The move beyond edutainment: have we learnt our lessons from the entertainment industry?

Serious games (SGs) have been used in the education of students and professionals for decades, but still have not reached their full potential, despite the large consensus they have gained recently. The entertainment game industry is a rapidly developing phenomenon, with a high market potential, enabled and enhanced by technological innovation. The question examined in this paper is: Did serious game designers learn from Entertainment Game (EG) designers in building a successful game? This paper presents three case study examples of games that have good learning outcomes to explore this question. This paper discusses the salient aspects and the differences between the examples and suggests how SGs could learn more from successful EGs.

[1]  David R. Michael,et al.  Serious Games: Games That Educate, Train, and Inform , 2005 .

[2]  Riccardo Berta,et al.  Assessment in and of Serious Games: An Overview , 2013, Adv. Hum. Comput. Interact..

[3]  Casper Harteveld,et al.  Making Sense of Virtual Risks: A Quasi-Experimental Investigation into Game-Based Training , 2013 .

[4]  Regina Bernhaupt,et al.  Evaluating User Experience in Games - Concepts and Methods , 2010, Human-Computer Interaction Series.

[5]  Hiller A. Spires,et al.  21st Century Skills and Serious Games: Preparing the N Generation , 2008 .

[6]  S. Wilson.  What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy , 2006 .

[7]  Alessandro De Gloria,et al.  Investigating the added value of interactivity and serious gaming for educational TV , 2011, Comput. Educ..

[8]  Deborah A. Fields,et al.  Connected Play: Tweens in a Virtual World , 2013 .

[9]  Thomas W. Malone,et al.  Toward a Theory of Intrinsically Motivating Instruction , 1981, Cogn. Sci..

[10]  Rafael Bidarra,et al.  Balancing Pedagogy, Game and Reality Components Within a Unique Serious Game for Training Levee Inspection , 2007, Edutainment.

[11]  Sylvester Arnab,et al.  ACCESSIBILITY, REUSABILITY AND INTEROPERABILITY IN THE EUROPEAN SERIOUS GAME COMMUNITY , 2013, eLearning and Software for Education.

[12]  Michael K. Thomas,et al.  Making learning fun: Quest Atlantis, a game without guns , 2005 .

[13]  Casper Harteveld,et al.  Triadic Game Design - Balancing Reality, Meaning and Play , 2011 .