Gaming gets serious ? It's already 2020!

?Nowadays, there is no area of activity or profession that does not have its own selection of sophisticated games that combine immersion, 3D, network and mobile gaming and even robotics.?

> French version

My work days this week are going to be slightly disrupted by a series of training sessions on new telepresence-based sales negotiation techniques. My usually moderate interest in this type of exercise was given a lift by an e-mail that I just got on my tablet. It tells me that part of the training sessions will involve a new generation serious game, one of those serious games that spread across the globe without us really noticing.

But this slightly different week for me is nothing out of the ordinary, as serious games have gradually made their way into our everyday lives. It?s been another example of the swift spread of a digital innovation. Even if the lovely oxymoron ?serious game? actually dates back to the Renaissance, with Italy?s Serio Ludere and its Rabelaisian offshoots, the modern concept did not take shape until the 1970s when Clark Abt proposed a first organized approach to serious games through his eponymous work ? seeing in board games, role-playing games and even outdoor games, and of course computer games, a medium that could help enrich teaching curriculums.

It was in the late 1980s, with the growing ubiquity of software suites and personal computers, and the arrival of the first forms of gameplay, that edutainment games begin to appear. In France, children were introduced to the intrepid Carmen Sandiego and the cute extra-terrestrial Adibou who came to give them extra-curricular lessons at home. Things developed very quickly after that, with a veritable explosion of applications in a great many fields, including teaching, marketing, healthcare, defence? which brought with it a proliferation of neologisms that sought to create a taxonomy for this bustling new universe: edugames, edumarket games, advergames, city-games, therapeutic games, military games, exergames, datagames, green games, news games, political games?

The French government?s national call for proposals for serious games back in 2009, which was part of its economic stimulus programme, later attracted the attention of the public, in an area that was identified as being of strategic importance to the appeal of our services and our future ability to compete.

The invasion had begun. Serious games have helped youngsters become aware of the issues of global famine thanks to Food Force, the game commissioned by the UN; students were given HR management training with IBM?s PostFinance; a number of online soldiers helped defend the United States with the popular game, America?s Army, which was produced by the US military itself. And a great throng of us worked to keep our minds supple with Nintendo?s brain training programme from the mysterious Dr. Kawashima, which sold 17 million copies back in the day! Retirement homes were cheered up by the sudden arrival of the Wii Fit, while huge swathes of the population with limited purchasing power gained access to the serious games produced by the Indian company, ZQM, directly on their mobile phone? and the list has only grown and grown over the past several years.

Although serious games initially developed as an offshoot of video games, they later proliferated through extremely fertile combinations of technologies: nowadays, there is no area of activity or profession that does not have its own selection of sophisticated games that combine immersion, 3D, network and mobile gaming and even robotics.

Only this week, the media was talking about a new breed of teaching assistant in primary schools: the robot called NAO who helps children with their reading and maths? while having fun!

need to wrap this up as my first training session is about to start. I can?t wait to go up against my pixelated rivals, and watch them eat my dust as I beat them to the monster contract? a triumph that will become the stuff of legend! Or not. @

Jean-Dominique S?val

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