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- Serious Games - Fundamentals and
Function before Fluff - Part 2
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- Go To Part
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- June 16,
2009
- By Eric M. Scharf
Entertainers – Not Trainers
The suggestion has been made in various games industry circles that
there are a number of current entertainment software products that qualify
as serious games. Whether the suggestion is designed to artificially
create another revenue stream for a fading entertainment software
product, or to fraudulently apply for highly-coveted funds from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), or to make a
legitimate claim, the core differences will be identified here.
There is an entertainment software product for almost every taste,
within so many different genres, for several hardware platforms,
with a wide variety of game controllers, and user interfaces ranging
from the amazingly simple to the multilayered and incredibly complex.
Entertainment software products encourage their target audiences to
view and consider their subject matter in various and sometimes
fantastic ways, most often beyond the norm (of those users who
simply react to what is placed in front of them versus other more
creative users who often test game mechanics to discover maximum
possibilities).
Users perform the
reward-based tasks, and even with a poor first attempt, they can see
a hint of what is possible. That glimmer generates an eagerness to
try again and again, stimulating creative thought, intuitive growth,
the “need” for ever-improving results, and an all-important
competitive nature (whether competing against the game itself or
another user). The vast majority of entertainment software products,
however, represent an in-depth escape from reality, rather than the
reality-based, pass-or-fail scenarios of serious games.
Objectively,
developer intent for all entertainment software products involves:
01 - Engagement
(Hmm – this is interesting. I will try this out.)
02 - Entertainment
(Hey – that was enjoyable regardless of how well I initially did. I
will try, again.)
03 - Encouragement
(Wow – I am getting better and better. Why stop now?)
04 - Ever-Increasing Addiction
(I have come too far, I need to win! I will definitely buy the sequel!)
Any resultant improvements to your intelligence, emotional maturity,
or situational reaction times are objectively coincidental due to
how engaged you choose to become with an entertainment software
product and, in turn, your addiction-driven efforts to power through
all of the designed challenges that await and finally win the entire
game. Entertainment software products provide reward-based tasks
where the rewards typically involve very little that can currently
occur in the real world, such as:
01 - Receiving a giant ice cream sundae for
finishing the final level (a la “James and the Giant Peach”)
02 - Receiving an arm-mounted nuclear fusion
cannon in exchange for an old west six-shooter
03 - Receiving a “health upgrade” from 2% to
100%, without corrective surgery or healing time
04 - Receiving three bonus lives after
defeating the main boss on level nine
05 - Receiving a giant flaming football
helmet that allows you to run ten times faster than normal
06 - Receiving a personal force field that
allows you to battle a stronger enemy without being harmed
07 - Receiving a magic wand upgrade allowing
you to change your slow broom to a fast winged horse
08 - Receiving the downloadable content item
of choice by defeating the Troll army in only three turns
09 - Receiving an indestructible perm by
surviving the hot wax zombies in the haunted hair salon level
10
- Receiving magic seeds that
grow crops at twice their normal size to feed your starving village
While entertainment software products can be designed to require
significant team participation, few of the displayed rewards
require you to perform as part of a team in order to achieve them.
No literal quality of products, services, or lives is ever in
jeopardy due to your performance in an entertainment software
product, unless you are attempting to use the winnings from a gaming
competition to pay off a loan shark.
The product lines of Guitar Hero, Pokémon, Tycoon, and Brain Age – for example
– may require you to learn in order to achieve, but they might not
even qualify
as "edutainment," let alone serious games. While these entertainment
software products may encourage you to memorize a very specific task
or series of tasks to be repeated over and over again in order to
complete certain levels and receive certain rewards, none of the
memorized tasks have, can, or will enhance your daily productivity
during your non-entertainment activities.
A person who learns how to play standard musical notes on
an amazing electric air guitar while playing a popular song on Guitar Hero
– with no
prior musical experience – may not be invited to fill in
professionally for Eric Clapton, Eddie Van Halen, or anyone from the
Boston Philharmonic Orchestra.
A person who learns how to simultaneously command multiple characters
while playing Pokémon – with no prior experience managing multiple
co-workers or sports teammates – may not be invited to run the local
high school newspaper nor coach their football team.
Furthermore, that same person can have years of experience playing
any of the Pokémon card games, and they may not be invited to fill in professionally
for Phil Helmuth on ESPN’s "World Series of Poker Championship."
A person who learns how to manage large numbers of material assets
and resources, as well as construct metropolitan cities and
transportation systems while playing any of the Tycoon games – with
no prior resource management experience – may not be invited to
manage or construct even the smallest of Mom and Pop corner stores.
It is important to acknowledge that a similar but far more in-depth
“God Game” like "Age of Empires" or "American Civil War: Gettysburg"
certainly can teach people very detailed elements of (A) how a
civilization was developed, (B) a sense of ancient battle tactics /
war strategies,
and (C) how / what / when / where / why resources were used in the
success or failure of those efforts.
If God Games provided the in-depth training required by serious games,
then, users of these games would eventually become certified as civil engineers, history professors,
or military strategists. Outside of military-funded serious games for
satellite-depth war-gaming and battlefield-level operations, that
kind of magical transformation probably should not be eagerly anticipated.
Nonetheless, a person who learns basic math as well as the official
flower of each U.S. state through a series of multiple choice and
true / false questions while playing Brain Age – with no prior
experience in mathematics or horticulture – may not be invited to
join or teach a calculus class, nor to join or manage a plant
nursery.
The entertainment software products mentioned here, like so many
others, were designed to be vehicles for entertainment, not
training. Any educational information that may be gleamed from them
is acquired in such an informal, unadvertised, unintended way,
that it is simply a non-starter to discuss these games as serious
games. If a serious game was a real person, the very last thing a serious games client wants to hear
out of that person (and their investment) is “I do not know much about haptic-based simulated cardiovascular surgery, but I
did
stay at a Holiday Inn Express.”
While there are entertainment software products which convey
simulator behaviors with photorealistic visuals, such crisp details are simply
an extension of entertainment and marketing goals. One of several
key goals for a
racing game (like Gran Turismo), for example, may be to show the user how closely it can
mimic the functional interior of a Ferrari F430 Spider where – through a modified first person view
– you can shift every gear,
adjust your seat position, modify your rear view mirror angle, tilt
your steering wheel, and adjust your suspension just to name a few.
You may even have the option to turn on or off the intense image
jitter or motion-blur, which are two forms of visual force feedback
experienced while driving a performance vehicle.
While a racing game developer may intend to “train” you to appreciate the finer details
of an exact replica of an exotic automobile cockpit, that developer has no
intention of training you how to actually drive the Ferrari, outside
of an extremely simple tutorial that you can skip with little to no
consequence. The developer just want users to believe and spread the
word that they REALLY felt like they were sitting in the Ferrari, inhaling the
experience of the carefully-emulated dials, gauges, and manual
shifter, the
well-crafted leather and wood surfaces, and humming in tune with the
high-revving purr of the twin-turbo V8 engine audio file being delivered in
base-thumping Dolby 5.1 surround sound.
The developer (hopes and) expects you to
have some level of performance driving familiarity, and without such
experience, you must either turn to serious games or physically get
off your couch / out of your office chair and invest in a real life
introduction to professional driving experience (YES – by taking
lessons from a professional driver, not by selling your house and
your neighbor’s house to purchase a Ferrari).
“Situational reaction times” – mentioned earlier – might be
referenced by those who would defiantly point to dozens of reports
of U.S. military service personnel showing faster reaction times to
their violent surroundings after playing entertainment software
products on their handheld devices. Those situational reaction
times – unfortunately – are easily the primordial result of entertainment software
developer intent. You see a shrink-wrapped entertainment software
product at a store in the mall – or you see an online ad for an
entertainment software product – and either way, you like enough of
what you see to purchase a copy. You play it once, and you may
perform poorly, but you enjoy the experience enough to go back for
more. You play again and again until you get quite good at playing
the game, steadily reaping the rewards (by defeating each level
boss, solving each physical puzzle, or winning each multiple choice
brain teaser), until you have dominated the entire game.
Well-known entertainment software products with a focus
on visual accuracy and statistical mimicry, such as Madden NFL,
Project Gotham Racing, Microsoft Flight Simulator, and Ghost Recon
Advanced Warfighter, can receive incredibly important,
profit-inflating endorsements from professional sports athletes,
race car drivers, and highly-decorated career military personnel,
etc. for delivering such a realistic-looking experience.
Authenticity always helps provide a more immersive-looking
environment and experience, but if the tasks performed within that
environment are relatively meaningless (resulting in a high score
and rewarded with a double-layer digital cake), then, such accuracy
is, again, only a marketing tool.
While entertainment software products prey on the human condition
for success, a serious game is not beholden to any potent
creativity, inventions, or flashy gimmicks that leave a user begging
for more. A serious game only requires a user to be interested
enough in being trained valuable skills which can result in new
employment, a promotion from their current role, or inclusion in a
large and exclusive mission or project. A serious game is
well-positioned as the vehicle through which big-ticket training
tasks can be assigned to a user, within a real world scenario with a
legitimate, realistic, and finite set of available choices,
consequences from those choices, possible corrective methods, and
final results.
Edutainment receives a special mention here, as it represents a
hybrid of serious games and entertainment software products, where
education and entertainment are equally emphasized. While this
combination of features has made edutainment products an excellent
source – at grammar school levels for teaching subjects like basic mathematics,
spelling, vocabulary, and history – it
is that same combination that currently prevents edutainment products, just
like entertainment software products, from achieving the extremely
high-yield training capabilities of laser-focused serious games.
Edutainment products are also primarily focused on children and
early teenagers who – as the latest generation of school-age
youngsters – may grow up expecting to be educated more and more by
digital versions of Mickey Mouse or Dora the Explorer as their
instructor. While a comprehensive guided tour of a nuclear
submarine’s electrical system by the San Diego Chicken would be
enjoyable, it would completely defeat the “fundamentals and function
before fluff” purpose of serious games.
Go To Part
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