In chapter 9, Nielsen discusses video gaming's potential as a form that is more than just an entertainment purpose. In order to more deeply engage in this topic, Nielsen introduces the term "serious game" that was coined by Clark Abt in 1968. The term, serious games, refers to video games that serve for purposes other than pure entertainment; serious games include games such as educational computer games, edutainment, advertainment, and also political games. However, as Nielsen states, "in theory, any video game can be perceived as a serious game depending on its actual use and the player's perception of the game expereience" (Nielsen 205), there isn't really a limitation to what games are considered as serious games and what games are not.
As we can easily see from the origin of the term (comes from the mixture of advertising and entertainment), advertainment refers to video games that are used for marketing purposes. These types of games are now easily findable since many global brads now use advertainment as a good marketing/advertising strateigies. The main object of advertainement games are focused on trying to expose the brand name or products as much as possible. The message that these games contain are very visible and thus, they are called the "giveaways". The games that integrate the message within the gameplay are called the "intergal games", but advertainment games are rarely integral games since the profit that can be gained from "giveaways" are much more profitable comparing the resources and finances invested to create advertainment games. Another use of advertainment in video games is that companies paying game publishers to put their products in the game context. This benefits both companies who want to advertise their products and game publishers because placing the real world products can increase the realism of the game while expose the brand name/products to players who play the game. Almost all blockbuster games now do incorporate advertainment elements in their games to increase the realism and get funded at the same time. For example, Konami's bestseller game, Winning Eleven (Pro Evolution Soccer) series now have football stadiums that are surrounded by posters of real world companies' products/names (such as Nike, Samsung, etc) to mimic the stadiums of the real world.
Another type of serious game is political games. Political games serve to set a political agenda within the game context. For example, Nielsen gives September 12th as the example of political games that try to insert the political idea of the aftermath of terrorism to players. Political games are often used by U.S. Army as of way to encourage patriotism to U.S. citizens to join the army. Some games are not really made for the purpose of political games, but political ideas are apparent. For example, in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, the opening sequence of the game let the player controll the terrorists and let the player kill innocent civilians. This scene is important for game narrative, but also can be seen as a part that has a strong poltical idea within the game context.
Edutainment is one of serious games that is most discussed in the chatper 9. The term comes from the fusion of education and entertainment, which refers to video games that are served for purposes of education. There are three categories to video games that are used for educational purpose which are commercial eduicational video games, commercial entertianment video games, and lastly research-based educational video games. The most apparent example of commercial educational video game is "Mathblaster", which is used for the purposes of letting the players to learn mathmathical skills while playing the video game. However, this category of games mostly use "Drill-and-practice", which is questioned by many reserachers regarding the effectiveness of the game as a learning tool. The problem is that "Drill-and-practice" doesn't really teach and explain why the answer is the answer (why 2 plus 2 is 4), but rather focuses on the repetition of skills.
Commerical entertainment video games are games that focus more on the entertianment rather than education. Simcity and Civilization are considered as commercial entertainment games. Nielsen suggests that when "commerical games like SimCity get it right they are an unbeatable educational experience". However, the tendency that these types of games focus more on entertainment purposes is the biggest problem when considering video games as the effective educational tool.
Nielsen lists five characteristics of edutainment video games that the most edutainemnt titles have little intrinsic motivation, have no integrated learning experience, most of them use "drill-and-practice" learning, simplized gameplay, and there is no teacher presence. In order to effectively use video games as learning tools, Nielsen suggests that teacher intervention is important. Since games are played by players themselves, without properly explaining the materials to the players (the part that is the least interesting), there is a limiatation to the learning effectiveness. As Nielsen states, "motivation, relevance, and engagement are stronger when using computer games in education caompared to traditional teaching" (Nielsen 219). In other words, if video games are used properly, it has a potential to become more effective than traditional teaching. However, the part "used properly" is still not answered. My question is this: In order for video games (edutainment) to be more effective than traditoanl teaching methods, what needs to be changed? Do you think there is any chance that, in the future, edutainment will replace the traditional learning methods? Why or why not?
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