Serious Games Summit DC 2006
I first met Alicia Sanchez in the hotel bar the night before Serious Games Summit 2006 opened, after a long day of traveling for me. Our simple chit-chat over drinks left me spinning, as my brain struggled to keep up with the speed of her conversation. Maybe it was the jetlag, but I felt at all times at least 30 seconds behind whatever it was she was saying. Two days later, at her talk—“Toward a Comprehensive Research Agenda for Game-based Learning”—I realized it wasn’t me; it was her. She not only is a fast talker, but has a lot to say with the ability to put it bluntly. You’d be amazed and what she can punch out in about 35 minutes. She seems to be seeing at all times 360 degrees around her, assessing how different pieces from far corners fit together. It’s a personality trait that easily flows into her work and could be a huge benefit to the serious games field. Sanchez, who studies modeling and simulation, is a research scientist at Old Dominion University; but she describes her field as “synthetic learning,” saying it includes games and simulators alike. In her talk, she reviewed a wide array of research literature dealing with technology and learning, advising that serious games makers pay attention to the work that others have done for them already in other fields. “I can’t imagine that anyone building a game for education or training would completely ignore the lessons learned from decades of research in those areas, but it probably happens more often than I’d like to imagine,” Sanchez told me in a follow-up conversation. I asked her about not only the debatably outdated research from the 1980s and 1990s that has crossover potential for serious games makers, but also what research is being done specifically for applications that are video games. “I think that right now there is research being done in the serious games area, but I think that most of the research focuses on the effectiveness or lack thereof related to single particular games,” she said. “What I’d like to see is more research that can be generalized to all serious games, contributing to a science of learning involving serious games.” The difficulty in gathering evidence to show the effectiveness of non-entertainment game is that they are so widely diverse in their aims. Still, Sanchez maintains that there’s much to gain in figuring out their commonalities and examining how or whether games, in general, are useful as an educational device. “When we look at a single game, there are many characteristics that could influence its success or failure that might not necessarily be indicative of the potential of games as a learning tool,” Sanchez said. “A good game, for example, might increase motivation and time on task, while a sub-par game might not have this effect. But right now we don’t really even have a way to judge the quality of serious games. Debates still exist on whether or not serious games need to be fun to be able to teach.” And though research is needed, there are obstacles to obtaining it, not least of which is the fact that many serious games are not openly available to the public. In addition, the developers working on the game, content creators, and financial supporters (grant-providers, government, independent investors, and so forth) aren’t likely to make research their first priority when under the pressures of producing a massive project, like an electronic game.
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