For which types of target audiences are serious games particularly well suited?


Dr. Maren Metz: Users of serious games include pupils, young people doing professional training, office workers, and managers. However, they primarily appeal to so-called "digital natives", that is, people who have grown up with digital technologies. For these people, dealing with digital media is a familiar and positive experience. The media competence they develop is important for this kind of the learning platform.

What are the advantages of serious games compared to other self-instructional methods?


Dr. Maren Metz: Serious games fulfill the desire to learn independent of time, place, or situation. Among their other advantages is the large variety of perspectives and topics, the possibility to gain concrete experience, and the chance to engage in a particular type of reflection. Serious games are seen as offering a high degree of learning autonomy since they can be engaged in individually and give users control to match the game to their personal requirements.

The users can play through various scenarios and view the topic to be learned from various perspectives. They can also assume multiple roles and try alternative approaches to the problems. The learning process is embedded in a context that requires complex action, decision making, and finding solutions - and permits various ways to those solutions. The learning scenarios can be worked on individually, in social networks, or in cooperation with specific groups.

Serious games set a learning process in motion on three general levels. The first is the level of content-related problem. This includes, for example, dealing with complexity, contexts, and decision making, as well as the ability to organize dealing with problems and organization approaches to tasks.

The second level entails individual thought processes, motivation, and emotions and particularly the ability of self-regulation.

The third level is related to dealing with social factors and processes. At this level in particular, serious games make it possible to analyze and train concrete competences, as well as the development of new or informal existing competences.

Further advantages of the game-based method of learning are the high level of activity involved and their great intrinsic learning motivation. Unlike other types of eLearning, serious games create a challenging and provoking and captivating learning scenario. Challenging means an average level of difficulty of consecutive tasks that can be solved with a high probability of success, engendering a flow effect and a concomitant feeling of satisfaction. In combination with a strong focusing of the concentration, there is immersion into the learning scenario. This immersion in the serious Game leads to a high intrinsic motivation that facilitates learning.

What special didactic demands have to be met when producing serious games?

Dr. Maren Metz: Serious games are action-oriented learning tools with the advantages of computer-based learning. Among the essential didactic demands are special factors that promote learning, such as making possible self-determined and active learning that permits significant autonomy on the part of the learner.

Therefore it is important to make it clear in advance what can and should be learned with serious games. Whether the projected learning aim matches the requirements of game-based learning (e.g. experimental learning, problem-based learning) must also be considered. The game-specific factors, too, are important, before learning-activities are designed, such as the depth of the levels, the quality of the presentation, the degree of accuracy, and the specifications of the game. The special needs of the individual learner and the learning group must also be taken into consideration.

Serious Games should always include phases for reflection for the individual as well as group-related learning activities. The learning effect of serious games is intensified by a didactic structuring of the self-observation and self-reflection because just as experience makes effective learning possible, so does understanding what was experienced and learned. The learning effect in serious games is thus reinforced when the game is integrated into a general coaching-based concept. This professionally led reflection before, during, and after a serious game is important for the transfer and the remembering of what has been learned.

Isn't the production and use of serious games quite an "expensive kind of fun" that only a few companies can afford?

Dr. Maren Metz: Besides some free serious games, off-the-shelf products with specific learning scenarios such as the acquisition of project-management skills can be purchased. There are also serious games available through a user license. And existing serious games can later be adapted to the specific needs of the institution, the firm, or the employees. All of these possibilities are more economical than having a completely new serious game developed. Furthermore, there is an observable dynamic that shows an increasing number of serious games coming out on the market and these lead to a broader range of more affordable learning methods.

In the medium or long run, will the ever be more than hype or a marginal phenomenon?

Dr. Maren Metz: The increase of new technical possibilities, expanded realites, and the rapid, dynamic development of virtual learning worlds are also changing the structure of further education. Computers have already altered free time and the routine of work. Surveys show that there is a computer in almost every household, computer games have become firm component of common recreational activities, and even children are active in virtual worlds.

The world of work has also changed, with virtual hiring tests, computer-based job interviews, Internet-based assessment-center exercises, virtual conferences, virtual consulting session, virtual coaching, and virtual therapy sessions.

Game consoles and particularly multi-touch devices offer a broad spectrum of possibilities for learning. This means that further education, too, has to come to grips with modern, more effective, and more efficient learning methodologies and accept the increasing spread and sophistication of technology. Serious games, with their pedagogic added value, succeeds in this in diverse learning contexts. Therefore, it's safe to assume that they will continue to enter the realm of education and training and ultimately establish themselves in the next few years. Their innovative concept and high degree of transferability gives serious games the potential to assume an important role as an experiential method in the familiar world of education an training.

Do Serious Games have the potential to change how people learn?

Dr. Maren Metz: In the future there will be an even closer link between the technologies of the entertainment field and the training sector. Surveys of experts who work on future educational trends confirm this. Serious Games use the perceptible dynamism of virtualization and merge knowledge generation and competence development with technology and learning. They complement traditional learning methods and have the potential to expand and extend the ways people learn just as virtual worlds have already changed the leisure time children and adolescents today. At the latest, these generations will certainly adopt serious games as a learning tool, but even today institutions and businesses have recognized the advantages they offer. Serious games are and will be an important topic in education and training, and with their great potential, are certain to be far more than mere game-based entertainment.