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Serious Games

Serious Games. David Wortley is Director of the Serious Games Institute of Coventry University, who discussed the role of serious games in training and education, the nature of SGI’s unusual public/private partnership, and how they work with the developer community in their region of the UK.

Here is a very early part of the exchange:

BEYERS SELLERS: And can you give us some examples of the types of games that SGI is already involved in producing or plans to be producing soon?

DAVID WORTLEY: Yeah, I can. But before I do that I should just make it clear that the institute is a public/private partnership. We don’t actually develop the games and environments ourselves. What we do is work with industry to support the development of those games, so we act as kind of intermediaries and brokers. But the typical kinds of applications that are being developed with the companies that we work with are Serious Games for training people in entrepreneurship, business skills, health related activities. We have a company that specializes in games for teaching people how to handle trauma injuries in the battlefield or first responders, how to respond to an explosion in a high street and treat casualties. We’ve got a really wide spectrum of applications that we operate in.

Much of the remaining discussion was on the substance of, and market for, serious games. To those who have been following this industry, the greatest opportunities appear to be military and emergency-response applications, with business applications also in the mix (though my impression is that they are far behind). Also, David talked at length about his efforts to proselytize on the serious games front, getting for-profit, educational and government sectors to see they value they can have.

But part that I found particularly novel and interesting was David’s description of the way this group is working—not actually producing serious games, but serving as a support to an industry that is in a position to re-energize the West Midlands economy (which had been reliant on a now-downsizing automotive manufacturing sector), and are moving into…games!

To me, this is a mark that governments (in this case, a regional UK govt) see real growth coming in this area.

I wish David—and the West Midlands—the best of luck!

Today, January 28, 2008, Robert Bloomfield and “Metanomics interviewed David Wortley, Director of the Serious Games Institute, which is associated with Coventry University in the UK.

We welcome input from the Metanomics community in exploring these post-event discussion questions:

1. What is the importance of “fun” in serious games? Under what conditions must a game be “fun” for a serious game to reach its educational or functional objectives?

2. What are the implications of serious games for the future of education? What barriers must be overcome to finance and develop education-oriented games?

3. To what degree is SL’s engine sufficient for the needs of serious games? What must Linden Labs do to better provide “serious” applications, and what will happen if they do not provide this need?

4. There was some considerable discussion in backchat as the event unfolded about security and privacy issues that may exist for some serious games clients. What are significant considerations must be made by developers of serious games, and what are the solutions that have been found successfully in the past?

5. What are the considerations in applying simulations and experiments from Second Life or other virtual worlds to “real world” business and economic questions?

Additionally, here are some pictures taken during the event: