Serious Games & Learning
Games as instruments — for teaching hard ideas, for training decisions under complexity, and for extracting knowledge that experts cannot articulate.
I keep returning to games, and not primarily because they motivate. A well-built game is a controlled environment in which people make consequential decisions that can be observed, which makes it an unusually good research instrument as well as a teaching one.
The earliest strand was computer science education. Mathematical logic, fundamental ideas of computing, and programming were taught through collaborative games, tangible robots, podcasts produced by the students themselves, and multi-touch applications built for classroom use. The recurring finding is that tangibility and collaboration change who engages, and that the effect is not uniform across gender or prior confidence — which is the interesting part, and the part usually averaged away.
The industrial strand uses business simulations to study decisions in supply chains, quality management, and production ramp-up. Playing the supply chain surfaces the human factors that make real networks underperform, and the same games double as training and as a way of eliciting process knowledge that experienced staff hold but cannot easily state. This is what the work on extracting process knowledge through serious games is about, and it is harder than it looks: the game has to be faithful enough that the knowledge transfers back out.
A third strand aimed at older adults treats exercise games as health interventions rather than entertainment, evaluating usability, performance, and pain mitigation with the seriousness that framing demands.
