Play to transform

A video game can serve to unwind and let off steam... but it can also have purposes beyond the purely playful. When the main goal of a game goes beyond entertainment, we enter the territory of serious games, the serious games.

In the words of Oscar Garcia Pañella, director of the Serious Games Lab program, there are three fundamental factors: "They improve motivation, the famous engagement. They allow teaching things, practicing skills; therefore, they are excellent educational tools –learning is achieved by practicing and making mistakes–. And they can achieve positive behavioral changes, not so much based on lectures and more on understanding things when you do them".

The name can be misleading and does not do them justice, because we are not necessarily talking about boring games. The label does not designate a specific genre; they can take on very different forms –from an adventure to a simulation–, as long as the mechanics inherent to the game are put at the service of a purpose other than the traditional one. They are based on leveraging what makes playing stimulating: posing challenges, experimenting, obtaining an immediate response, and advancing as a skill is mastered.

However, the potential of applied games does not depend solely on their mechanics. As Garcia Pañella points out: "Narrative and characters are also powerful factors in ensuring that people engage with the experience".

The immersive power of the medium offers especially interesting possibilities. Because a lesson explains how a certain situation works, but a simulation places you right in the middle of it. A manual describes a procedure, but a game forces you to apply it. And that which on paper seems repetitive and very little stimulating, in the form of a game becomes a motivating challenge.

Education is probably one of the fields where this translation is most direct and intuitive. serious games turn the student into the protagonist of a situation, it is not just about receiving information and trying to assimilate it. The video game presents a situation in which one must make decisions, solve problems, and immediately verify the consequences.

This makes it possible to work on very different contents: from historical reconstruction to mathematical problems or scientific phenomena that are difficult to reproduce in a classroom. The difference with respect to other educational resources is the ability to interact with what is being learned. The student acts, makes mistakes, modifies their decisions, and tries again. The feedback turns learning into an active experience.

Video games can serve to address practices that are difficult to carry out in an educational center. They also allow for training skills such as problem-solving, teamwork, or making decisions under pressure.

In the healthcare sector, the possibilities are even more diverse. A game can train professionals for critical situations, help patients understand a treatment, or turn complex medical information into an accessible experience.

In Catalonia, this application has been acquiring its own dimension. The incubation program Serious Games Lab focuses on gaming applications for health, with the participation of the Bellvitge University Hospital and the Catalan Health Institute. The program works with interdisciplinary teams to transform healthcare needs into applied or therapeutic gaming experiences. They have developed, for example, projects to promote healthy physical activity in children, work on the emotional well-being and self-esteem of young people, or train healthcare professionals in responding to a heart attack or a stroke.

According to Garcia Pañella, one of the great opportunities for applied games in health has to do with "a major problem of patient adherence to treatment; this has a cost... some costs, in fact, that are very impactful – on people's health, but also an economic cost and a cost in resources. Therefore, it is extremely important to ensure that diagnostic guidelines are followed, and not just at the beginning of the treatment or in the acute moment".

The same line continues to evolve. The combination with virtual reality and other interactive technologies expands these possibilities, always as a complementary tool for training or healthcare intervention. Serious games provide a tool that can facilitate certain learning, training, or intervention processes.

The fact that video games allow for mistakes to be made without suffering the real-world consequences of the error is a particularly valuable quality when the goal is to train or prepare people. In a simulation, a professional can face an emergency, make an inadequate decision, and try again. The game creates an intermediate space between theory and reality: safe enough to experiment, but interactive enough for decisions to have an impact within the experience.

This ability to reproduce situations also explains the interest in video games in vocational training. Simulation does not replace real experience, but it allows one to arrive with greater preparation. And, in certain cases, it makes it possible to practice situations that would be too expensive, dangerous, or difficult to reproduce in a conventional way.

The applications of serious games do not end in classrooms or hospitals. Beyond education and health, they can also address social and scientific issues.

Scientific research can also take advantage of this capacity. Video games allow for the construction of virtual environments in which behaviors can be observed, skills can be trained, or problems can be posed to a large number of participants. For these applications to be truly useful, it is necessary to be able to verify their results. Garcia Pañella summarizes this need with a formula: "There is a very important issue, which is the "engage and measure", that is, motivate and measure. I don't just want to motivate you, I want to measure. We need both". And the measurement is not a final phase, but a continuous process: "It involves internal tests, with the client and with the end users, through continuous playtests. Many playtests are carried out, a great deal of validation, continuously".

In certain projects they can even turn complex tasks into experiences accessible to people who are not specialists. A video game can take advantage of distributed thinking to try to solve one of the most difficult computational problems in biology. For example, one can invite video players to contemplate a protein to find out how it folds and, perhaps, while playing, contribute to developing new drugs.

The same set of knowledge –interaction design, narrative, programming, animation, art, sound, virtual reality or artificial intelligence– can be applied in a school, a hospital, a university, a company or a research center. According to Garcia Pañella, the main areas are "health, education, heritage and tourism and human resources, but there are many others". Diversification thus expands the function of the video game: fun is not necessarily the final goal, but the engine that allows reaching it.