The 5 types of serious games

Serious or applied games are games designed with a serious purpose as their core aim. They are not merely forms of entertainment. What makes serious games so effective is that by embedding your purpose in the format of an online video game, that purpose is served by engaging game mechanics which creates addictive game play. Additionally, the simulated environment of a game gives participants a low stakes learning environment in which they can make mistakes, experiment with new concepts, and learn.

But how many types of serious games are there? How versatile is the online serious game format really?

In this article we’re not aiming to flesh out a taxonomy of serious games, so much as explore the functions they are best suited to. These functions are not limited – serious gaming is a highly dynamic field, with innovation occurring at a rapid rate – and you can consider these functions applicable to any sector or industry.

1. Serious games to develop skills

Serious games and serious game training have near limitless utility when it comes to skill development. Typically in a corporate context, when trainees or employees upskilling in different areas need to practise and experiment with new concepts to serve them in their developing careers, serious games offer businesses one of the most compelling solutions available.

Because of the low stakes environment provided by serious games, there is a virtual sandbox in which employees can engage with scenarios, experiment with business theory, and make mistakes without any errors or shortcomings having serious consequences. Utilising game engines from the Drimify platform such as the Quiz allows you to create business-based scenarios through text and video, then ask questions, with options indicating different courses of action a participant could take.

The format is fully customisable to suit your industry and the business function, so you could easily adapt historical challenges your business or your competitors have faced in order to make the challenge realistic. Consider how you might prepare project managers for growing responsibilities, or for having a larger team reporting to them and all the related challenges they may not have anticipated. It’s a great way to give employees a broader idea of their responsibilities, instil best practice thinking and processes, and identify any areas that need further development. If you want to develop a skill, you need to practise. Simulating business challenges and encouraging your personnel to play through such learning experiences offers them the necessary repeatability to develop the soft skills they need to apply their expertise effectively.

2. Serious games for teaching knowledge

Serious games probably see their biggest uptake across education and corporate training. They’re excellent mediums through which you can not only encourage someone to repeatedly practise skills, but also through which you can help them acquire knowledge. By making it impossible to complete a game without acquiring specific pieces of knowledge, and the game itself using game mechanics to manipulate not only a player’s desire for progress, but also their natural curiosity, serious games make phenomenally effective vehicles for learning.

We are encouraged in school to read books and watch documentaries. These can be effective, but everyone learns in different ways. Nearly all school students now can be classed as digital natives, and so too can a large and growing proportion of the workforce. By making specific bits of knowledge the purposes of serious educational games, you can appeal to students used to shorter feedback cycles than books and documentaries. You can make their education a more active process by inviting them to engage in playable learning pathways.

Technically, serious games are a component of e-learning, but they progress from more traditional e-learning formats in that a serious game is a game. It is built on interactivity, as opposed to being an electronic book with the occasional button click. Consider the possibilities for reinforcing teaching on a long-format, multi-level learning pathway. Utilising the Dynamic Path™ format on Drimify, you could use multiple quizzes and mini games to give students a customised educational game that sees them travel across a historical timeline, or a foreign country. Some levels of pure video content would help to reinforce required knowledge, with that knowledge being the key to answering the right questions and successfully completing the mini games. Every detail of the game can be customised to reinforce the targeted learning outcomes. Because the format also has data collection functionality throughout the usable game engines, it can also serve as a low pressure way to assess student performance outside of a test.

3. Serious games for recruitment

Serious games offer an engaging and effective way of identifying talent and aptitude in human resources. Consider in the recruitment process a game which can separate the best candidates. Consider sifting through the qualified candidates to identify those that have the most up to date and relative industry knowledge. Effective serious games used as part of the recruitment process can shorten the hiring cycle, and make it far more efficient from a business point of view.

Through a series of customised Quizzes, some of which could be based around industry specific knowledge, some of which could be based around decision making and critical thinking, you have a really effective tool to identify relevant talent. Once games are customised, they can be adjusted over time, but you can significantly reduce the amount of labour cost you put into recruitment, and take some of the guesswork out of identifying talent.

4. Serious games to encourage desirable behaviours

Serious games, and more broadly gamification, have shown exceptional results when applied to encouraging positive behaviours. Points, badges and progression are almost a natural part of sports anyway, but gamified smartphone apps, GPS watches with biometric readings, and variations of Whoop bands, have added extra digital incentives to healthy eating, various forms of exercise, and forming sensible habits.

When it comes to encouraging desirable behaviours, amplifying a participant’s own internal motivation isn’t hard. Everybody wants to be healthy. Everybody wants to manage their time better. Everyone would like to eat well. The serious game’s role here is to connect the dots. Creating learning pathways, like you would in an educational context, can run players through hacks, tips, and strategies to equip them with the motivations and frameworks to quit smoking, eat better food, and put the infrastructure into their life to get better sleep.

In larger businesses with large workforces, it could make sense to customise a serious game along exactly these lines. It works from the point of building your brand as a caring employer, as it’s being proactive about employee health and development, but can also help your business run more effectively. It’s common practice to bring in business coaches to give group sessions and 1-on-1s to talk about everyone having 168 hours in a week, and strategies for prioritisation, so why not help them put into place healthy sleeping routines and better eating habits? They’re all pieces of the same puzzle. Utilising the Dynamic Path™ format that allows you to build a course of multiple levels or modules, you could start off with a module that’s a customised Survey or Quiz that’s geared towards assessing their general health, and finish with a similar one to see what habits, tricks, and tips they’ve incorporated into their lifestyles.

5. Serious games to raise awareness

Serious games can also be used to put a spotlight on particular issues, or even to persuade and activate communities. Through interactivity within absorbing scenarios, you can immerse players in issues that they may not be fully aware of. Sometimes these can take the form of newsgames, but they can also take the form of asking for feedback and opinions.

Consider examples that invite members of the public to get a better understanding of specific political processes. Games could invite them to manage a simplified version of a budget, or put into effect a strategy for combating a coming fuel shortage. This is an effective tool to not only communicate the issues their town or city might be facing, but can also impart practical tips to help them play their part in overcoming bigger problems. Similar formats can be just as effectively applied by charities looking to combat climate change or humanitarian crises, and they can be tailored to different age groups by the nature of the content.

Serious games can focus on outcomes and processes

While we’re not, as mentioned earlier, building up a strict taxonomy of serious games, and more looking at the most repeatable ways they can be applied by businesses, educators, and nonprofits, there is one further distinction that is worth discussing when considering how serious games work. They can either be more outcome-focussed, or process-oriented. It’s important before customising a serious game format that you decide which one you’re more concerned with. Sometimes, the outcome could debatably sit in the middle, so thinking of it as being on a spectrum can be helpful. Ultimately, having a primary serious purpose that trumps all others can be key in making your game effective.

If your game is outcome-focussed, you’re looking at some key external outcome from users playing your serious game. For example, if you built a course to train a particular area of computer programming, your game is almost definitely going to be outcome-focussed. The purpose of the game is that your students have improved in a particular area, developed their skillset, or acquired some new programming knowledge. If your serious game is being used as a recruitment tool in a highly competitive field, the outcome is to find the best candidates possible and shorten the hiring cycle.

If your game is process-oriented, its aim is to improve how things are done. For example, serious games to assess the strengths and weaknesses of a team, the results of which can be used to inform future programmes of training, or even other serious games for training. They could be used for research, to encourage citizen engagement, or even to develop soft skills like decision making and people management.

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