Serious Games: What is a game?
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.
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.