Helping you make games for purposes beyond entertainment
Helping you make games for purposes beyond entertainment
Last updated October, 2018
A "serious game" is any game, but mostly video & computer games, used to achieve a primary outcome other than entertainment. Serious games as a term-of-art was originally adapted from Clark Abt's book on the topic published in 1970. The term was re-used by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholar's Serious Games Initiative, and quickly gained steam. It became a convenient way to describe, and promote a variety of uses for games and game-technologies applied to any variety of challenging problems and fields such as education, health, science, workforce development, and data-collection & analysis. The fact that in D.C. at the time many things associated with videogames weren't considered a "serious" pursuit or use of government funds was a key reason the term was adopted by the Wilson Center.
While other terms are commonly substituted (e.g. games for change, games for good, impact games, applied games, etc.) the overall long-term notion behind all of them is really simple: games, in many forms can, and do produce outcomes beyond just entertaining us.
In many ways, all games are serious, for entertainment, producing it, and consuming it, is an important part of being human and enjoying life. Some entertainment games even produce many awesome outcomes even if not primarily intended. We learn from games like SimCity, we better understand football and other sports thanks to Madden and NBA 2K. We think about important ideas by experiencing games like Journey and Civilization. As many academics and educators have noted, the very core problem, of problem solving, in any game, becomes a foundational experience for skills and attitudes about learning and problem solving.
However, increasingly, games are being purpose-built for outcomes such as skills acquisition, team building, health behavior change, data analysis, planning, and more. The goal of such serious games is to apply the technologies, interface approaches, and psychologies, ideally the most unique ones, to games, media, to create original comparatively advantage tools. Some are full games, some are very simple, some are just the core technologies (e.g. real-time 3D graphics) but in all cases they pull their power, inspiration, and capacities from games designed entertainment.
Not all serious games are perfect, many are experiments, and some are good but not well distributed. Just because videogames have ascended as a dominant media today doesn't mean every serious game has magic properties. Serious games can work, and research increasingly shows that games have special strengths and properties that make them viable and useful, if not the best, solutions to problems we face today.
Is there any dispute that games make for great entertainment? Of course not! One only has to look at the billions spent globally each year on games to realize that they are a huge industry and media form. Even the board game market worldwide is surging due to increasing popularity for games in all their forms digital and non-digital. For decades, and especially over the last 20 years there have been many organizations and individuals building games for purposes beyond entertainment but the question is why?
In some cases proponents of serious games cite the wide appeal of games, their ability to draw in players and "engage" them as a critical reason to use games. In a world where attentions are increasingly divided and competed for there does exist some logic to any form of media and messaging that breaks through to get critical attention. Others cite the growing technological power of videogames and especially 3D environments as their motivation to use games. However, these are not the only, or even the best reason to use games for applied purposes. Games do more than grab and hold attention.
Research and examples increasingly show that games may have unique qualities over other forms of media when it comes to tasks such as education, skill development, data-analysis, and behavior change to name a few. These qualities have much to do with the forms games take that enable new communication forms, how games enable dynamic adaptation to users, how games offer better approaches to systems-based thinking, and more. 3D games, while popular, are not always the best solution either. Many simple 2D, and even text games have proven to be very powerful, and often optimized, experiences.
Given that games may have special capacities we also should consider the problems to begin with when discussing 'why games?' In today's complicated and ever-more sophisticated world there is increasing emphasis for an "all-hands-on-deck" approach to problem solving. No longer can we address various intractable challenges such as education, productivity, or health with the same approaches. While tried-and-true solutions such as public service announcements can be useful for health issues PSAs have limited reach to youth, and fairly limited capacities for inducing behavior change. The same can be said for seminar and counseling interventions, and more. Through the serious games movement there is increasing sentiment to add games, when evidence shows success, to the mix of media and non-media tools we use to solves today's most important problems.
Do serious games work?
Through a variety of research projects conducted since the late 1990s there is a growing body of evidence that games can play an effective role in areas such as learning, behavior change, and productivity. There is a need for more and larger studies, but already there have been some excellent cases where game-based learning enhanced retention, understanding, and more among learners in subjects including math, science, and nutrition to name a few. What we also know is that there have been games that have failed. They either outright failed, or they didn't necessarily improved results vs. existing solutions.
It thus can be said, "games can work, but projects can fail."
What's important toward making sure a game works is that not only is the game well designed, and aimed properly at the underlying problem, but that, as with many forms of learning, and behavior change, that the players are supported by both the game and surrounding systems be they mentors, teachers, additional materials, calls-to-action, and more.
Quality affects serious game projects no different than other intervention designs, but it is exciting to know that there are excellent examples where games have risen to the challenge offering overall promise to the next great projects.
Serious games tend to be made by six types of game/software developers:
1. Developers who build games of all shapes and sizes : These hybrid developers seek to leverage their commercial game expertise to help build excellent serious game projects.
2. Developers who specialize in serious games : Some developers choose to specialize in serious games, or even specific segments of serious games like K12 education, or health. They often have a educational technologies background, or feature entertainment game designers who have left those markets behind to focus on new markets like serious games.
3. Media production companies : Often companies that produce web-based media and apps will seek to work with their clients to create games. While these companies tend to do best with advertising style-games (i.e. advergames) they seek to bring their client service focus and understanding of production values from those projects to serious games. The downside for them is their game design skills tend to be fairly basic, and their understanding of learning and behavior change design is also limited.
4. University based programs : Either as student work, or part of grant-based research a lot of serious games work is based in the world's colleges and universities. Often these are experimental programs but every so often they reach full maturity and make it out as part of a larger public-facing project, university spinoff, or startup.
5. Start ups : There are a number of companies that are building serious game-based businesses in health, learning, and more. They are not producing a game for clients, but instead as part of their core business.
6. Independent and hobbyist developers : There are a number of small games produced by hobbyist and independent developers that cover topics of interest to them. While not everyone is rhetorical in nature, many of these often ephemeral games, are often game-based commentaries on their subjects, current events, or matters of personal storytelling.
Most organizations and individuals who want to build a serious game are themselves not game designers or developers. Additionally, they may not have much background in software development. They do, often have the expertise in the underlying subject matter, and a keen awareness of the problem they are trying to solve and what has, and hasn't worked thus far in contributing to a solution. As such, they must seek out the technical and production talent to make their game.
Making games take a lot of work, time, and often capital, but most of all they need "keepers-of-the-vision" to manage them from idea to finished project. Assuming you are bringing the idea, and ideally the capital what you need first of all is a well-articulated outline of your problem, and eventually an informed design document that matches up possible game ideas to the problems and their specifics that are put together.
Once there is proper articulation of the challenge, the target audience, and some basic ideas of game-based approaches that will work, you can further iterate on the paper designs and plans. Assuming you have well-though-out plans the next step is to identify one or more developers and begin to get them to bid and comment on your project.
Picking a developer and contracting with them may seem like the end, but it's only the beginning. No matter how talented and experienced all developers benefit when the idea-holder, and their expertise is brought to bear on a project, helping with as much of the design, production feedback, and testing as they can.
Great serious games get made when good teams are properly supported and financed. Your game gets made once you have a well articulated plan that not only explains the idea for the game but defines the problem(s) the game is aimed at in great detail such that development talent can best match-up great creativity, game design, and technology toward the solutions you need at the budget you can afford.
Much of this means you will be working with external teams to your organization. Like many media productions organizations undertake be they videos, pamphlets, posters, books, or web sites, games are no different in that they are communication and collaboration style projects that require a dedication to upfront planning and backend polish.
Your get your game made when you bring all the right resources and careful thinking to a patient process imbued with the best talent you can muster.
Games can cost as little as a few thousand dollars to millions of dollars - it's very wide open. Typically most serious games cost $50K-$250K for smaller size projects, board games, mobile, and web games with tightly focused designs. Larger six-figure projects often expand gameplay to more involved gameplay, higher-production values, and deeper levels of content and curriculum covered, or they involved more advanced technologies such as virtual reality, 3D graphics, or advanced forms of online play. In the million dollar ranges the driver is often the style of game you're building, and how deep-and-long the gameplay has to be to satisfy the challenge it is trying to solve. Multiplayer features, and extensive cloud-based features can also be major cost-drivers to a project as well.
As a rule-of-thumb developers tend to charge $10K or more per-person, per-month. So a small team of 5 developers working full time over the course of six months to build a game might have a budget of $300,000 or more. More experienced teams in high-demand, and higher-cost-of-living markets, can easily charge more than the $10K rule-of-thumb.
In cases where projects can cut costs to build the least-expensive games tactics will include not just simplifying gameplay, but also eschewing certain features such as more involved tutorials teaching novice users how to play, better art, or lack of online play. Cleverness in design can also play a role as well but can't be pre-ordained as the solution to the cost-of-serious-games question.
The costs discussed so far are also just for core design, production, and completion. They may not include costs to deploy the game, promotion, user-support, hosting, and more.
While there are certainly games, quite successful ones, built on budgets below $50,000, it really must be said that most organizations should be prepared for minimum budgets in the low six-figures range. If you're not prepared to spend in these ranges, which for many games are tiny still, it's really going to be difficult for developers to offer a solution you might put reasonable faith in.
Hopefully you will! In most serious game project cases to date a clear sponsor funds the creation of a game, be it by grant, or as part of their cost of doing business. A large swath of the serious games space is a work-for-hire services-based development industry. Clients produce problems and capital, developers build games they hope offer a solution. Yes, in a number of rising cases, developers are raising funds and/or building serious games first, and attempting to commercialize them but aside from some key markets (e.g. exercise) these efforts are not broadly applied.
You may have heard that many serious games are funded through grants. This is true to an extent, many serious games are part of research or public interest funding provided by governments and philanthropic foundations. Many others are funded by enterprises for their internal user (e.g. training) or external use (marketing and customer support) and only a handful so far are funded as commercial products for sale to target users.
The bottom line is you will need to secure the funding for your game. Most developers are fee-for-service companies and are not looking to build games, however interesting they may be, on spec. If you haven't already secured funding you will want to look into various forms of financing for games be they grants or other means of raising funds.
The vast majority of serious games produced thus far are built to be free and to achieve their goals through the process of being free-and-publicly available. Only a handful of serious games are provided as a commercially available product where the goal for the developer is to build sustainable revenues from sales of the game. Certainly this is how most commercial entertainment games work. A developer/publisher builds a game and then monetizes it through sales to users, and sometimes with the support of in-game advertising revenues as well. While only a handful of serious games have sought to be commercially viable products that isn't to say it's not done. Many popular exercise games are commercially successful serious games, so are products like the language learning game Duolingo, and the learning game DragonBox.
Overall the serious games space has made hundreds-of-millions, to billions of dollars depending on what you count as revenues, which games (e.g. Wii Fit was a billion dollar product at its peak), and how much services revenue is earned by developers building all sorts of public-and-privately used serious games.
So yes Serious Games do make money, but like many revenue-generating products, services, and efforts, it's a LOT harder than it may seem!
There is much to know to learn how to make any game let alone one likely to be on a specialized subject. Serious games require the intersection of many domains of knowledge including game design, software development, psychology, cognitive science, and much more. Serious game projects have lots of unique features that make their development processes, while similar to entertainment games, different. Depending on your role in the process of creating a serious game it is helpful to understand the basics of making games, providing input into production, and managing creative, iterative productions.
A key part in making good serious games is understanding important technical aspects to the learning and behavioral science that drives modern day game design. Whether it's understand ideas like social learning theory, message framing, behavioral economics, or the theory of planned behaviors, the last few decades has produced a plethora of evidence-based theories about learning, and behavior change that is critical to the creation of successful serious games. This knowledge is not always held by developers, or it's understood, but not in a formalized manner as many game design philosophies do dovetail with successful learning and behavior change practices.
Beyond the technical knowledge, and the domain knowledge relevant to what your game is about, the most important thing to know to make serious games is working with teams, working with creatives, and how to capture constructive feedback that you can feed back into the game development process.
All-in-all what you need to know to make a good serious game is how to identify, and eventually supplement across the team of professionals building your game the various knowledge bases that you bring together to make a great serious game. This can be a little bit of everything, but often includes the core domain knowledge of the game's subject, and the UNDERLINE/evidence-based theories/ that drive outcomes for your problem area.
Games research is quite a robust and ongoing area of activity. Hundreds of university based projects exist, many robust university programs focus exclusively on looking at the impact and capacities of games across a range of sectors.
There is a growing body of work around the use of games for purposes beyond entertainment especially in education, and health to cite and build upon. Some of it is contained in journals that focus on games, game technologies, and serious games, however, it's important to know that a lot of work on the subject is also published in fields specific to the topic of the game and/or the problem it's addressing. This is why when working to find prior work, and evidence you will want to look not only for generalized games research, but also specific research within the field/topic your game is targeting.
To pinpoint several papers or research projects that may be useful can be difficult but the resources on SeriousGames.Tips can help you look for research, games, and conferences that may be useful for your efforts.
On SeriousGames.Tips are many links to useful resources to follow up with via the Web, social media, books conferences, and video.