Can we stop calling them “serious” games?

I try to avoid using the term Serious Games as much as I can, but I can’t escape the fact that this is a term often used when we talk about educational games, though the overlap isn’t always complete. Let’s see what this is all about.

A “serious game” is broadly defined as “a game designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment” and many agree that the American researcher Clark C. Abt is responsible for coming up with the term and formalizing the concept as known and used in modern times.

While this is true, the notion that play can be for more than entertainment is an not a new one. In fact, there’s a quote from Plato’s Laws that’s going around in which the Athenian Stranger argues in favour of giving children tools that mimic the function and working of tools used by adults, so that they can begin practicing a future work activity from their early days through play¹The only translation I could find freely online doesn’t match the quote I’m seeing going around, but the spirit is intact.. But the idea makes sense even without bothering the classics, and it’s a topic for another day anyway.

These days, a serious game is mainly an educational or instructional video game, but it hasn’t always been the case, it’s just we didn’t use to call The Landlord’s Game a serious game, yet educational it was. For example, Magic: The Gathering and SimCity can both teach you strategy, planning, and resilience in the face of random adverse events because both games exploit the card draw mechanic in which you never know what could happen at any given time, whether your opponent is a human, in the case of MTG, or the game world, in the case of SimCity, but we don’t call these serious games either. More interestingly, in the early days of digital computing, video games were created as part of research, to develop and test new algorithms, improve programming techniques, and as ways to show the public that computers could be fun and interesting, and not scary at all, which is quite serious business if you ask me…

But let’s stick to video games. There came a time, between the 1980s and the 90s, when video games began to be marketed to – and perceived by – the public as toys for children. At the same time, a new type of video game began to emerge: the educational one. I’ve already talked about this and, while there have been some valiant efforts in edutainment video games, there has also been push-back from the playing and non-playing public due to misconceptions and misportrayal of video games, and, generally speaking, educational video games don’t exactly have the best reputation among players. Tacking on the label “serious” to educational video games does nothing but reinforce the idea that this type of video games are not going to be fun but you should play them anyway because “it’s good for you” or, worse, because “teacher says so.” It’s funny that even Clark C. Abt himself couldn’t see any reasons why “serious” games shouldn’t be fun, but hey, here we are.

Let’s play the definitions game

This is where we are: 1. serious games are games; 2. games are generally fun. Both these things are hard to argue against. The way I see it, serious games retain the entertainment aspect of games by virtue of, well, being games, and slap an extra aspect of education on top of that. So, a better definition of serious games should sound more like games that have an extra purpose on top of entertainment.

And let’s not confuse “fun” with “funny” here, or “entertainment” with “mindless enjoyment” or “children’s play” and whatnot, because if we want that no theme should be off-limits from the game medium, then we have to accept that some themes demand to be treated with respect. At the top of the page, I put a photo of a game of Pandemic, a cooperative game where the players try to eradicate a number of infective disease outbreaks around the globe, working together towards several goals such as finding cures and vaccines, deploying medical resources, exchanging knowledge and resources, and so on. I have fun playing Pandemic, but I don’t find it funny. I find it entertaining, but in a challenging way. It makes me appreciate the difficulties of organizing research and development on a new disease and guess what, the game is from 2008, and we are just now coming out of a similar scenario.

The label “serious” can sometimes overshadow these games’ true potential. It may seem superficial but, by removing this distinction, we let serious games take back their place in the gaming space, as products of a medium that can be as informative as they can be entertaining. While we may never get rid of poorly designed educational games, changing the perception of serious games among educators, players, researchers, and game designers should promote more synergy between all these figures, and help produce engaging and entertaining learning experiences that are more effective and better received.

So, can we stop calling serious games “serious?” The better question is whether we should, and the answer is yes. Can we do it? That’s going to take work and a party of willing participants from all the areas of game design and the gaming industry at large, to engage with each other and seek a design and evaluation process that can ensure that entertainment and educational values fit together in the final product, and can be evaluated with rigour for educational effectiveness and engagement value.

Sounds like a quest? Well, get on board! My contact info are all over this place 🙂

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This post is loosely based on a conference paper that I will present at GoodIT 2023 where I will also co-chair a special track on games. If you happen to be in Lisbon, Portugal, between the 6th and the 8th of September, be sure to get in touch and I’ll be happy to chat! The article will be published as follows, so bookmark it now.

Andrea Franceschini and Antonio Rodà. 2023. Play to Learn: from Serious Games to just Games. In ACM International Conference on Information Technology for Social Good (GoodIT ’23), September 06–08, 2023, Lisbon, Portugal. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 11 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3582515.3609525

@inproceedings{playtolearn,
  author = {Franceschini, Andrea and Rod\`{a}, Antonio},
  title = {Play to Learn: From Serious Games to Just Games},
  year = {2023},
  isbn = {9798400701160},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3582515.3609525},
  doi = {10.1145/3582515.3609525},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Information Technology for Social Good},
  pages = {117–127},
  numpages = {11},
  keywords = {entertainment, video games, digital games, serious games},
  location = {Lisbon, Portugal},
  series = {GoodIT '23}
}

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  The only translation I could find freely online doesn’t match the quote I’m seeing going around, but the spirit is intact.