Challenges of serious games

EAI Endorsed Transactions on Serious Games Research Article Challenges of serious games B. Fernández-Manjón1,*, P. Moreno-Ger1, I. Martinez-Ortiz1 and M. Freire1 1 Grupo e-UCM, Facultad de Informática, Universidad Complutense de Madrid Abstract Although educational games have revealed to be a very effective focus in diverse situations, their use in education is still very limited. In this paper we analyse the main challenges concerning educational games that, from our perspective, have to be approached so that the use of this kind of games can be widespread. These challenges are classified in three main dimensions: socio-cultural, educational and technological. Once the challenges are identified, some possible measures are suggested to address or reduce these problems so that the use of educational games may be widespread. Keywords: e-learning, human-computer interaction, educational games. Received on 15 September 2015, accepted on 07 October 2015, published on 05 November 2015 Copyright © 2015 B. Fernández-Manjón et al., licensed to EAI. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unlimited use, distribution and reproduction in any medium so long as the original work is properly cited. doi: 10.4108/eai.5-11-2015.150611 mistakes and learn from them, to finally acquire a wider experience that will enable him/her to achieve his/her goal. All these characteristics present in videogames are highly desirable in a learning process. While educational centres work hard to awake the pupil’s interest in the learning process, the videogames industry has flourished, having experienced exponential growth for the past two decades. This has lead to a great increase in investments (and risk) to learn how to develop products that capture the attention of players of all ages and backgrounds. And they have succeeded: the videogame industry has learned to capture and hold the players’ attention like no other medium. Its highly interactive nature, with very short feedback cycles, deeply engage the player, easily generating these immersive and deep absorption states (flow), even blurring the line between attraction and addiction. These successes have led several researchers to argue (and demonstrate in some domains) that this medium is ideal for improving the knowledge and skills needed by the next generations. However, despite this impetus and the high level of acceptance within the educational technologies research field, the actual use of educational videogames in real environments remains limited, and its adoption is still very slow. For example, in the 2013 and 2014 NMC Horizon 1. Introduction The use of games in education is far from being a new idea. The game is an activity closely related to the learning process (all mammalian offspring develop their skills through play), and educators have identified gaming in general, and more recently digital games, as a natural and very effective approach when it’s time to capture and hold students’ attention [6], [18]. Games can lead the user to get so involved in the play, keeping his/her attention so deeply, that even his/her perception of time can be distorted. This state, identified as flow, was proposed and described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [4]. This author characterised the set of circumstances that are needed for the flow to occur either in games or in other daily life situations. This state is usually achieved when some motivating task is being accomplished, and it requires a proper combination of factors such as having a clear goal, which is interesting and involving a challenge, but simultaneously providing a sense of control and feedback, or progression. These are characteristics present in most of the best games. On the other hand, games provide a highly interactive and safe environment in which the player has to take the initiative to explore, make * Corresponding author. Email: EAI European Alliance for Innovation 1 EAI Endorsed Transactions on Sersious Games 10 -11 2015 | Volume 2 | Issue 6 | e4 B. Fernández-Manjón. et al.  Technological dimension. This is the closest to the research on the use of information technologies, covering issues such as the excessive cost of game development, the lack of support tools to facilitate the subsequent monitoring of results, or the challenges to face when schools provide suitable devices for the use of educational games. Reports, games are described as one of the most promising educational technologies, in both cases citing an adoption window of two to three years [10], [11]. Nevertheless, this seems an optimistic projection: its widespread use is still far due to a series of social, technological and cultural barriers, making it difficult to embrace this medium in educational institutions (in fact, this is also referred in the 2012 NMC Horizon Report both regarding high schools and higher education institutions [12]). In this work some of these barriers are revised, which in many cases are common to the use of educational technologies (ICT), and possible solutions or ways to mitigate the identified problems are proposed. Thus, we present a possible roadmap for a widespread acceptance of using educational games in the classroom. This classification aims mainly at structuring the analysis of educational games challenges. We are aware that, as whenever dealing with any complex problem, there are no clear or perfectly defined borders. Certain critical aspects, such as those concerning teachers, affect every dimension. 3. The social dimension To analyse the social dimension it is interesting to compare the videogame sector with the cinema or video worlds. The latter are also greatly important as educational content, which has recently been reinforced with the arrival of massive open online courses (MOOCs), mainly supported on videos. However, it is much more common to find news about the release of a new film or the opening of a film festival than about the launching of a game or the awards for the best game of the year. Yet, the videogames industry is today much more important than the film industry both from the business turnover’s perspective and the amount of jobs it has created: throughout the rapid growth of videogames in recent years, their impact as industry in the media is relatively insignificant when compared to its economic impact. Nevertheless, both industries experience a quite distinct social perception. Although the cinema comprises several subjects where very thorny issues are handled, and despite the high amount of more extreme sequences than those represented in video games, the way the media handles them is very different. On the one hand as for the film industry, there is a worldwide understood system about content classification for adults only; on the other hand, usually it is not established any direct link between the type of movi (...truncated)