. They’re generally designed for training and education, as a virtual simulation offers a low stress, low risk proving ground. In a very rudimentary sense, you can almost think of a serious game as being like a batting cage in baseball, or a practice wall for tennis players. All of these things offer repeatability and simulation. If a mistake is made, it doesn’t matter. They’re low pressure opportunities to learn and develop, so they offer an especially attractive solution wherever training on the job could lead to serious consequences. For example, serious games can be utilised in a number of ways in medical education. They allow students to practise skills and repeat scenarios that if they were to fail at for real, could compromise someone’s health.

The serious game format, and definition, also covers games that aim to engage audiences around specific causes, create awareness, and even to generate engagement from the public and seek feedback.

When is a serious game not appropriate?

The honest answer is, almost never. Because a serious game is built around its serious purpose, they could be adapted to anything with the right planning and expert content. Serious games can be applied to topics as serious as health, both in terms of maintaining it by encouraging exercise and good habits, but can, and have, also been used to help people engage with and understand conditions they’ve been diagnosed with, or even conditions loved ones have been diagnosed with, with the purpose being to equip them with the tools and strategies to make the necessary lifestyle adjustments. They have also been applied as “newsgames” to help journalists tell stories and shed light on crises, and can be great teaching and learning assets in fighting climate change and promoting socially beneficial behaviours and attitudes. Care interventions, military and law enforcement training, citizen engagement, and even mental health – there are not many serious topics in which the serious game format cannot be effectively used when experts in their fields collaborate with game creation specialists.

In fact, probably the only area in which serious games have no business is in pure recreation. We have classic video games for that, which modern online serious games are based on, although it is worth noting the odd exception, such as America’s Army, a United States Army-published game initially designed to educate and recruit prospective soldiers, which with its first-person shooter gameplay, massively blurred the lines.

Top 3 tips

So, you know what serious games are, you know you want to utilise them in your business, but how do you make them effective? What steps can you take to maximise the effiectiveness of your serious game, and use it to help you reach your business goals?

Following these tips can’t guarantee success, but if you give them due consideration in your planning and development stages, your game will be far more effective than if you ignore them.

1. Know your audience’s needs, and pick one serious purpose to build your game around

Essentially, don’t get greedy. You might be customising a long form training game for your employees, and be tempted to just fill it with everything they need to be taught, or even try to fill it with too much information. The whole lot in one game. You could be putting all your eggs in one basket, and risking delivering an unfocused experience. If too many aims are crammed into a single game or level, they become too diffuse, and you dilute your game’s purpose.

For example, let’s suppose you are creating a training game for your employees. You’re looking to train them on a new piece of legislation that’s coming into effect in your industry. You need them to know X, Y and Z, and how it applies to their jobs. For the best results, you should obviously focus on X, Y and Z and how it applies to their jobs. Don’t dilute those aims by devoting time to A, B and C, if A, B and C have no bearing on your target audience’s business function. They might walk away knowing A, B, X and Y really well, but in learning about A and B, they’ve not retained Z, and missed important elements around how to apply it to their roles.

Serious games are a great way to tap into a user’s psychology and influence behaviours and attitudes, and how they interact with challenges relevant to your industry. However, as players play through the game, it’s not on them to identify the more important or valuable learning points, or even identify parts they can ignore. Game mechanics tap into the player’s psychological drives to complete, conquer, and master – every bit of knowledge or skill the game covers should feed directly into its purpose. 

2. Add variety to keep the game engaging, but don’t distract from the game’s purpose

If you think about the best books you’ve ever read, or the greatest movies you’ve ever seen, what objective statement could you apply to all of them? Probably something along the lines of, “No scene, scenario, or piece of dialogue was superfluous.” In short: lean, effective storytelling. Ernest Hemingway called it the iceberg theory – focusing on immediate events and having the larger themes being implicit over the course of a story. In his foreword for Music for Chameleons, on having reread every word he’d ever written, Truman Capote lamented that he’d been “writing three pages to arrive at effects I ought to be able to achieve in a single paragraph.” In a good story, well told, the audience is shown nothing by accident. When you’re customising a serious game, you’re as much a storyteller as you are a trainer or educator, and you can learn from the best.

Your game needs to be lean and narratively effective to deliver its purpose. Every level or module, every mini-game, should be tailored through the video, imagery, and text to reinforce learning outcomes. For example, consider if you were using the Dynamic Path™ to build an interactive learning pathway as an onboarding experience for new recruits. It’s their first introduction to your company, so your aim is to transition them into your company’s culture and way of operating. Some of the levels will take the form of purely informative video, some will be heavier, and possibly carry more vital information. Mini games are a great way to provide variety to the experience, but they can be customised in appearance to reinforce learnings from more challenging, content heavy levels. Used in moderation, they can be effective in keeping users engaged while still serving the game’s aims.

3. Think long term with your serious games programme

It’s highly likely that you’ll be able to produce an effective serious game on the first attempt with a serious game platform like Drimify. It’s even more likely if you take advantage of our available assistance packs. However, there will nearly always be room for innovation. The games and experiences you can customise on Drimify give data collection and analytics, making it very easy to review not only your audience’s performance, but also your game’s effectiveness. Is it effectively training your teams to perform specific tasks? Are your students playing your game and subsequently showing greater interest in their learning, and achieving higher test scores in the targeted subjects? Are the desired outcomes being reached?

Over time, the data you’re able to collect through your serious games allows you to review and improve them with very little work. You can also use the data and your learnings from one serious game project when starting a new one. For the best results, and to take full advantage of the format’s versatility, serious games should be a long term, evolving aspect of your approach to training and education.

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