Serious Games: Potential problems with using serious games

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Potential problems with using serious games

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“Although games can be effective learning environments, not all games are effective, nor are all games educational. Similarly, not all games are good for all learners or for all learning outcomes.”

– Diana Oblinger, 2006

      When deciding to use a game for training, it’s important to clearly state your learning objectives and to determine exactly what advantages the game will provide. If the game is too easy or too hard, or does not focus on the objectives, it may simply waste the learners’ time. Depending on the type of game you intend to use, you may need to go through a substantial testing phase to ensure success.

      Some of the possible issues to watch out for:

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    Serious Games: Why use games for training?

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    Why use games for training?

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    “Without motivation there is no learning”

    -James Paul Gee

    “If a learner is motivated, there’s no stopping him [or her]”

    -Will Wright

    Why is there so much excitement around the idea of using games for
    workplace training? Simply put, games have some advantages that make
    them exceptionally suited for training in certain situations.

    One word: Engagement!

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    Serious Games: discussion of the Virtual Knee Surgery game

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    The Virtual Knee Surgery game as a window onto some gaming concepts

    Virtual Knee Surgery is designed to teach high school students some of the
    concepts and steps in a knee replacement procedure. It is fairly simplistic but demonstrates some typical game structures and objectives well. You can try the real Virtual Knee Surgery game here, or just follow along with some of the screenshots below.

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    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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    Music: why not a finger-sensing keyboard?

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    Electronic keyboards like the Yamaha Motif or Korg M50 often have a “Split” feature, allowing different patches to be assigned to different sections. For example, the bottom 18 or 20 keys can be assigned to a bass patch, leaving the rest of the keys assigned to an electric piano sound. These splits allow not just the patch to change, but the pitches as well. For example the bottom keys can sound an octave lower than they ordinarily would.

    Small keyboards often have buttons that shift the octave to the left or right on the fly, effectively increasing the number of keys without the weight.

    There is another split type that is possible nowadays but apparently no manufacturer has done it yet. What if the patch or pitch range were assigned to each key in real time by which finger or which hand touched the key?

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