Lesson 12 - Emerging Technologies

In terms of the hype cycle, serious games are somewhere along the slope of enlightenment. There is not the research yet to move them into the plateau of productivity, but there is enough evidence from practice that they are gaining traction in education.

However, there are a number of reasons why serious games have not become more prevalent in education. The first is philosophical. There is resistance to the idea of games because some see serious games as an oxymoron. How can a game be serious? Many instructors fear that learning could easily be trivialized through games or that games can cover only a very limited part of what learning should be about – it can’t all be fun; that is not the purpose of education. Similarly, many professional game designers are not interested in developing serious games because they fear that if the primary goal is learning and not enjoyment, a focus on education risks killing the main element of a game: being fun to play. 

A more pragmatic reason is cost and quality. The assumed high cost of video games has so far acted as a deterrent in education. There is no obvious business plan to justify the investment. The bestselling video games for entertainment for instance cost millions of dollars to produce, on a scale similar to mainstream movies. If games are produced cheaply, won’t the quality – in terms of production standards, narrative/plot, visuals, and learner engagement – suffer, thus making them unattractive for learners? 

However, probably the main reason serious games are not more prevalent in education is that most educators simply do not know enough about serious games: what exists, how they can be used, nor how to design them. Experience suggests that there are many possible and realistic applications for serious games in education. There is some evidence (see for instance, Arnab, 2014) that effective serious games can be developed at very little cost.

Nevertheless, there is always a high degree of risk in serious games design. There is no sure way of predicting in advance that a new game will be successful. Some low-cost simple games can work well; some expensively produced games can easily flop. This means careful testing and feedback during development. So serious games should be more seriously considered for teaching in a digital age – but their application needs to be done carefully and professionally.

Thus serious games are relatively high risk, high return activity for teaching in a digital age. Success in serious games means building on best practices in games design, both within and outside education, sharing costs and experience, and collaboration between institutions and games development teams. However, as teaching in a digital age moves more and more towards high-level skills development, experiential learning, and problem-solving in real-world contexts, serious games are bound to play an increasingly important role.