Serious games and gamification: using the power of games to achieve your objectives

Gamification, serious games, serious gaming and edutainment are all terms used in education circles, or by businesses innovating their corporate training to describe new educational tools, but what exactly do they mean? Aren’t they all just the same thing?

Serious Games and gamification, what is the difference?

Serious games come under the umbrella of gamification, but the two terms are not interchangeable. There is a very simple way of looking at the two concepts that differentiates them:

• Serious games apply serious objectives to a virtual and simulated reality: the digital game environment. They are games specifically designed to achieve educational, training or professional objectives, as opposed to being purely for entertainment. A serious game is designed to be both engaging and educational, providing an immersive experience that allows users to learn and understand in a more playful way.
• Gamification, on the other hand, takes elements of games and applies them to less playful activities, contexts, or processes such as applications, websites, or even training courses. It uses game mechanics such as points, badges, and leaderboards to encourage participation, competition, and collaboration, but the task is still the task. Gamification hasn’t turned it into a game. It still has real world consequences.

These two concepts are obviously linked, and both aim to use a gaming framework to achieve specific objectives. In both cases, the aim is to create commitment, increase motivation, and achieve desired results from users or players.

Edutainment: the precursor to serious games and gamification

Let’s talk about the concept of edutainment. Broadly speaking, it is teaching content that aims to educate by being entertaining. Of course, this means edutainment often involves the use of game elements and mechanisms to serve learning objectives, but can also take the form of movies and TV – in fact, the term predates serious games and gamification, and is attributed to Walt Disney in the 1950s.

In terms of specificity to learning and training in the classroom, edutainment is probably the most general and broad term, and perhaps the least helpful for our purposes. While it could, and does technically cover gamified content, it can also be applied to nature documentaries on TV, and is generally a far more casual, and less disciplined and stringent approach to teaching. Gamification is slightly more specific, although, as it has more real-world application, it lends itself more to processes and increasing performance than training or educating, per se. Serious games offer the most utility because they create a virtual, low stakes educational environment that can be tailor made to support the learning process.

Gamified e-learning components add greater interactivity and engagement

There are many types of serious games, and many applications where they can be effective, particularly as part of longer e-learning programmes and courses. E-learning, also known as online learning and training, is learning done in an online space, where involving the student or trainee is not always easy. Gamified elements in the form of serious games up the level of interactivity, and motivate students or employees more than more rudimentary forms of e-learning, which are essentially quite basic, interactive online books.

With serious games integrated, the potential of remote education and training is truly brought to the fore. Since both the learner and the educator do not need to be physically present together in the same place, much greater efficiencies can be achieved across numerous measures, for both users and administrators.

Meeting learners’ basic needs through play

American researchers Scott Rigby, a behavioural scientist, and Richard M. Ryan, a professor and researcher in psychology, detail in their book Glued To Games, why the video game format is so motivating for players. They cite that video games meet 3 essential needs: competence, autonomy and affiliation.

• Competence is a need to acquire a certain level of mastery and knowledge of something. With serious games, it is stimulated by challenges that are hard enough to be interesting.
• Autonomy is a very important aspect of a learner’s motivation and commitment. It refers to the need to take matters into one’s own hands, without apparent constraint or interruption from the teacher, course requirements, or exams.
• Affiliation and social bonding in this context refers to the need to be connected to others, to our peers, and to belong to a certain community.

Easily create serious games for your training and educational goals

Games can be created easily on the Drimify serious games platform, and because all our game engines are built mobile-first, they can be played on any modern device, be that a smartphone, a tablet computer, or a desktop or laptop, making them a highly versatile learning tool to engage students with in the office or at school, as easily as at home.

Utilising game formats like the Dynamic Path™, you can create long form, multi-step learning pathways, which you can use to make courses of original learning through customised Quizzes and additional, informative content. These can be tailored to suit all ages, ability levels and subjects, from training project managers to simulate experience in a low stakes environment, to providing more engaging homework assignments to complement and expand upon classroom learning for school students.

When used thoughtfully, the online serious game can provide an immersive educational experience to help all types of learners.

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