During the last few years, a new area of creative media industry, namely Serious Games, has started to emerge around the world. The term serious games has become more popular for example in the fields of education, business, welfare and safety. Despite this, there has been no single definition of serious games. A key question, what the concept itself means, has stayed unsolved though most have agreed on a definition that serious games are games or game-like interactive systems developed with game technology and design principles for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment.

In this book, serious games are understood as games which aim at providing an engaging, self-reinforcing context in which to motivate and educate the players. Serious games can be of any genre, use any game technology, and be developed for any platform. They can be entertaining, but usually they teach the user something. The central aim of serious games is to raise quality of life and well-being. As part of interactive media industry, the serious games field focuses on designing and using digital games for real-life purposes and for the everyday life of citizens in information societies. The field of serious games focuses on such areas as education, business, welfare, military, traffic, safety, travelling and tourism.

Includes an overview of different aspects of serious games fields from a multidisciplinary perspective Authored by an international group of experts in the field

Inhalt
Game Production.- Three Approaches Towards Teaching Game Production.- Design and Architecture of Sidh a Cave Based Firefighter Training Game.- Human-Centred Design and Exercise Games.- Children's Involvement in the Design of Game-Based Learning Environments.- Learning.- Designing Serious Games for Computer Assisted Language Learning a Framework for Development and Analysis.- Competence Complexity and Obvious Learning.- The Attitudes of Finnish School Teachers Towards Commercial Educational Games.- Using Videogames as Educational Tools: Building Bridges Between Commercial and Serious Games.- Social Perspective.- Let's Play Together with the Camera of Your Mobile Device.- AnimalClass: Social Networks in Gaming.- Multiplayer Interface for a Computer-Augmented Learning Game.- Technical Applications.- RACER: A Non-Commercial Driving Game which Became a Serious Tool in the Research of Driver Fatigue.- VIPROSA Game-like Tool for Visual Process Simulation and Analysis.