Play to Learn: from Serious Games to just Games

I’ve been waiting for someone to write this article for a very long time, but at some point I couldn’t wait any longer so I stepped up and wrote it myself.

I talked a little bit about it in this previous post and the resulting conversations over social media were very informative and enjoyable, so I’m very happy with this.

The article goes into a bit more detail on the literature surrounding video games that can be used as educational interventions, both games made for entertainment and games made for research. The most interesting observation is that there is a lot more research published on the educational applications of entertainment and edutainment video games than there is on video games built for education research. This is interesting but not surprising, though! A so-called COTS¹Commercial Off-The-Shelf, not that I like the term but that’s what it is… video game is widely and easily available, and allows for multiple applications, research angles, and hopefully makes it easier for more people to adopt and adapt the methodology developed by others. On the other hand, like with every other piece of software built for research, research video games are harder to obtain, harder to adapt, having been built for one specific purpose, and sometimes even hard to run, as they may be single platform and built in haste with poor attention to code and deployment QA.

I am sure I missed a whole bunch of video games in the article, but going for total representation would have been impossible, and probably not very useful either. I talk about this in the article too.

If you push the link below, you may or may not be able to find the PDF available for download. If you can’t find it, I’m happy to share a pre-print, just ask 😬

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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{10.1145/3582515.3609525,
  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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  Commercial Off-The-Shelf, not that I like the term but that’s what it is…