Eric Zimmerman: Forget Serious Games
Filed at 8:09 pm on November 2, 2006 in Games • 2 comments
All too often, those who investigate and create serious games operate from a limited notion of what games can be.
A game doesn’t need to be explicitly educational in order to be a positive learning experience. Every good game in some way teaches literacy and learning, sometimes by encouraging what seems like the worst behavior in players.
Too many serious games researchers focus on the explicitly curricular, data-measurable aspects of games and learning. One problem with these approaches is that they excise the play from the game. Play is messy, unpredictable, and hard to measure. But it needs to be at the center of any inquiry into games and learning.
Games are best at teaching processes, not at injecting data into players. By letting players experiment with the behavior of systems, games provide contexts where players can play with ideas and information, seeing how relationships emerge and change over time.
This kind of learning is harder to track and measure, particularly under the rubric of No Child Left Behind and the quantitative turn in federal research funding. Is the best player the one that completes a game level most quickly and most correctly? Or is it the player that drives his car off the track to explore the world, or the player that hacks into the game to change what her character looks like and how she can play?
Cultural norms of what constitutes proper play are also at work here. In The Ambiguity of Play, Brian Sutton-Smith identifies several “rhetorics of play” - how play is discussed and conceived in culture. The idea of play as progress, that play is only valuable if it evolves children into better adults, is the dominant rhetoric of our time. Yet other rhetorics exist, such as the idea of play as a transgressive activity that can play with and refashion social structures.
What are the forms of games and learning that would embody such alternative models of play? Good question. Let’s expand our models of serious games so that they can do justice to the rich phenomena of games and play.
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Comments (2)
1: Eliane Alhadeff at 10:06 pm on Friday, November 3, 2006
Fully Agree! On my recent post “Gaming Is All About Fun” I address exactly the same issue.
“The key to serious games is prioritizing entertainment over pedagogy: It doesn’t matter how good the teaching is if no one wants to play.”
Entertainment games are demonstrably “engaging”. In comparison, when the training industry uses the word “engaging”, there is an all too obvious incongruity.
Games engage people psychologically - they can be very emotional experiences -and they also engage people physiologically.
What is going on beyond the peripheries of the TV screen or computer monitor ceases to register to the user. Their heart rate increases, the hair on the back of the neck stands up and they may well end up laughing out loud at (or furiously cursing at) a virtual character who is actually nothing more than a collection of pixels and programming code.
If you strip away all the techno-wizardry games are essentially highly experiential software applications which foster deep levels of cognitive activity and higher-level thinking skills.
Above all, there is a most rewarding sensation common to all game players: having fun!
Wherever “Serious Games” are heading, let’s keep it!
2: eben at 7:00 pm on Friday, November 10, 2006
“Too many serious games researchers focus on the explicitly curricular, data-measurable aspects of games and learning.”
I agree with this and would add that there seems to be some correlation with this perspective and the one that sees simulation as transcendant of the subjectivities of representation. In this light, simulations are engines for the generation of certain objective truths, empowered by the computer’s ability to take and pass mathematical variables *without judgement* the simulation gives us little, abstract glimpses of truth about our reality otherwise obscured by our subjective interpretations. Serious games will only be serious once there is an understanding that simulation does not *transcend* subjective representation. And I do believe that this is happening already. To quote Ian Bogost, (“Oil-God” serious-game designer):
“What simulation games create are *biased, nonobjective* modes of expression that cannot escape the grasp of subjectivity and ideology.”
In other words, they’re perfect for the ‘No Child Left Behind’ curriculum, but not for serious learning.
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