Advertainment and Edutainment games

Nielsen starts chapter 9 with the other uses of games which are growing these days. Games based on education, edutainment, and advertainment are called serious games. Advertainment is a term for advertising and entertainment. Nielsen mentioned advantages of the advertainment games.

“As video games reach a broader audience, product placement becomes a more appealing option for a wider variety of global brands. Product placement differs significantly from traditional advertainment games as product placements can in principle be implemented in any computer game.” (Nielsen, pg207)

I strongly agree with this. For advertisers, they need to target audience very precisely. Age, gender, class, and any other factors determining the segmentation are significantly functioning in advertising. When advertisers and corporations want to target some specific target like male from teenager to adult who is really into sports, they might not want to avoid the fact that they can use the sports games as advertising, because the people who play the sports games will flawlessly fit in the segmentation that the advertisers want to target. Lots of advertising can be seen in the games. For example, when you play sports games, you might see some ads posting on adboards in a stadium. the ads are exposed to audience as much as people play the game.


The traditional education games were different from modern edutainment games. There was a problem within the old types of education games. Students might figure out an easy way to prove all the questions offered by game producers based on their game experience and they even can make wrong assumption. There are different kinds of educational computer games. First one is commercial educational video games like edutainment. Second one comprises commercial entertainment titles for education. Third one is research0based educational video games. (Nielsen pg. 210) There are some problems regarding edutainment in terms of instructional approach, and educational use. Problem can be found from students’ interest and engagement, and students are unsure whether to approach the video game as play or learning. In conclusion, Nielsen said it seems to be difficult to find educational effects of video games due to the fact that assessment of edutainment outcome is incredibly difficulty, and there are numerous barriers blocking the educational use of video games.

Here’s my question for you guys. Have you ever played education game? what’s the name of it? And was it effectives?