A 'Serious' Growth Area For Game Developers?

simoniker writes "The recently launched Serious Games Source website, which deals with games created for training, health, government, military, and educational uses, has an interview with the Serious Game Initiative's Ben Sawyer, in which the non-profit director, looking back at E3, comments controversially: 'I believe that every company in the games space will have a serious games related business position in the next ten years.' Sawyer especially referenced Square Enix's recent announcement that it has created a subsidiary to 'develop and distribute edutainment style software'. How many of our traditional education and training courses will be taken over by games over the next few years?"

Comments

A Far Cry.

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the use for Farcry for geovisualization*

*I have plenty more were that came from for anyone interested.

Here's more information....

[sesshomaru]

Here's more information, a Wired article about how 3DO is going to revolutionize the game industry... by destroying it to make way for "edutainment."

Oooh, it has "interactive movies" too... I'm actually salivating, "play an interactive movie: help create characters, shift the story line, change the situation, watch something different happen each time - cable in the VCR and edit your home videos." I'm sure that's going to beat the heck out of playing games! (Note, article is from May/Jun 1993 and titled "3DO: Hip or Hype? Is it the next Apple, Microsoft, and Nintendo rolled into one? Or is it too good to be true? Joe Flower finds out.")

Social Skills Building Games - the Sims?

[WillAffleckUW]

I think dating sims are a great start to this, but they are all fantasy based, very unrealistic etc. I'd love to see a video game that uses real life video of people to train you to better read facial expressions and body language as well as to learn good responses to situations that may cause social anxiety.

If anybody can think of any currently existing titles that are good for this, by all means please post them.

Hmmm. How about the Sims 2? Specifically, the Hot Date, University, and Nightlife expansions for that?

They're all fairly accurate, with a little bit of humorous silliness thrown in so it's not boring.

There's a reason why the Sims is the most widely sold computer game - most of the players are actually women and girls, in fact. But most game mechanics are based on actual psychology and sociology studies.