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Square Moves into Serious Games Biz
Kotaku has the word that Square/Enix is moving into the 'serious' games market. Serious Games, as they're known, attempt to do more than just entertain. Square has never previously created games for education, and so it's quite notable that company strategist Ichiro Otobe is now slated to give the keynote at this year's GDC Serious Games Summit. From the release: "The serious games market represents a new outlet for our skills as a game developer, and it means that we will be serving totally different customers. As such, there are many different kinds of hurdles that must be cleared in order for it to offer meaningful opportunities. I plan to speak about Square Enix's approach to these challenges, and hopefully provide both business and design inspiration for everyone interested in the uses of games beyond entertainment."
I have to wonder why this is the news story when we have current rumours saying Square are selling off Siken Densetsu, Chrono and the Kingdom hearts franchises. Wouldn't this be a massive news story as opposed to Square failing in the educational market?
I like muppets.
Isn't this just the natural progression from their failed movie studio and the 'movie games' they've been making for the past few years?
"Moogles and Chocobos teach sex education"
Monstar L
So Square is coming to a full circle in game design?
If anything, this announcement should've come months ago when games like Brain Age took over the Japanese sales charts. Such "productivity" titles make perfect sense for a massive studio's diverse portfolio, as they cost less to make and tap into a broader market. Perhaps the studio's ties with Disney will come into play with educational software, for starters?
FFX meets... the lewis & clark expedition... just imagine the boss battle when they get to the mouth of the columbia river... :D
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
for this type of thing.
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- games.html
I'm quite interested in games for education. I think games are made to educate and there's nothing wrong with exploiting this to make learning more fun for kids and adults. Games like Civilization and Colonization have done this to some extent for me when I was learning history at school. I know of one Polish guy who learnt his English with the help of Monkey Island one. Great! An exciting future. The DS already has a "brain training game" that lets you brush up on your maths as well as inmrove less defined "brain skills" and in Japan there are several language games that help you learn English, Spanish or French (and also deal with the history and sites of countries using those languages.)
So that's good, but what's not good is a growing number of people labelling such games as serious games. This is a bad bad label, if the person who created this label was here now I'd very much like to bop him (or her) on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper and maybe waggle a warning finger at them. Here's the wikipedia definition of "serious games":
Serious games (SGs) are computer and video games that are intended to not only entertain users, but have additional purposes such as education and training. They can be similar to educational games, but are primarily focused on an audience outside of primary or secondary education.
Pah! Psst! Pah!
If you call one group of items serious you are suggesting all other items are some how less serious. Let's take people, if I said "serious people" you might form the following model in your mind.
Serious People: Buisness Men, World leaders,
Non-serious People: Comedians, Artists, Bums, Clowns, Mimes...
So imagine if this shadowy education group had targetted music instead of computer games, they would like us to form the following mental model.
Serious Music, music that educates:
Sing 2 School - Multiplication Hip Hop
Alphabet - Music for Clever Kids
Non-serious music, music that fails to educate:
Classical, Rock and Roll, Pop, Jazz, Rap, Indie
Non-serious music, is that worthless, for kids stuff, that has nothing to redeem it - it merely entertains - it doesn't convey FACTS! Therefore it's not "serious" - it's a waste of time and you should be feeling very guilty about listening to it at all! You grubby hippie frittering your life away by enjoying yourself, I hope this chastizes you sufficently.
The same labels could be applied to books, instead of fiction and non-fiction we could relabel them serious and non-serious (or waste of time, guilty pleasure, whatever label seems to fit best.)
As I hope you can see this way of naming things doesn't help anyone and is a little insulting to anyone not creating media that's not primarily educational. I'd intially distrust anyone "seriously" throwing the term around. Serious is quite subjective, let's keep that way.
This a blog post from http://einfall.blogspot.com/2006/08/irked-serious
Replacing 'entertain' with 'teach':
They don't teach you anything, but they look absolutely fahhhboulous while they do it!
Among other things I didn't know before:
- When the Royal Navy used to send gigantic steel warships to shell the crap out of some primitive town from several miles offshore, they had to take precautions against being sunk by the local spearmen.
- The tobacco and cotton plantations of the American colonies were worked mainly by Indian converts and by transported criminals; no slave labour was used at any time.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I get the feeling that these games will be titled along the lines of "chocobo teaches typing", "chocobo math", etc.
"Serious Games, as they're known, attempt to do more than just entertain."
Back in the day, they were called "edutainment," but as I recall they all died of cholera.
Edutainment was typically used to characterize child education games, which is only a small subset of the 'serious games' category.
... some would argue that politics is a game, and it's not funny, so does that qualify it as a serious game?)
'Serious games' seems to be used to describe job training exercises, exercise games, games with political messages, and the casual puzzle games that are supposed to 'stimulate your brain'.
Do the labels really mean anything? Probably not, but if you think of edutainment as the only type of 'serious game', you'll miss a lot.
(hmm
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
I think he meant like, the Civilopedia and stuff. I did read those entries in Civ 1 and they were interesting reads. Of course, after I closed Civilopedia my Tank was killed by a spearman :)
Civ didn't teach based on what you did in the actual game. That should be obvious given that we haven't launched anything at Alpha Centauri, and nobody has yet achieved world domination. However, if you read the civilopedia, they do give you a substantial amount of information on what happened in real life. That bit of learning is even more present in Civ IV, where they give short bios of each of the leaders and things like that. All an educational game needs to do to be successful is give you enough information to make you go seek out more on your own.
...and now they say it's not a serious game?
ObWTF: WTF?
'Serious games' seems to be used to describe job training exercises, exercise games, games with political messages ...
Well, that's a relief. I was worried that they might be terrible and boring, like educational games were!
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Looking forward to Square's version of a Fire Fighter simulation that was showcased at the GDC Serious games summitt last year but with Final Fantasy characters. They should call it Final Fantasy Fire Fighters or FFFF for short!
Previewing comments are for sissies!
> but as I recall they all died of cholera.
:-(
Lucky sod. Mine all died of dysentery
Video games: Serious Business.
The "Serious Games" buzzword frequently refers to military training, first responder simulations, interactive political simulations, etc. They are typically not designed to be even remotely entertaining. The phrase is relatively new and should be more like "interactive simulation".
The "Edutainment" buzzword typically refers to K-12 educational games, and simple simulations. It's a pretty old phrase and pretty well understood.
Because Square has no actual *product* it's tough to tell where they lie.
I mean, DS is the preference when we talk about education/learning games. And it's for a [good] reason. I think the Chocobo and the Magic Book [Or something like that] game goes that way.
Minti: What's that huge shuriken in your back?! Kin: It's the instrument of my victory.