What is a serious game?
Jord Rolland de Rengervé
Freelance - Agile Coach | Tribe Scrum Master | Serious Game Workshop Facilitator | Innovation Enabler | Program Manager | Conference Speaker
“To enter into a game is to enter another kind of space where the rules of ordinary life are temporarily suspended and replaced with the rules of the game. … .This agreement amongst other players to suspend reality creates a safe place…” abstract from the book Gamesorming by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo
A game is a safe place to try new experiments and take risks with consequences limited to the time boundaries of the game. It's also a good way to convey learning without having to use slide decks. The actual benefit of using a serious game for teaching is that the attendees of your course are actually practising to subject matter instead of passively listening.
Moving motivators is an excellent example of how a tiny game, a ten cards deck, can foster team spirit and transmit knowledge about team motivation.
Serious games are used to animate workshops, facilitate brainstorming or as tools in a coaching activity.
Since communication is probably the most common issue in companies, what about learning best practices and acquiring tools to support it by playing the MeWe serious game created by Dahm Mongkol Hongchai, ABD ?
Workshop facilitation works best with serious games, we can reconnect with our child's brain, a limitless area of creativity. Serious games can be used to bring in innovation topics in workshops: product boxes combined with divergent and convergent thinking are great ways to foster innovative approaches in solution designs.
Where can you find serious games?
You can follow The Serious Gamers or follow Jord Rolland de Rengervé posts on LinkedIn tagged with #seriousgame If you speak French you can find a lot of resources in The Open Serious Game movement and following the tag #openseriousgame.
Organisatie Coach, Facilitator & Serious Game Master
2yThanks for writing this post :) I'ld like to add my thoughts on the definition of what a serious game is. A lot of games from Gamestroming (and management 3.0) I call 'Gamified activities' instead of games. There is a subtle but important distinction for me to distinguish them. With a gamified activity 'real world' context is used. It blends with the game world, thus not fully closing of the boundary of the game world. The immersion and therefor flow could be less. In case of Moving Motivators people use their own, constrained, context of what drives them. The game world only exists by the rules and constraints, not by framing. So although by the definition provided this is a serious game, the feeling people have, at least for me, is more of an exercise instead of a game. Reason for me this is an important distinction is because games allow metaphors to be build. This causes immersion that might lead to more impactful outcomes since it ties an experience, and thus emotion, to the activity. In The Serious Game Lab we will go a bit deeper in to this theory.