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

Not new, 8 bit computer had great educational

[gbrandt]

Back in the day....

Selling those 8 bit Commodores, "back in the day", the educational software market was huge...MAvis Beacon, Carmen Sandiego. Most adults bought the machine for their kids and the first software purchase was for education...then games. It wasn't until the later 8 bit years nearing the 16 bit years that games took off bigger than educational software.

Gregor

A Serious Growth Area...

[Red Samurai]

Better get that checked out...

Maybe someday...

[HolyCrapSCOsux]

When long division becomes as fun as slapping hookers, stealing cars, and mowing down hordes of aliens with a chaingun....

Re:Maybe someday...

[CogDissident]

funner.

Imaginary Numbers = Good.
Imaginary Words = Bad.
You may be good at math, but I think you need more time with those language edutainment games.

Re:Maybe someday...

[sesshomaru]

I think funner is just as cromulent a word as edutainment. (See, changing nter to du makes it cool. Or not. Please tell me that this abomination of a word hasn't made it into Websters....)

Remember when Trip Hawkins at 3DO was pushing "Edutainment" as the "wave of the future!" I think that system was mainly used for playing Japanese "H" Games at the end of its lifespan....

So, I guess if I really want to get the jump on this new "edutainment" trend, I should start investing in companies that produce H games....

A Far Cry.

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the use for Farcry for geovisualization*

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

how many?

[Surt]

"How many of our traditional education and training courses will be taken over by games over the next few years?"

All of them. I'm particularly looking forward to playing Super Quantum Chromodynamics Brothers II, Welfare Fraud Investigator Deluxe, and Tom Clancy's: State Farm Policy Insurance Ghost Writer.

Government/ Military

[runlevel 5]

I think there was a /. article a few months back that talked a bit about the increasing use of combat simulators in military training programs. What software developer wouldn't want to tap into the [infinitely deep] pockets of the government?

Re:Edutainment? *sighs*

[CogDissident]

Yes, we hate idiots.
No, you really don't want to validate their existance by responding to them.
(Yes, this message is self defeating.)

What about the classic

[LWATCDR]

Flight Simulator?
I would like to see more open ended games that didn't involve killing people or being a criminal.

This is great news!

[xmtrx]

The time is ripe to pitch these blockbuster web-app edutainment titles:

The Matrix: Excess XSS

and

The Matrix SQL: Injected

...pending franchise approval, of course.

(The Brothers Wack' have already covered buffer overruns.)

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

[Lord_Dweomer]

I'd really love to see some development in games dealing with building social skills. That may seem like an oxymoron but there's really something to be said for learning skills in an environment that does not induce the full amount of stress that the real world situation does.

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.

And for you smartasses who are going to answer "I got a game for you, its called Real Life"....my response to you is that as someone with Social Anxiety Disorder, it isn't always as simple as "oh, I'm nervous around people so I'll go talk to as many as I can to try to get over this". Often times there is a specific underlying fear of the social interaction itself (or many fears) that need to be worked on before someone is able to test their skills out on a real person. I honestly think that the one person qualified to make such a game would be David DeAngelo. Some of his stuff may be fluff and an attempt at pushing more product, but at his core, he knows his shit and he speaks the brutal truth about interaction with the opposite sex.

Warning: "serious" is overloaded in this context..

[wowbagger]

Warning: "serious" is overloaded in this context:
"serious games"

Found 2 possible classes:

"Serious::Game" in namespace "Croteam"
"Serious::Game" in namespace "adjective"

Didn't anybody else think <voice="Serious Sam">"Cool - Croateam are doing more Serious games - let's get our Serious Bombs and go kick some serious ass!"</voice>

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.