An Overview of Serious Games

Abstract

Serious games are growing rapidly as a gaming industry as well as a field of academic research. There are many surveys in the field of digital serious games; however, most surveys are specific to a particular area such as education or health. So far, there has been little work done to survey digital serious games in general, which is the main goal of this paper. Hence, we discuss relevant work on serious games in different application areas including education, well-being, advertisement, cultural heritage, interpersonal communication, and health care. We also propose a taxonomy for digital serious games, and we suggest a classification of reviewed serious games applications from the literature against the defined taxonomy. Finally, the paper provides guidelines, drawn from the literature, for the design and development of successful serious games, as well as discussing research perspectives in this domain.

Learning Programming through Games and Contests: Overview, Characterisation and Discussion

“…Serious games may be defined as an application with three main components: experience, entertainment, and multimedia (Laamarti et al, 2014). Especially entertainment dimension in serious games has the potential to enhance the user's experience through multimodal interaction.…”

“…The paper of Laamarti et al (2014) overviews studies on serious games in different application areas including education, well-being, advertisement, cultural heritage, interpersonal communication, and health care. Also, many platforms were analysed and discussed, what the necessary components of the game to be successful are.…”

“…Several components of serious games were distinguished and categories of criteria were suggested (Laamarti et al, 2014). These criteria may be useful for any programming games as well.…”

“…Additional recommendations for necessary components of the games to be successfully used can be as follows (Laamarti et al, 2014): a. User-centred software engineering: an important element is the perspective that the designers contribute to the development teams and the experience that the player will obtain. b. Multimodal games: multiple modalities should be incorporated (e. g. visual, auditory and haptic combination).…”

Game for Health Professional Education

“…The enjoyment of the game is the very means by which the goal can be reached. Thus, the game should be kept enjoyable, or else the serious goal would not be reached even though it was given the highest attention in the development of the game [2]. Serious games encompass the same goals of "edutainment", but extend far past teaching facts and rote memorization to include all aspects of education: teaching, training, and informing [3].…”