Game over? What hampers a major uptake of serious games?

Abstract

Well designed serious games (SGs) incorporate affordances to boost a culture of learning that better matches with peoples brain wired motives, at the same time enabling a better sustainable growth towards 21-th century skills in a more global society. This highly interactive session encourages audience participation in streamlining the discussion with panel contribution from experts all being members of the recently started European Network of Excellence on SGs: GaLA (Games and Learning Association). GaLA partners represent research, industry, SG education, as well as end users of SGs in corporate training and education. The panel will have pronounced answers to the main questions below: a. What is needed to increase SGs impact for training and learning? (examples of good practice) b. What makes SGs well-designed? (examples of well-designed SGs will be available) c. How will societal and technological developments impact future SGs? This session provides the audience with practical guidelines for choosing and incorporating SGs in sustainable proliferation, taking their specific usage context into account.

Propositions will be prepared by the organizers and panel which are related to the aforementioned main questions. The audience can add additional propositions. Through a voting procedure by the audience, three highest ranked propositions/questions will be discussed by the panel and with contributions and responses from the audience. The moderator steers towards the main goal of this session, namely that each proposition will be concluded with practical guidelines, if possible – informed by research.