Serious Games (SG) are entering more and more the educational world. Games in education make it possible to overcome practical constraints of real-world settings and explore the boundaries of virtual spaces. Modern Game-Based Learning (GBL) approaches are commonly build on applications that have defined learning outcomes and are designed to promote active participation and interaction, balancing the pedagogical objective with the game play, in order to enhance the ability of the learner to retain and apply the knowledge gained to the real world while being completely involved and thus more receptive. SGs often exploit narratives, storylines, visual elements and other features common to entertainment games, such as scoring and social networking in order to motivate and engage players in a learning activity.
These games have learning goals and pre-defined structure to achieve the pedagogical goal, but in addition are adaptive and interactive and most importantly they provide enjoyment, pleasure, motivation, gratification and emotion, in order to achieve learner engagement and involvement. Games create simulated environments that facilitate immersion, allowing learners to explore alternative approaches to situations virtually, in order to directly experience practical and emotional consequences of their actions. Through these approaches, GBL allows learners to directly though virtually experience the real-world by developing their awareness of consequentiality through doing and experiencing. For example, SGs can combine a wide range of different kinds of inputs and outputs for understanding complex social issues like poverty or immigration. This requires adopting multiple viewpoints and scenarios to analyse cause and effect. SGs provide an environment for active, critical learning, allowing users to explore skills, methods, and concepts rapidly within a safe experiential environment designed with behavioural learning components. The potential learning outcomes include changes in participants’ behaviour, knowledge, skills, attitudes, and/or levels of functioning.
Sónia Hetzner 