Platforms for building serious games

Serious or applied games are those not designed chiefly for entertainment, but for a serious purpose. Serious games can serve a number of functions, but are typically used to identify particular qualities within players or participants, to encourage desired behaviours, or to facilitate skills and knowledge acquisition.

It is within the confines of the game’s environment that organisations utilising serious games can achieve their goals. By definition, a serious game is exactly that: a game. This is where it differs from merely gamifying a process such as adding a leaderboard or points to motivate employees. The game mechanics applied don’t necessarily mean that you’ve made something into a game. Getting a prize for selling the most gym memberships, for example, doesn’t mean that you’re not still selling gym memberships. You could still mess up your sales pitch, or fail to adequately answer a question, and ultimately lose a sale and lose business. The consequences and the stakes are still real.

In a serious game, the stakes are incredibly low. Failure in a serious game has no cost to the business. It’s a safe environment in which to practise and experiment, and take on information through targeted content. It’s through a rich, virtual simulation that an immersive experience is provided to the player. It can put participants into challenging scenarios they are likely to encounter working in your industry. When paired with engaging, interactive content, such an experience is very conducive to learning.

What is a serious games platform?

The term “serious games” was coined in 1970, and from the early 2000s serious games as we know them today have taken off and become more and more accessible. By mimicking popular video games through their digital format, serious online games have become an incredibly effective medium, and as they become more advanced, and move more and more into the realms of virtual reality, they’re only going to improve. At one point in time, making a customised serious game would have cost a business an enormous initial investment, or required the need to have extensive coding skills on your payroll (or both). However, significant advancements in technology and the rise of serious games platforms have put this powerful tool in the hands of small and medium sized businesses, as well as behemoth multinationals.

A serious games platform, such as Drimify, gives businesses in any industry access to a number of versatile game engines that can be customised for different purposes. Online serious games created on the Drimify platform are playable on any modern device with an internet connection, giving them as much utility in the office as for remote working, or even for applicants or contractors outside a business.

If the goal is to create a training or educational tool for a specific area of your business, or even a massive open online course (MOOC), a serious game platform like Drimify gives anyone the tools to realise it. There are game engines that can be applied to any industry, and tailored to almost any application within those industries.

How do you make serious games?

This can be answered in two parts. There’s actually putting your game together on your Drimify dashboard and seeing your concept come to life, but before that comes the planning stage.

Serious game development

This can be daunting. It involves defining your aims, selecting the appropriate game engine, or more likely engines if you’re planning to have multiple levels or modules, and writing and defining the content of your game. Like any creation-based task, the hardest step is often just getting started.

This is where utilising a serious game platform that is also a creative agency can really pay off. If you were to build a game from scratch, and were to do all the coding and backend development, you’d be sailing in uncharted waters. Not only would you have the coding challenges, but with no experience of creating serious games, there would be a lot of educated guesswork, and while your expertise in your chosen field might be first rate, turning that into an effective serious game is an entirely different exercise. The best athletes seldom make the best coaches. They thrive under the lights, at the cutting edge of performance, not trying to balance the appropriate level of challenge to develop a learner without overwhelming them. With a serious games platform like Drimify, that comes with agency assistance packs, you can be sure you’re getting the best advice on every step of your serious game creation journey.

Fundamentally, the better thought out your serious game is, the more effective it will be when it comes to helping businesses reach their goals. Because online serious games are able to collect data, it’s easy to monitor and assess how your audience, and by extension your playable experience, is performing. Long-term data collection through the Drimify dashboard means you can improve your serious games strategy over time. This aspect of your corporate training or human resources can essentially become a self-regulating, self-innovating programme, with minimal labour costs as all the answers are in the data. You can think of a serious game for corporate training as essentially a self-sharpening learning tool. As you utilise it over time, it will only become more effective in how you train your teams.

Serious game creation

This is the fun part. Once you’ve defined your aims and defined your content, you can actually create your game, previewing it as you go. The Drimify dashboard makes this – historically the frustrating, fiddly and expensive part – an incredibly quick and hassle free process.

You simply log in, click to create a new app, pick your game engine, and begin tailoring it to your needs. For example, if you were customising the Quiz, you could add extra questions, make the answers multiple choice, open, or even ordered according to values, and add various intermediate screens to introduce new ideas and elements through videos, pictures, and text-based content. You have complete control over your start and end screens, as well as options on what personal information you want to ask for, and where in the game you’re asking for it. At any point you can preview how your game is looking and make any necessary adjustments.

Ultimately, online serious games can be used in any industry, and can be effectively applied to almost any purpose. Like Prometheus stealing fire from the Gods and gifting it to man, serious games platforms have put these highly effective, highly versatile tools into the hands of any businesses wanting to level up how they engage with their teams and stakeholders (minus the saga with the rock and the eagle and the eternal torment). Serious games are superpowers that can help businesses reach their goals faster, and they’ve never been more accessible.

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