3 Serious Game Myths That Hold The Industry Back (+1 Problematic Fact)
I started designing games for impact in 2012, the year after Jane McGonigal’s seminal work “Reality Is Broken” made serious gaming a topic of discussion in research labs, classrooms, NGOs, and companies around the world. Since then, I’ve had to explain what exactly it is I do countless times, and consequently have become quite good at it. In this process, I’ve come across certain… let’s say, patterns of misunderstanding about these playful objects, what they are, and what they can do. Or, to put it more succinctly, myths.
At times, these myths have created confusion, mismatched expectations, and even distrust. I outline three of these myths below in an effort to clear things up, and then offer one problematic fact that serious game designers need to reckon with to gain the trust of partners and clients and take the craft of serious game development into the future.
Myth #1: Chocolate Covered Broccoli
I’ve heard this one many times, often in excited tones. “Serious Games,” people will say, “are like chocolate covered broccoli!” The point being, that broccoli is good for you but a kid would never eat it. Meanwhile, chocolate is bad for you, but no one needs to be convinced to wolf it down. Educational or serious content is like broccoli, the idea goes. And the gameplay is the fun chocolate that sneaks in the boring stuff. You’ll be having so much fun, you won’t even notice you’re learning!
I’ll start with the most obvious problem with this analogy. Chocolate covered broccoli would taste vile, and no one in their right mind would eat it. The original purpose of the analogy was just this: covering your broccoli in chocolate doesn’t work. Sadly, too many serious games actually feel like this.
The chocolate / broccoli binary is a false dichotomy. It assumes two wrong things: first, people do not like learning. The fact is, if people are interested in a topic, they love learning. The second is that game mechanics and learning content are separate. The truth, as any accomplished serious game designer will tell you, is that the key to a great serious game is ensuring that the central mechanic of the game is not just super-fun but also communicates something fundamental about the content by itself. This is the challenge and power of serious game design, not treating people like your dog when you slip a pill into a spoonful of peanut butter.
Myth #2: Serious Games And Gamification Are Different
I’ve talked about this before at length, and people tend to get wrapped around the axel about definitions when it comes to this stuff. I used to be quick to tell people that apps like DuoLingo are not serious games, they are gamification. And games like Oregon Trail are not “gamification” they are educational games. The reason for this distinction is that gamification is the use of game mechanics in non-gaming contexts, such as adding points to your credit card to encourage you to spend more. Whereas games have a rich academic discourse around them focused on a definition that hinges on resolving actions into win and loss states.
However, after teaching this stuff for years in college classrooms, the distinctions started feeling very… academic. And worse than that, I saw them being used to denigrate others’ work and preferences. People, for one ideological reason or another, love to claim that one of these modes of interaction (games or gamification) is more respectable, or more ethical than the other. Or that certain games are not “real” games, but rather toys or playful pastimes.
Over time, I’ve come to think of a game as any playful, rules-based activity, a radically inclusive definition that holds up House, “Animal Crossing”, and “Call of Duty” as the same exact art form, each the intellectual and spiritual equal of the others. And by this definition, DuoLingo is a game, too. I don’t get hung up on “win states” or “strategy” anymore. The strength of a gamified experience and a serious game are exactly the same: they use the play-drive that every human has inside them to create certain behaviors and ways of thinking about the world. Once you start thinking about games and play in this way, it frees you to design the solution that people really need, putting the player (or user) first, not the ego of the designer.
Myth #3: Games For Change
The myth I want to call attention to here is one shared by amateurs and professionals alike. It is the idea that a player will play a game, and that this game will somehow change them.
This isn’t a dig on the Games For Change summit, where a lot of interesting work is celebrated and presented each year. It’s also not an attack on games with an artistic or political point of view. I think every game is fundamentally political, so the designer owes it to their player to at least be thoughtful about it.
But no game is so good that a player can play it once and come out the other side with new, lasting behaviors. How do I know this? I’ve tried! I spent years developing games for diversity training, and when we measured attitudes and behavior in a scientific way, we found that there was no measurable difference in any of the subjects. Let me be clear. The game was good. It was so fun and made its point so clearly that it was an official selection at IndieCade, the game industry’s version of the Sundance Festival. It’s a great game and was thoughtfully designed. It just doesn’t work, at least not in the way it’s implemented. I’ve also read similar studies about industry darlings like “Spent” and “Papers, Please” that show the exact same thing.
“Papers, Please” is an amazing game. It’s extremely engaging and thoughtful, and treats immigration as a complex issue with no clear good guys or bad guys. It also has no measurable impact on players’ attitude toward immigrants.
“Paper Please” is an amazing game … It also has no measurable impact on players’ attitudes towards immigrants.
The truth is, we are affected by the media we consume, but in subtle ways. Games are just one of many cultural projects we encounter each day, and for every thoughtful serious game we play, there are dozens of others that are pure entertainment games with little to no thought about its cultural impact.
So how do you actually make a game that modifies behavior? Sustained play over time that is tailored to a specific player demographic and scaffolded to real world action. How do I know? I’ve done that, too, and done the assessments. This was true both in rural Ghana, when I designed a game for hand washing with soap for school children, and in the developed west when I created measurable health impact as Lead Game Designer for Sidekick Health. (See, games and gamification are the same).
Finally, One Problematic Fact: We Don’t Actually Know If They Work
One thing that serious game designers don’t like to talk much about is assessment. With some exceptions, like the ones I talked about above, most serious games are never measured, not in any rigorous way. And when they are measured by third parties, we find that they sometimes do not work, or even have the opposite effect from their intention! This is a serious problem. People are rightfully distrustful of serious games as a science and art form for behavior change. In order to fix this, the serous game industry needs to get serious about evaluation. Until this happens, we’ll stay stuck in 2011 forever.
Sam Liberty is a serious game consultant and former Lead Game Designer at Sidekick Health. He teaches games design at Northeastern University.
