Serious Game – one, nobody and 500 thousand

How to distinguish the Serious Game to what a Serious Game in not

Once upon a time. Finally, after years of shy peek out in the ranks of boring e-learning products more or less interactive, here we are the Serious Game! Those in the industry have heard about them for at least fifteen years, that is, since phenomena such as Second Life and Syms promised new ways of communication, training/ learning and selection.
Today the situation is 500,000 results by launching the label to the search engines. And now? Let’s do some order. How do you find your way in a world that is adjacent to the video game industry and crosses over to classic products such as In-basketball and Business Case?

What’s not a Serious Game?
– Video Game
– Video Storytelling
– In-basketball
– Business Case
– Webdoc
– Interactive surveys
…interactive stories, increased (cool!), with more or less complex evaluation systems are not Serious Game

I Serious Game: fundamental elements and important features
1. Real not-questionnaires simulators with multiple-choice questions! with which to train complex and systemic behaviours and skills. It consists in making meaningful experiences through a serious goal to achieve, such as solving a conflict, managing a problematic negotiation, carry out a project that involves relations with different interlocutors and resolution of different problems (cognitive, relational and possible)

2.  non-linear: they do not contain a story with one or more predetermined endings, as in the classic “crossroads” models, but many stories depending on the decisions that the player-participant will take during the simulation. In practice, different decisions will gradually change the connotations of history and the behaviour of virtual interlocutors (bots);

3. digital immersive environments where you can experience: when well designed, the possible endings are better than those provided by the designers. During the game every choice made contributes to build a player profile and the characters with which it will dialogue will change also concerning the style/ character expressed by the player.

4. continuous feedback: this is the real litmus test that denotes a Serious Game from a nice multimedia product. The feedback panel returns quantitative and qualitative elements to the player-participant who will try to analyse a new play to improve their performance. The goal well yes is just Trial & Error “try, try,
try…”

Trial&error, is this the most interesting feature, the basic paradigm of simulators and also for simulations in managerial training: repeated games allow the participant to come to know in a tacit way his style  understanding how it works to solve the situation and try different roads on the style of the sliding door.
Why are they so interesting for managers?
We’ll find out in the next article! Stay tuned!