"Developing Serious Games" details what is involved in developing serious video games, from the use of affordable game engines to marketing and identifying sources of capital. The book is designed as a complete resource for developers and programmers interested in creating serious games: it teaches them how to get started and how to make money in this emerging arena. Beginning with a brief review of the emergence of serious game development as a viable niche in the multi-billion dollar gaming industry, the book explores the various types of serious games, including military, academic, medical, and training & development. 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 an evaluation of the market, the economic potential of the space, and the customer base. The book closes with a look to the future of serious gaming from a developer’s perspective. The companion CD-ROM includes sample development tools and demos of serious games.

Bryan Bergeron (Brookline, MA) developed the first commercial multimedia patient simulator (game) on the microcomputer. He is the author of six commercial ?serious games? in healthcare, and authored or directed the development of a dozen or more in the course of his work supporting the curriculum at Harvard Medical School and MIT. He holds two patents in serious gaming (two more pending), and has consulted for medical boards, the pharmaceutical industry, publishers, and universities in the US and abroad on the topic of serious games for over 20 years.

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.

Developing Serious Games details what is involved in developing serious video games, from the use of affordable game engines to marketing and identifying sources of capital. The book is designed as a complete resource for developers and programmers interested in creating serious games: it teaches them how to get started and how to make money in this emerging arena. Beginning with a cbrief review of the emergence of serious game development as a viable niche in the multi-billion dollar gaming industry, the book explores the various types of serious games, including military, academic, medical, and training & development. 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 an evaluation of the market, the economic potential of the space, and the customer base. The book closes with a look to the future of serious gaming from a developer?s perspective.

actual and broad overview of hyping topic

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.

Simply too general and unfocused

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!

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.

Serious games must be taken seriously!

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

Serious Games must be taken seriously!

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 ideas on what makes a serious game a good game and gives lots of references for further study on particular serious game design issues. However it is up to you and I know that some of the serious games mentioned in the book are NOT good practises.

It does give an introduction into the development process of (serious) games, technologies and (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! 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 needs to be redone all over. 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. For (serious) game development use iterative project processes!

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 www.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 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. 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 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 they were made, which design choices were made, how the result was 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!

Gaming Techniques to Teach Lessons

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.

Worth a wait.

I’ve been waiting for a book on serious games long time. This is just what I was looking for. I can see the author has put a lot of energy into this work. Well-written and well-researched. Also it comes with good reference.
I particulary like serious game development templates.
A definite keeper for my bookshelf! I recommend it.

Still mulling it over...

I don’t know what I expected from this book, and, as a result, I think I probably got what I deserved. I had high hopes for this book; I work for a small software company that is teetering on the brink of becoming a producer of ’serious games’, and I was hoping for some kind of bolt from the blue, some kind of revelation. My career, my company at a frontier - should we cross in? Or should we run screaming? Peering into the entrails of this book, what dark auguries could I see?

Unsurprisingly, the answer is ’not too much’. That’s too much to expect from a book, and honestly, I knew that going in. So what is the book good for?

The book is a good overview of the contemporary state of the field. It touches upon games development in general, best practices for software development, ditto for game development; it covers dev tools, platforms & engines; it covers art and sound resources. It discusses funding sources, and the differences between ’entertainment games’ and ’serious games’.

In short, it covers everything. And, as such, it covered nothing in particular in depth. Labeling on the back to the contrary, I didn’t feel like this was a book geared towards software developers. Rather, it felt like an accessible book geared towards anyone with some familiarity with software development: PMs, VCs, CEOs, software devs and testers, media and art specialists... There’re a couple of C/C++ code snippets, there’s some pseudo-code, but compared to, say, the pages of calculus in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, the technical content of this book is really quite low: if you don’t need to understand code, you can probably safely skip these bits and still understand how the big picture bits apply to you in your role.

I also found some of the editing to be sloppy. The writing is strong, but the proofreading left a bit to be desired: "a" for "an", "fist" for "first". CRM: sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. There may not have been a lot of these typos, but the ones I noticed were quite jarring.

If you’re looking for a 50,000-ft view of the field, this book will probably suffice. If you’re looking for an intensely geeky dev-oriented book, you will probably be left wanting more. Perhaps I’ll change my mind in a day or so, but I doubt it. Don’t get me wrong - there are some great things in this book for a developer, such as the appendices with their snapshots of tools and concepts. But I’m not sure if this book will stay on my shelf of ’keepers’. We’ll see.

Okay, but not great

I had high hopes for this book, as I work for a small software company that is teetering on the brink of becoming a producer of ’serious games’. Unfortunately, this book failed to meet my expectations.

The book is a good overview of the contemporary state of the field. It touches upon games development in general, best practices for software development, ditto for game development; it covers dev tools, platforms & engines; it covers art and sound resources. It discusses funding sources, and the differences between ’entertainment games’ and ’serious games’. There is also a good history of ’serious games’, starting with the earliest military flight simulators and ending with current releases for, among other platforms, the iPod.

In short, it covers everything. And, as such, it covers nothing in particular in much depth. Apart from the history, there really isn’t anything in this book that probably can’t be gleaned from spending time on Gamasutra.com, gamedev.net, or igda.org.

I also found some of the editing to be sloppy. The writing is quite strong, but the proofreading left a bit to be desired: "a" for "an", "fist" for "first". There may not have been a lot of these typos, but the ones I noticed were quite jarring.

If you’re looking for a 50,000-ft view of the field, this book will probably suffice. If you’re looking for an intensely geeky dev-oriented book, you will probably be left wanting more. Don’t get me wrong - there are some great things in this book for a developer, such as the appendices with their snapshots of tools and concepts. It is also a great ’all-in-one-place’ resource. But I’m not sure if this book will stay on my shelf of ’keepers’; we’ll see.