Tag: progression

Serious Games: discussion of the Virtual Knee Surgery game

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

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

  • 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: 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.

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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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