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In recent years, the term “serious games” has become more and more popular. We regularly read articles about them in the newspaper. Friends and family stumble upon the term themselves and then ask us about it. As it happens, in fact, another company making serious games is located just around the corner from our own headquarters!

But what does it mean?

Serious Games are interactive experiences designed with training/education as their primary purpose (instead of pure entertainment).

In other words, they’re games made for a “serious purpose”. Examples are simulators for training pilots or surgeons, or roleplaying games where one can briefly experience the effects of poverty or slavery, or medical games to treat memory or attention problems.

We personally don’t hate this development (or name) … but we do take some issue with it.

Why?

We’ve written countless articles about the fact that games are ALWAYS educational, because FUN = LEARNING. For example,

Games are meant to teach you skills and help you practice. That’s literally where all the fun comes from. Humans started playing “games” because it helped us grow and survive. If we look at the animal kingdom, we can find this in most other animal species too: their young will play games in their free time to become stronger and learn to spot danger.

That’s why the name “educational games” is a bit of a misnomer, because every game is educational! Similarly, “serious games” is a misnomer because the concept of “serious” is ill-defined.

What does serious mean? Look at a typical (competitive) game being played, and the players are absolutely taking it seriously, aren’t they? At the same time, isn’t any experience that has no real-world risks attached unserious by default?

We’re afraid that the term Serious Games gives people the wrong impression. It supports the idea that all games are just silly useless entertainment—but, of course, that Serious Games are somehow special and actually educational! Which is simply wrong.

At the same time, it is helpful to distinguish how educational a game is.

Is education/training the first priority? Does it have a clear topic or skill that it teaches, or is it more subtle? Is it truly a game, or more of a gamified activity?

A game like Scrabble is pretty educational: it’s all about spelling words, no fluff, no other theme or system. A game like Ticket to Ride teaches loads of skills (planning, mental calculation, set collecting, predicting other people’s moves) but it’s less obvious and its theme is more apparent.

As such, if we use this term, we’ll be refering to the definition we gave above. Serious Games are just games like any other, but they are completely focused on a clear, specific skill. They’re games where the primary purpose is to train for a job or treat health issues. They’re games that your school director is more likely to accept if you try to play them in the classroom ;)

But at the end of the game, they’re games like any other.

Which is why we rarely use this term.

At our online store, games are just games. All games are educational. We did our best to tag and categorize games well, so that if you want to teach a topic (say “subtraction”) you can find games most closely aligned with it. “Serious Games” with their primary purpose being subtracting numbers, if you will.

And now that we’ve reduced Serious Games to just being games, all that matters is their quality. A fun game will be played over and over, because the players are invested and take it seriously. Which means their educational value is much higher than a “Serious Games” that’s just boring to play and feels like gamifying a textbook.

Our games are a fun game first, because fun = learning, and wanting to play = always more educational than not wanting to play. It just so happens that we theme the games around specific topics and built an entire curriculum to help out teachers and homeschooling parents!