Serious Games

Serious games are games designed with a serious purpose at their core beyond entertainment. They are used to practise and develop skills, acquire knowledge, simulate real-world scenarios, or promote behavioural change. Modern online serious games can be played on a variety of platforms, including computers, consoles, and mobile devices, and are often used in the business world for recruitment and training.

Serious games can be created to simulate real-world situations, allowing learners to practise skills and apply knowledge in a realistic but low stakes environment, learning through repeatability. Additionally, serious games can be more cost-effective than traditional training methods as they’re a less labour intensive form of training, and offer a level of autonomous learning to let workers develop around their work schedules.

Serious games and gamification use game elements to achieve specific goals, but there are key differences between these terms. Serious games are complete games, and typically have a narrative structure that they incorporate their serious purpose into, meaning nothing in the game affects the real world, making them ideal for training. Gamifying something applies game mechanics to real-life tasks, and doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve created a game.

The origins of serious games can be traced back to Plato suggesting that play could be used to train children for their future careers. While war games had been used for centuries to prepare soldiers for the realities of battle, the term serious games as we understand it today was coined by the US researcher Clark C Abt in 1970, while he was helping to train officers for the Cold War. Since then, the use of serious games has expanded across all sectors and business functions.

The first step is to define the serious purpose, whether that’s to help workers develop a particular skill, or learn some new legislation. Then you choose the type of game and necessary game mechanics to support and help fulfil that serious purpose. This part, the execution, is made easy when you use a games creation platform like Drimify, as you can customise the graphics, copy, in-game elements, and settings of pre-made game engines to customise a serious game to your exact needs.

Companies of all sizes and across all sectors use serious games as part of their internal business strategies, and in some cases even as part of their external communications strategies. Any organisation with a serious purpose to be addressed could benefit from a serious games programme. They can be used for: job-specific training, recruitment, corporate social responsibility campaigns (CSR), promoting health for a specific demographic or group, as well as raising awareness about causes or issues, among other things.