Category: Serious Games

Serious Games: Online game terminology

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Terminology: Open worlds, Games of Exploration, Pervasive Gaming and more

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  • An Open World game is one where players can freely roam a virtual world. Usually the
    term is used to describe a game that has objectives and a storyline, but is sometimes used to describe completely open-ended virtual worlds like Second Life.

  • Non-Linear gameplay: Players are presented with challenges that can be completed in more than one order. Nonlinear sequencing may consist of multiple entire plot sequences to complete the game, subplots or small branches off the main plot. 

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Serious Games: The Virtual Patient specification

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The Virtual Patient – a common standard for medical simulations

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From Transforming Professional Healthcare Narratives into Structured Game-Informed-Learning Activities by Begg, et.al.



The Virtual Patient specification was developed to take advantage of the natural affinity for the branching narrative style of much of medical education. The Virtual Patient is a common standard by which patient cases can be structured in a manner that can be read by many game and simulation systems.

A virtual patient represents whichever characteristics of the patient are relevant to the current educational context.

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Serious Games: What is a game?

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What is a game?

Note: This series of posts is from the handout for a talk on serious games, given at UMHS on May 12.

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We all have an idea of what a game is, but it is not so easy to define precisely  what makes games different from other activities. No definition of games is entirely complete, but we can approach an understanding by considering games in relation to similar activities, such as
reading stories, watching movies, playing with toys, solving puzzles,
and so on, and try to see where the significant differences lie.

Stories, games, toys, puzzles, races, etc. all have some attributes in common, but the proportions of those
attributes make some activities more gamelike. Thinking about the role
of attributes such as interactivity, representation, challenge, and risk can help us understand the nature of a particular learning game,
what types of learning objectives it might be most effectively used
for, and what kind of learner might benefit from it.

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An Actionscript 3 Drag and Drop Medical Treasure Hunt Game

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This game is a framework to create a simulation of a crash cart in a hospital. A crash cart is a red metal tool cart with 6 drawers, filled with the items used by the Cardiac Arrest team to save people’s lives when they have a cardiac arrest. Speed is of the essence in an arrest, so the people on the team need to know exactly where each item is in the drawers. The goal of this game is to help train team members to find the items they need.

VIEW DEMO

An item to be found is randomly chosen, and the player clicks on a drawer and looks through the items to find the one they are looking for. When it is found, they drag the item to the target (which will probably be animated and a whole lot cooler looking in the final game. If they get it right, they get positive feedback of some sort and another item is chosen. If not, the item pops back to its last position before the drag and they get another chance to find the correct item.

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Virtual Cardiac Arrest Cart Treasure Hunt game: Adapting the game to your needs

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A while back I wrote [LINK] about a treasure-hunt-style game we developed in-house for training purposes. The purpose of the game is to help healthcare professionals memorize the location of items stored within a cardiac arrest cart, to make things go smoothly when every second counts.

A cardiac arrest cart (or “crash cart”) is a red metal tool cabinet, filled with items like airway tubes, IV needles, masks and other supplies used in advanced cardiac life support. The goal of this game is to learn where all the items are by retrieving the requested item from the cart by opening drawers, then dragging the item to a target for checking.

VIEW DEMO of the Virtual Cardiac Arrest Cart

DOWNLOAD SOURCE files for the cart game.

Game play

  1. When the game loads, a cardiac arrest cart stands off to the left. A specific item is chosen at random and requested in a message toward the bottom of the screen.
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