Gamepaddle Video Games. Education. Empowerment. Michaela Anderle & Sebastian Ring (Ed.)

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Video Games vs. Serious Games?

It appears that video games – described as reality mediated by digital technologies in which spontaneous, free, voluntary acts take place, purely for fun and detached from the urgencies and the boundaries of the ordinary life – must be folded and labelled as serious games, so that they might be considered as appropriate tools for the needs and culture of the educational institution in general – although something like a non-serious game might not exist (Andreoletti, 2010).

The debate about serious games, however, is not free from ambiguity and confusion: at a macro level it is likely to lose sight of the meaning that a video game should have into the wider world of the game, while at a micro level it tends to have an unclear idea about what the boundaries are that differentiate serious games from commercial bookshelf games (Rockwell & Kee, 2011). In some cases the latter acquire connotations of the first as they reveal educational purposes. In other cases commercial games seem to more or less concentrate on fun.

Serious games differ from commercial games in terms of an “educational purpose explicit and carefully weighted” (Abt, 1987), although other authors point out that the term “’serious’ in ‘serious games’ is intended to reflect the purpose of the game, why it was created, and has no bearing on the content of the game itself” (Michael & Chen, 2006). According to this concept the difference is only given by the intentions of the game designer, not by the product actually made.

Characteristics

The difficulty of defining what a game is also implicates the complexity of achieving a clear definition of video games. Omitting a cursory definition that refers to the video game as “a game whose rules are automatically managed by an electronic device that uses a man-machine interface based on the display as an output system” (Andreoletti, 2010), it is necessary to analyse the elements and dimensions of similarity and dissimilarity of video games and games. This examination is vital for the use of video games within training and educational courses.

Interaction and Participation

It’s a common opinion that the main feature of the video game is its ability to respond in an appropriate manner (output) to the stimuli offered by the player (input). In reality, this process must be seen as a reciprocal one, as even the player responds to situations presented by the game: the interactivity can then be defined as the ability “to test the environment, explore it and, finally, interact with it and change it” (Aukstakalnis & Blatner, 1995). The process of two-way interaction creates a strong bond between man and the machine and the reciprocal influence generated between the two systems creates dependency up to the point that the first completely immerses into the second and isolates himself from the real world, while the second cannot exist without the first, in the sense that man is the true engine of the playful activity.

The lived experience within a virtual world is defined by the David Zeltzer’s model (Zeltzer, 1992) and is represented by three dimensions:

• autonomy: “quantifies the ability of a computer model to react to an event or to a stimulus”;

• interaction: “defines the access to computer parameters, the ability to alter them and get an immediate reply”;

• presence: “quantifies the number and type of stimuli exchanged between the operator and the virtual world”.

Interaction described in this way only shows the existence of a reciprocal influence between the two systems without defining time, mode, purpose and quality of this relationship. “The interaction competes to technology, the participation competes to culture” as Henry Jenkins says (Jenkins, 2010). In Seymour Papert’s words, it “is not the computer that dominates the man but it is the man to dominate the computer” (Papert, 1994) and in consequence it can be argued that the interaction must be understood as the action that a person conducts within a given system.

The active dimension involves primarily that the subject has the awareness that he is the starting point and the end of the relation to technology and that the relation to it should be understood as a process of enrichment for him and the other players that can participate in the relation to and through technology itself. The participation must be understood as the way in which people interact within a given system.

The participation involves the knowledge of the nature of the relation to technology (video game) in the final dimension (because there is this relation?), in the modal dimension (in which way is this relation situated?), in the temporal dimension (when does it start, when does it stop and how many time does this relation take?), in the spatial dimension (where does this relation take place?) and in the relational dimension (who are the agents within this relation?).

Simulation and Immersion

The simulative function of the videogame results from a reconstructive process which reduces a world, a reality or a fantasy. This process is done by the game designer, which carries out an analysis of a phenomenon, of a process or of a system achieved through the construction of a mathematical model, which can be explained on two levels:

Macro: the inability to fully reproduce any existing system, by considering:

the complexity of the real world in its dimensions;
the ignorance of the real in its entirety;

Micro: the choices made by game designer that within a range of technological and playful constraints creates:

a closed system without any link to other systems;
a system adapted to the gameplay (Andreoletti, 2010).

The simulation element is already present in traditional games and appears to be meant as the detachment from the reality in which you live and to immerse into a new playful reality: on the one hand playing games means a close relation to reality and on the other hand to be separated radically. The player is aware of this situation because when he plays while remaining in the real world (we cannot be separated from it), he or she is found in another world, the fantastic one (re-) created in the game, which is closely tied to the real world (you cannot imagine anything outside of the existing).

The way of immersion in the reality of the game of each subject, can be explained following two axis:

Type of immersion: When a player plays, he or she immerses physically into a new reality, separated only formally from the world, and in it he or she interacts with the elements of the playful world. Interaction and immersion differ between the classic game and the video game. In the latter the immersive process moves from the sensory-motor axis (in the game the immersion is predominantly physical) to a logical-formal axis (in the game world the immersion is predominantly mental). The intellectual component of video games has a greater weight and role respect to the traditional game, as the playful activity takes place in a world reproduced within a machine, through algorithms, designed by a game designer. The courses of participation are mediated by a machine;
Level of immersion: While playing the subject participates freely and voluntarily in the playful activity with diversified degrees of involvement on the basis of personal (physical and psychic condition, humor, interest, etc.) and environmental factors (degree of definition of the setting, quality of the present materials, freedom of action etc.) factors. Being inside of the magic circle (Huizinga, 2002) created by the game does not imply the existence of an optimal level of involvement in the playful activity (immersion), but depending on the intention with which players decide to play may vary from time to time, going from a minimum level, where he plays a marginal role – in respect to the center of the action – to a maximum level, on which he is the engine (or one of them) of the playful activity.

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