[Music] hello my name is John Kingston I teach in N engineering school I'm Irish I did my PhD on serus games and I'll be with you this week to talk about serus games I also manage a community uh called so serious where people talk about serus games and I will be very happy to tell you more about serus games what are serious games about well basically if you search the word serious you will find out that it's something important so we could say serious games are important games I would add that serious games are really
useful games you have games for leisure and you have serious games to learn something important something you will need now let's talk about games let's define games so if you look up games you'll probably find out that games are something fun something funny to play another definition also tells you game games are something you hunt you hunt to eat we have two definitions that are complimentary one definition tells you you're having fun another definition tells you you're hunting it tells us that the origin of games have to do with surviving for example hunting for example
wrestling you learn things that are so important that if you don't know them you could die that's why games are so important and that's why your brain actually has fun practicing them because it's very important for your survival to give you an example of what serus games are about let's go back into history some of the first serus games that we know about modern serus games are war games for example the prussians nearly two centuries ago used to practice during the winter war games with pawns and paper with pawns and Maps so we have examples
here of war games that are used to practice to enable officers Russian officers to improve their military skills we have a perfect example of serus games used to practice and improve yourself we could say that the typical game is a puzzle a puzzle is a word that means something difficult to resolve for example a jigel is a specific kind of puzzles that you resolve a puzzle is something you need to resolve it's very difficult to design puzzles to set up situations that can be easily resolved so for you to focus on setting up situations that
are easy to resolve we we have decided that this design is going to be a lowtech design a lowtech design means using paper scissors glue it means uh using dominoes targets leaderboards game boards dices hourglasses uh cards obviously other kinds of pieces everything low Tech so that you focus not so much on technology but on creating a serus game one great application of serus games are business games in business games you learn accountancy you learn management you learn economics there are many other games where you can learn something and most serious games are here to
teach you something what's counterintuitive about about serious games is that you actually have fun learning something in fact having fun theoretically speaking is having the possibility to learn and to practice as soon as your brain is in a situation where it can practice and where it can learn you will have fun so far what we looked into is the signification of serious games and of games and of practice and of resolving puzzles what you really have to keep in mind after what we've just said is that you're designing serious games to help students learn serious
games are all about learning and having fun at the same time
