I'm not sure about serious games. I've spent the majority of the first two days of GDC sitting in on the Serious Games Summit, and I'm still not sure what serious games are or why I should care.

Ben Sawyer has done an admirable job of popularizing the notion that video games can provide something more than idle amusement. His participation in the Serious Games Initiative (http://www.seriousgames.org/) has been instrumental in bringing games to the serious business of health, welfare and warfare. Kicking off the summit, Ben powered through a towering stack of slides in an effort to orient everyone to the area.

Here’s what I gathered:

• All games are serious
• The notion of “serious games” is an intentional, perhaps ironic, oxymoron
• Serious games are going to be something big, to someone, sometime.
• Educational software (Eduware, like Mathblaster) has harmed the good name of serious games, I assume, by being crappy.
• Lot of groups could use serious games, including:
  • The military
  • Higher education
  • Corporations
  • Non-government organizations
  • Journalism
  • Artists
  • As well as anyone who needs editorial expression, propaganda or has a political perspective to share.
  • In short, anyone, everyone.
• Serious games can be defined as “Any computerized game whose chief mission is not entertainment PLUS all entertainment games which can be reapplied to a difference mission other than entertainment.”

Serious games are more about “serious” than about “games”. Too much of the conversation at the summit was about how to borrow the “sex appeal” of games and lather it onto all sorts of other things, with training being the most popular target.

To his credit, Ben warned against what he called “transference” or, trying to sex-up dull things like microbiology with games. But, as far as I can tell, this is the most common mistake made by the practitioners.

Of the stuff that was demonstrated, I really only saw two kinds of serious games—task simulations and expressive objects. Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca showed their Dean for America game. This is an example of the expressive, serious game. Its goal was to leave some positive impression in the mind of the player. A game that allowed firefighters to practice responding to a biohazard from Carnegie Mellon and another title by a group that use games as a part of a therapy treating anxiety disorders (like using a driving game to help treat agoraphobia) were task simulations. The game structure in these cases really just coincided with the simulation needs of the learning or therapy.

To that end, Gonzalo and Ian’s game was an example of the more interesting side of serious games, but the side given almost no attention that I could see. Everyone wants to simulate and learn.

And here’s the point that bothers me: I spend many hours listening to people talk about serious games and I didn’t get the impression that the group of serious game folks really had a clear idea of what they wanted or how they would get there

I spoke to a Glyn Anderson about this. His company helps manage the development of the Full Spectrum Leader and Commander titles for the military. These games follow up the Full Spectrum Warrior title, and simulate platoon and company maneuvers. His description of the game makes it clear, the software they create is a video game. But when I asked him if the officers who trained on the software thought of it as fun, he didn’t seem to think so. It’s not that they hated the training. It seemed that they were more focused on learning the most effective way to manage their troops to achieve the goals with the least causalities. And that’s kind of the point. These programs sound like fun to me. But I don’t face the immediate prospect of leading of group of soldiers into a real battle. For me it’s a game. For the platoon leaders and commanders, it’s a simulation.

Maybe that’s what Ben was trying to explain. Maybe serious games is a silly aphorism for using the tools and technologies honed in the games business for purposes outside of entertainment.

That makes sense to me. But this whole idea of making learning more like a game sounds like a horrible idea. It sounds to me like one more clever way to overcomplicate learning with expensive tools. Learning is not a special thing that happens in a correctly controlled environment. We learn all the time. We can learn from games, sure. But once you add the serious, the game is gone. It’s probably good for PR to have something called the serious games summit at GDC. But I have a feeling that in retrospect, this might be akin to having a tractor display at a car show since they all use internal combustion engines. It’s the similarity that does not make a difference.