As a newbie, still trying to find out what’s so serious about “serious games”, I ran across a helpful site offering a Serious Games Taxonomy. Ben Sawyer & Peter Smith (U of Central FL Retro Lab) developed the slide pres for the Serious Games Summit in Feb 08.
Ben is also the author of Serious Games: Improving Public Policy through Game-Based Learning and Simulation Whitepaper for the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and was a contributor to Game Developer magazine. He’s co-director of the Serious Games Initiative found at http://www.seriousgames.org/ (Home page)
http://www.seriousgames.org/presentations/serious-games-taxonomy-2008_web.pdf (PDF link)
If you link to the Taxonomy PDF, Slide 29 offers a nice table of serious game industry segments cross-referenced with game objectives. Industries currently investing in serious games include Government & NGO, Defense, Healthcare, Marketing & Communications, Education, Corporate and Industry.
Game objectives include Games for Health, Advergames, Games for Training, Games for Education, Games for Science and Research, Production, and Games as Work. There’s a drill down from this chart for greater levels of detail within each category.
The presentation offers good information about precursors to serious games, the relative strengths of industry segments, levels of game play, and references to serious game projects. It’s a worthwhile overview if you’re into serious games.
Ben will be back at the 2009 Serious Games Summit March 23-27, 2009 in San Francisco.
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