A large number of serious or teaching games and simulations have been created over the years. As early as 1831 an action-based teaching system was created by Vital Roux for a new Parisian business school. The field has progressed from its paper and pencil exercises through the computer world’s mainframe, punch card, personal computer and now internet ears. Today’s online delivered and fast-acting experiences have been designed for a wide variety of applications.
Over this 18-decade time-span these games have been described in various ways s those who either created or used them but their descriptions have been inconsistently applied and were often unique to the descriptor’s view of the nature of such their exercise(s). The Serious Games Typology Project is an attempt to describe such meaningful games in ways that are meaningful to others.
This wiki presents a classification system or typology that is a generalized and expanded version of that initially presented in 2013 by Greco, Baldissin and Nonino for describing business games. While their system was applied to business games, the Serious Games Typology Project has been created to facilitate the description and access to the entire spectrum of serious experiential or action-based games and exercises available for meaningful results-oriented pedagogical and research purposes.
The system’s basic outline that consists of five major sections can be found via the Serious Games Classification System link found below. A glossary of its terminology can be found at the Glossary link.
Those practitioners in the field who use games and exercises are encouraged to list or otherwise encode their experiences. If you wish to do so you can preview the nature of this process by contacting the current Typology Master at jwolfe8125@aol.com. He is briefly profiled under Contacts. Once at the web site at www.seriousgames.online you will find the following that should indicate to you the nature of what you will be accomplishing:
- Reviews database—This is a list of all reviews in the typology’s catalogue. It can be used
to search games and experiences by name, player language, topics covered, for what
purpose can the game be used by the player’s sophistication level. - Reviews list—This is a list that displays the experience’s logotype, its name and a short
description of the scenario set by the game. - Typology Guide—A pdf file that describes the typology’s derivation, descriptions of each of its five major sections and encoding examples.
Contacts
For additional information and comments contact the support .
REFERENCES
Léo Touzet and Pierre Corbeil (2015). Vital Roux, Forgotten Forerunner of Modern Business Games. Simulation & Gaming, 46(1): 19-39.
Marco Greco, Nicola Baldissin and Nicola Nonino (2013). An Exploratory Taxonomy of Business Games. Simulation & Gaming, 44(5): 645-682.