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- Serious Games - Fundamentals and
Function before Fluff - Part 1
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- June 16,
2009
- By Eric M. Scharf
Defining Serious Games
Serious games largely occupy the training-based,
instructional-design-driven category of game
development products. Serious games are utilitarian and
goal-oriented, offering the user a protocol-driven functional
engagement, acknowledgment of task achievements, and little pure entertainment value
or fluff (outside of the necessary local and peripheral "traffic"
caused by natural interaction with other entities and environmental elements
within the game space – humans, animals, plants, inanimate objects,
mechanical props, vehicles, buildings, and weather).
Serious games subject matter is typically taught to
employees-in-training, re-assigned employees, or emergency
preparedness / non-profit volunteers within any line
of work, from leadership to trench-level roles. That learned
material is, then, put to use in real world employment or deployment
scenarios, from how to properly drain and dispose of vegetable oil
from a fish-and-chips fryer to how to properly disassemble,
diagnose, and repair the turbines on a military helicopter.
Serious games are almost entirely bulk-use or site-licensed products
rather than COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) offerings, with customers who
tend to be interested in training large groups of personnel at once.
Those customers are part of an immense range of target audiences
including but not limited to:
01 - City, State, and Federal Government
Agencies
02 - The Department of Defense (Army, Navy,
Air Force, Marines)
03 - Aerospace
04 - Mass Transit
05 - Political Think Tanks and Non-Profit
Organizations
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- Medicine and Emergency
Preparedness
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- Finance
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- Agriculture
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- Waste Management
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- Energy Development and
Exploration
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- Commercial Freight
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- Fire and Police Departments- 13
- State and Private
Educational Systems
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- Auto and Textile Manufacturing
The term “serious games” is a necessary marketing cover for products that
are, have always been, and may continue to be VIZSIMs
(interactive visual simulations).
Serious games are not designed for Thursday night group gaming
sessions at your friend's house, nor are they designed as “fun for
the entire family,” with respect. Yes, the end user ultimately
determines how any game product is appropriated, but the developer intent of
a typical serious game is for the user to perform a specific task as
instructed for a specific training result, rather than for
pure enjoyment, and commonly with much more than an extra life or the
high score at stake.
Serious games train would-be-employees or group event participants
using a rigid set of instructions which ideally result in the
learning or memorization of an equally rigid set of one-off skills
sets. While some of these one-off skill sets can serve multiple
purposes, those purposes always appear to derive from the same group
(i.e. piloting skills applicable to multiple types of aircraft).
Examples of the one-off skill sets learned from serious games are:
01 - Disassembling / cleaning / reassembling of various handheld and
shoulder-launched weaponry
02 - Piloting a military helicopter
03 - Piloting a commercial passenger jet
04 - Managing a construction team and protocols involved in building a
sports arena super structure
05 - Disassembling / diagnosing / repairing / reassembling the turbo
diesel engine of a big rig
06 - Performing peaceful protests against an unlawfully assembled
national government
07 - Performing a tracheotomy
08 - Creating and applying burn dressings to a burn victim during a mass
casualty incident
09 - Performing the daily tasks of a bank teller
10 - Performing the daily tasks of a quality control supervisor at a soft
drink distribution plant
Almost all of these serious games skill sets are performed in team
settings where the order, collaboration, and timing of tasks
performed are of utmost importance, placing the quality of products,
the flexibility of services, and the protection of lives on the line every day.
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