Emerging trends in serious games and virtual worlds

Description

The role of ‘serious games’ in modern culture is a recent phenomenon, and broadly arises out of the wider use of electronic gaming for leisure purposes and the increasing use of the internet to support large online communities. Serious games, as distinct from leisure games, provide users and players with opportunities to explore non-leisure applications using games and immersive world applications for education and training, as well as supporting business and medical uses (Michael and Chen, 2006). The term has been coined to create a separation between leisure and non-leisure games-based activities in order to take games as training or learning tools more seriously. The use of serious games, in this way, may engage under-served learners, liven up school and tertiary curricula or provide support for lifelong learners in new and innovative ways.

The emergence of virtual world applications such as Second Life and ActiveWorlds provides potential for supporting learning communities in new ways. Virtual world applications, like immersive serious games applications, offer the capacity for using three-dimensional spaces as new learning spaces. This can support seminar activities, streaming lectures, create cybercampuses and help to support distributed and remotely located learner groups. This may add value to existing educational provision, as well as extending new provision of learning.

Serious games and virtual world applications offer great potential for learners to step inside the screen of their imagining with such possibilities as roleplaying characters from history to re-enact events such as in the game mod (modification) of Neverwinter Nights, Revolution, which was modified by researchers at MIT in order to study the effectiveness of game-based learning with students of history. The idea was to help students to role-play social characters during the American Revolution to allow them to empathise with the people from that time. These formats can also be used to role-play researchers perhaps interviewing famous scientists long deceased, or as scientists undertaking experiments only possible in outer space (see Figure 1). In this latter example, students can use the tool developed by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to enact physics experiments that cannot be employed in the real lab. Learners could also become virtual tourists visiting museums a thousand miles away (de Freitas, 2006; Sandford et al., 2006). In addition, these applications are supporting a whole host of social interactions providing scope for learners to meet with mentors and subject experts from around the world, undertake virtual work experience or form a distributed learning community to solve challenges and problems, play educational games and share and produce content.

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