With the impressive growth the games industry has enjoyed for the past decade, game developers, educators, and marketing firms are excitedly envisioning serious games applications for computer game technologies. These applications- serious games- represent opportunities for game developers to apply their talents to areas outside of the entertainment industry. Developing Serious Games is a practical handbook that details what’s involved in developing these serious games. It explores the emergence of serious games as a viable niche in the multi-billion dollar gaming industry, and it covers the various types of serious games, including military, academic, medical, and training & development. From there it continues with a discussion of the enabling technology trends, emerging standards, and the tools that promise to reinforce the current trajectory of development and user demand for serious games. The second half of the book emphasizes the economic realities of the serious games industry, including and evaluation of the market, the economic potential of the space, and the customer base. The book culminates with a serious game design document that illustrates the important differences between entertainment games and serious games. It also provides a look to the future of serious gaming from a developer’s perspective. The book is written for students, established game developers, and professionals in related fields, such as modeling and simulation or instructional design, who are skilled in training with traditional approaches and tools. It is also applicable to programmers, graphic artists, and management contemplating or involved in the development of serious games. Key Features: * Teaches developers how to get into the serious games market and be successful * Details the serious games design document and explains the critical differences from games that entertain * Presents tools and techniques that can be applied to real-world development challenges * Teaches how to identify and obtain funding sources * Illustrates the entire process of development from choosing game shells and engines to marketing * Discusses key technologies, including middleware, shells, content provides/generators, etc. * Provides an extensive resource section for established and burgeoning game developers

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 7 Ratings

Serious games must be taken seriously! - 2006-03-09
Reviewer Rating:
This is a very good book on serious games. It does give you probably up to a hundred examples of serious games on various fields such as the military, medical training games, educational games, simulations, etcetera. In the book serious games are categorised as: Activism Games, Advergames, Business games, Exergaming, Health and medicine games, News games, Political games, Realistic games, Core competency games, Repurposed of the shelf games and Mods. Within all these lots of examples are given that give designers examples. Unfortunately these examples are not really analysed in detail so the reader has to make up his mind if the given example is a good practise of a serious game or not. The book does give some basic ideas on what makes a serious game a good practise and gives lost of references for further study on particular serious game design issues.

It does give an introduction into the development process of (serious) games, technologies, (project) management and business aspects. I could care less for this part and on a occasion or two I found the book (in my opinion) wrong. For example the game development process is being described as a `pipeline' process, thus being linear. However good games, serious or not, need to be tested and tested and tested by players and thus redesigned and redesigned and redesigned many times. You can not do that in a linear managed project, where you go from fase to fase! I have never seen it work in practice. This is what happens if a museum, institute or school wants to make a serious game and does it in a linear way: they have an idea, they design the game, they make it and then when almost all the money is gone, they have it tested by some kids only to find out it is a boring game and that it needs to be redone all over. Back to the design fase! They did manage their money well throughout all the fases, but they never realised they needed to go trough the idea and design fase up to 10 times! For this reason and others the use of MS projects as proposed in the book is a bad suggestion. MS projects is ok if you manage a construction project, not good for software development. But the use of MS projects in software development (and thus game projects) is
another story.

Another part of the book is about the hardware and software you could use to make a serious game. The suggestions on software and the lists of examples is very good (even though there is lots more software available to make (serious) games. E.g. have a look at gamesmaken.startpagina.nl. The remarks on hardware, could be left out. It lists what kind of PC configuration you would need to make a serious game. Ok if you are a total beginner in this field, but for the 98% of the other readers it does not make much sense. This list will be outdated at the time the book has left the presses. Also, there is always so much debate on which hardware to use. The book for example suggests a pc configuration for sound recording. Now, I do not want to get into the Mac- PC discussions, but all the people I know (and I have a lot of musicians as friends) use Macs for audio recording with protocols or logic or on a occasion Steinberg software. I did not find these tools in the book. The same goes for graphics design. The book suggest a Alienware or Dell to work on. But all the professional designers I know (more than 50 I estimate) work on Macs. So the solutions mentioned in the book are not wrong, but well... you know it is too personal. I would not even write about it in a book.

But ok, besides these two small issues mentioned above, I think the info in the book is very good.

What I personally was looking for the most is how to really do it. How to make a good game for education, how to make a good game for a museum or how to make a game that convinces kids to eat healthy or not to start smoking. Design issues like these are introduced and discussed in this book, but not enough in my opinion. It would have made this book superb instead of very good if the writer had done that. Just maybe analyse two or three serious games that turned out to be working very well. How where they made, which design choices were made, how was the result measured, which dead ends were tried before they had the final result, how do the players respond to the game, etcetera. But then again, this might be a great subject for the next book on serious games!

www.wouterbaars.net

Simply too general and unfocused - 2006-07-23
Reviewer Rating:
This books definitely have good stuff in it, but you become frustrated because you have to dig so much. The books cover way too many issues that are non-specific to serious games. In the places where it do deal with serious games it on, however, quite successful but without being brilliant.

Military, academic, medical, training and more games! - 2006-03-16
Reviewer Rating:
Bergeron's DEVELOPING SERIOUS GAMES provides game developers with a practical manual exploring serious games: military, academic, medical and training games, to be specific. With the wealth of titles focusing on pleasure games, it's good to see a developer's guide which explains business concepts, tools which can be applied to real-world challenges and concepts, and discusses major differences between entertainment and educational gaming. Students and developers alike will find it a fine practical 'how-to' guide teaching concepts ranging from locating funding sources for such games to choosing game shells and marketing finished products.

Gaming Techniques to Teach Lessons - 2006-03-07
Reviewer Rating:
Serious games is an interesting offshoot of the standard gaming industry. While most of the characteristics of the games have to be the same as 'play' games the key to a serious game is that it imparts 'a skill, knowledge or attitude that can be applied in the real world.'

When the hijackers who were to crash their planes into the World Trade Center wanted to learn to fly, they used simulators. These very expensive devices move the 'game player' around in three-D to impart muscle memory to the player. Other less serious games can't quite do that, but they can still impart a lot of knowledge about how to fly a plane (microsoft flight simulator), drive a car, or drive a tank.

This book presents a fairly high level overview of the serious game business. It talks about the general concepts of things like marketing (quite different than what's needed for space blasters), costs, marketing and so on. It then covers the basic techniques for game development including the specialized software that has been developed to facilitate the software development.

actual and broad overview of hyping topic - 2007-10-26
Reviewer Rating:
Although the name of the concept "serious games" sounds strange and evokes some debate, it is broadly accepted as a those games that are not intended for entertainment (alone), like games for education and training. The author takes it even broader and includes games-for-marketing-purposes also into this category. Almost implicitly serious games are computer-supported games, video games for short. Part of the argumentation in the book applies to non-computer games as well, however.

For those who are new in this field and for those who have their roots mainly in non-computer games, the book offers a broad overview of what is going on at this moment: examples in different sectors (certainly not education alone), possibilities, underlying software, the way of organising development projects, funding, best practices etc. If you are a specialist on one of these topics you may find its treatment too simple. For topics you are not a specialist on, the book offers a valuable introduction and overview, accompanied by numerous references and interesting links. The only thing I missed was an accompanying DVD crowded with demo software, white papers, clickable links etc.

As serious gaming seems to be hyping at the moment, the book was published just in time. The book is full of actual information. Therefore it is very useful NOW, although you may expect it to become out-of-date within a few years.

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