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Videogames have changed: time to consider ‘Serious Games’?
Benjamin Stokes, NetAid (www.netaid.org)
Acknowledgements to Edith Asibey and Justin van Fleet;
also to Dave Rejeski and David Williamson Shaffer
Interest in digital ‘Serious Games’ has been growing for the
past three years across nonprofit, government and media
sectors. A few development educators are already involved,
and that number will likely grow significantly in coming years
in both North and South. Benjamin G Stokes of NetAid explores
three educational opportunities in games - raising public
awareness, affecting behavior and empowering learners - and
discusses collaborative ways to move the agenda forward.
Accepted for June 2005 Publication with Referee’s Approval in
THE DEVELOPMENT EDUCATION JOURNAL (http://www.dea.org.uk)
The journal of the Development Education Association
Published by Trentham Books (http://www.trentham-books.co.uk)
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The term ‘Serious Games’ is increasingly used for digital games whose primary goal goes
beyond entertainment to education, outreach or training. The term’s use has grown largely through
the Serious Games Initiative, which started in 2002 at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International
Scholars in Washington, D.C. Today, hundreds attend conferences and collaborate online to find
out what Serious Games might bring to their jobs as educators, political organizers, academics,
game designers and more.
Despite videogames’ existence as a form of mainstream media, the adoption of Serious
Games by educators and theorists is just beginning. One likely reason is the reputation of
videogames as shallow and often violent indulgences. Historical comparison with the film industry
reminds us that it was only 30 years ago that commercial movies began to make inroads with
academics, but today film is widely studied on its own and in confluences across the university. As
the first generation to grow up with videogames approaches middle age, a similar tipping point in
games’ relevance to educators is drawing near.
Opportunity 1: public awareness campaigns
When you hear ‘videogames’ do you still think of teenage boys playing in the isolation of
their basements? Look again. Increasingly, the Internet allows games to become social
experiences across vast distances. Of equal importance is the demographic shift: the average
player in the U.S. will turn 30 next year and the industry’s Entertainment Software Association says
that one-in-three is female.
Consider ‘advergaming,’ which is gaining in popularity with awareness campaigns desperate
to combat the public’s growing indifference to television and print ads. A good example is
‘Smokeout Café,’ released by the American Cancer Society in late 2004
(www.nynjevents.org/site/PageServer?pagename=SmokeoutCafeGame). The game challenges
players to ‘throw’ orange wristbands at moving cigarettes, and each eliminated cigarette earns you
points. The wristbands are inscribed with the slogan ‘Livefree.
Smokefree.’ and can be ordered for $1US to be worn offline as
part of a larger awareness and fund-raising effort.
Advergames have several advantages over Public
Service Announcements on television or in print. One is the
comparatively low cost of such games - though they’re still not
cheap at $10,000 to $500,000 US. Perhaps more importantly, the player is exposed to the
UNICEF has succeeded in
attracting 11,000 web
visitors a day to
play at ‘Becoming a
UNICEF World Hero’.
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message for as long as they’re having fun – from minutes to hours. Finally, advergames can
supplement messaging with extending learning on demand. In Smokeout Cafe, clicking on ‘reasons
to quit’ will immediately lead you to lessons backed with statistics and stories. Such lessons in a
traditional advertising context would require the viewer to call a phone number, turn to their web
browser or visit a location in person.
Development organizations are giving advergaming a try. UNICEF, for example, has
succeeded in attracting 11,000 web visitors a day to play at ‘Becoming a UNICEF World Hero’
(Richtel, 2005). As educators become web savvy, games will continue to increase their ability to
reach and draw in online audiences.
Opportunity 2: affecting behavior
After raising awareness, many educators seek to inspire behavioral change. In 2002, an
online game began inspiring participants to risk their (real) lives - that’s some serious motivation!
This military recruiting tool, called simply ‘America’s Army,’ aims to deliver the values and
messages of the U.S. Army to young people and has reached nearly five million players over three
years.
The worldview promoted by America’s Army goes beyond messaging. In the game,
individuals and multiplayer teams train to complete tactical missions that, compared with the tiny
advergames, are much more immersive and prolonged. At a surface level, the vehicles and
weapons depicted in the game closely mimic their real-world counterparts. At a deeper level, the
game makes efforts to mirror the systemic requirements of the real-life Army, from deployment to
teamwork and hierarchy. In this way, following the Army’s worldview in-game is necessary to win.
For example, participants who do well earn ‘honor’ points that are required to enter restricted
portions open only to those of senior rank; for players working as medics, a primary focus lies in
and responding to the calls of injured players.
The game’s recruitment results aren’t public, but military spending patterns and occasional
inside quotes (Schiesel, 2005) indicate that it may be more effective than the Army’s traditional
advertising. Yet the game’s call to enlist is unusually soft. Each player simply experiences the
Army’s structure messaging for hours of emotional intensity. What can compare? Books and
videos can engage for hours, but actually inhabiting a space can profoundly put the learner in
someone else’s shoes. At its heart, America’s Army is a deep role-play, but with players interacting
with emotion in their own time outside the context of any classroom. The experiential depth means
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that those who enlist after playing do so with a relatively detailed, structured and hopefully
accurate vision of their future.
A very different and successful behavioral game was developed by Debra Lieberman et al to
‘improve self-management of diabetic children.’ The game’s heroes are diabetic elephants Packy
and Marlon, and the backdrop is a summer camp stricken by rodents who have scattered food and
diabetes supplies. The player’s goal is to keep their characters’ diabetes under control by
monitoring blood sugar, providing insulin and managing food intake.
The result has been a 77% decrease in hospitalization rates for youth given a copy of the
game (Brown et al 1997). To achieve this, Lieberman developed the game based on theories of
experiential education. It’s a good fit: common educational goals for diabetic children parallel what
experiential education can deliver, including quick retention and real-world performance. The
remarkable decline in hospitalization rates supports an experiential approach to game design when
seeking to affect behavior.
Opportunity 3: empowerment through game design
In a social justice context, the goal of changing behavior is typically to empower learners
toward a better future. One role for digital games is to ground hopes for this future into more
applied thinking, according to Dave Rejeski, head of the Serious Games Initiative. For long-term
thinking in particular, Rejeski believes that games might bring to life vital implications that, in
practice, are often overlooked.
Much as a picture can be worth a thousand words, an interactive game can trigger profound
insights for long-term thinking. Rejeski emphasizes two aspects, one of which is an understanding
of complex systems - a bird’s-eye-view which Rejeski refers to as ‘top sight.’ The need for such
tools can be observed, for example, in the difficulty of teaching complex concepts such as
sustainable development or global interdependence. A second aspect more literally explores time
by adding foresight to the simulation thus connecting actions in the present with implications in the
future.
One long-term thinking game is MassBalance, designed to ‘entertain and educate players
about some of the nuances of the Massachusetts' [state] budgeting process’
(www.playmassbalance.com). Players are challenged to successfully balance the state budget. By
offering the game for free online, many people - from journalists to academics to state
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representatives - are being pushed experientially to consider longer term implications of annual
budgeting decisions. The approach is spreading: similar budget games have been created in the
U.S. for Utah, California, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Texas.
One opportunity with games like MassBalance is to align learning with participation. Many
games integrate the simulation within an online community or connect it to government
communication channels. By doing so, what might otherwise be passive learning in a typical budget
news story becomes an integrated structure within the larger contexts of democratic discourse and
participation. In this way, the empowerment derived from the individual’s long-term thinking is
actively leveraged into media and government.
When the design emphasis turns to skills that make the greatest difference, a significant
challenge lies in determining what should be taught and what left out. Shaffer et al (2004)
summarize one approach where games may change the future of learning: take a hint from
existing communities of practice. For example, if real-world activists are already succeeding in on-
the-job training for generations of novices, then perhaps they are
already using the shortcuts between action and context which are
easiest to pass from one individual to the next.
Unfortunately, such in-person learning is often only available
if you’re a good investment for the activist-trainer: probably at least a high school graduate willing
to work full-time and unpaid for several weeks. In most cases this effectively limits access. Such
limitations are unacceptably narrow when the learning is about empowering citizens to improve
society.
Can games make learning from communities of practice accessible? Shaffer et al (ibid.)
claim the answer is yes, so much so that they declare games as necessary to understand the future
of learning. They assert that the virtual worlds of digital games can teach vital social practices
which are often otherwise inaccessible. Where we can observe communities of practice already
teaching global citizenship, we can design games for learning that employ the shortcuts of
professional activists.
In the North, one place where many professional activists are already working online can be
seen in the proliferation of advocacy websites. Such website infrastructure presents an unusual
possibility to connect game conditions to real advocacy. NetAid prototyped this approach in early
2004 with a challenge add-on to an online game for adolescents called Peter Packet. The animation
portion, developed by Cisco’s Creative Learning Studio, invited students to help Peter fight global
An interactive game
can trigger profound
insights for long-term
thinking.
6
poverty over the Internet by battling hackers and viruses. Characters for the background story
were drawn from three of NetAid’s partner field projects in Haiti, Zimbabwe and India.
The extension Challenge was a 10-day online competition to earn points by raising
awareness about the stories of poverty told in the animated game. Players earned five points if
someone donated in their name (regardless of the amount donated) and two points if someone
clicked on one of their awareness-raising emails. The temptation to spam was moderated by listing
the parent’s email address as the sender on outgoing email. Continuity was provided by
maintaining the look and feel, but the design then leveraged several components of the service
learning tradition. Reflection was encouraged by asking the recipients of the students’ emails to
start a dialogue using model questions with the student. Second, the service of raising awareness
was personally relevant and had real-world impact. Thus the Challenge prototype provides one
early model for how games might work hand-in-hand with online service learning.
The game-based motivation appeared quite effective with some students. One 11-year old
girl said, ‘Every day after school I went to check my points and the total money for poverty.’ The
top two competitors took enough action to each earn more than 50 points. The average Challenge
participant sent five emails, and one in five participants received a
donation. As far as the connection with the animated game,
approximately 10-percent opted to sign up for the Challenge,
indicating that traditional games may provide a bridge for more
involved advocacy-based activity.
Adding service into a game could be especially powerful given
how players self-identify in videogames. More than with a book or
movie, after a videogame it seems fair to claim pride in the hero’s
ultimate success because the player perceives their actions as
responsible for the success of the game hero (Gee, 2003). In the animated portion of Peter Packet,
this translates into emphasizing the identity of self-as-Peter-Packet, the superhero that succeeds in
fighting global poverty. In addition, the Challenge follows in the service learning tradition and
emphasizes real-world identity formation, and thus promotes the identity of self-as-real-world-
awareness-raiser. In combination, hero and service learning identities reinforce each other, but
also blend to form a third identity: self-as-Peter-Packet-with-real-impact. This last identity may be
especially helpful in a big challenge of global citizenship education: to help the player identify as
someone who is powerful enough to take real-world actions in fighting global poverty.
After a videogame,
it seems fair to
claim pride in the
hero’s ultimate
success because the
player perceives
their actions as
responsible.
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Collaboration to build game solutions
Despite the remarkable potential of the games described above, several barriers are likely
to slow newcomers. We can minimize these barriers in the future by choosing approaches today
that lay foundations for broader accessibility. This article concludes by matching three barriers with
suggested approaches to move the agenda forward.
Educational games are inherently interdisciplinary and the first predictable barrier lies in the
awkwardness of collaboration. A good example is the quick emotion stirred by the term
‘edutainment’ (a combination of education and entertainment). Many educators contend that
edutainment has largely produced shallow products focused on short-term test scores. Conversely,
game developers counter that edutainment has alluded to the visuals of games while overlooking
the centrality of fun and pleasure. Frequently they have both been right.
One resolution is to encourage communities which promote both educating and entertaining
as professional practices rather than simple skills. In the process, professionals become stewards
who depend on their peers for community standards. The popularity of the Serious Games
Initiative is already building momentum for such relevant sub-groups as Games for Change
(www.seriousgames.org/gamesforchange) which focuses on social change through nonprofit
professionals and their partners.
A second barrier is the cost of development. As pop-culture videogames align more closely
with Hollywood and its special effects, fundraising expenses often include both professional video
and technical engines. To help level the playing field, development educators should reward
approaches to game production that are designed to leave behind tools and media assets for low-
cost repurposing in the spirit of open source. Universities can help in this effort by building
collaboration between emerging games studies programs and organizations dedicated to the public
good. Finally, with games industry revenues outpacing Hollywood, commercial partnership remains
a tempting, if elusive target. One backdoor exists in the free tools that some companies offer so
their players can create ‘mods’ (modified versions of the original game). Building within commercial
games will help industry envision broader partnership and thus deserves support.
After construction, many games will need to overcome a third barrier: distribution. Even if a
new game fits within mainstream traditions, competition in these over-saturated channels means
standing out against marketing campaigns often costing 20% beyond game development. As a
sector, social impact games may need to create their own distribution channel to parallel what
public radio and television provide for broadcast media in many countries. Individual games can be
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encouraged in approaches that prioritize distribution as part of game design and that leverage
partnerships beyond traditional game channels. Throughout, we can minimize the effect on the
learning divide by supporting explicit North-South distribution and content sharing.
Game-based solutions can already provide outreach that goes beyond messaging to affect
behavior and empower learners with deep understandings of solutions, effective social practices
and powerful identities. Today’s development problems cry out for solutions and digital games will
likely be of growing relevance to development educators. Increasingly, the key question may be
how quickly we can bring the expertise of the games sector to bear on our own work.
References
Brown, SJ, Lieberman, DA, Gemeny, BA, Fan, YC, Wilson, DM, & Pasta, DJ (1997). ‘Educational
video game for juvenile diabetes: Results of a controlled trial.’ Medical Informatics 22(1), 77-89.
Gee, JP (2003) What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, Palgrave
Macmillan, New York, USA
Richtel, M, (2005, February 4) New York Times, ‘Is Instructional Video Game an Oxymoron?’
Schiesel, S, (2005, February 17) New York Times, ‘On Maneuvers With the Army's Game Squad’
Shaffer, DW, Squire, K, Halverson, R, & Gee, JP (2004). ‘Video Games and the Future of Learning’.
Report published by the Academic ADL Co-Lab, Madison, Wisconsin; Retrieved December 12, 2004,
from http://www.academiccolab.org/resources/gappspaper1.pdf
Benjamin G. Stokes manages NetAid’s digital unit on Education for Global Citizenship and is a co-
founder of Games for Change, a community of practice focusing on nonprofit goals and social
change as part of the larger Serious Games Initiative. He would like to give special thanks for help
in this article to Abby Falik, Stephanie Flournoy, Davis Forsythe, Joy Portella, and Caleb Stokes.
