Serious game

A serious game is a game designed to teach or to change behaviour rather than primarily to entertain. It carries the marks of a game, a goal, rules, constraints, feedback and usually a score, but the content comes out of the player’s own reality.

A test measures whether somebody knows the answer. A game shows what somebody does when time is short and the information is incomplete. For procedures that are known on paper yet still go wrong in practice, that difference is the whole reason to build one.

Serious games pay off best on decisions under pressure: a shift handover missing information, an alarm that can be read more than one way, a choice between carrying on and shutting down. They are precisely unsuitable for pure knowledge transfer, where an e-learning module is faster to build and cheaper to maintain. The design costs more than a module, so the question up front is whether the behaviour really is stubborn enough.