Serious Games: Games That Educate, Train, and Inform 1st Edition

Written for game designers looking to add serious game to their companies portfolio. This book you a solid foundation for the serious games market but it a little light on instructional design principles.

Not great really.

The book provides a good overview but stays on a quite overall level without really getting deep into the important problems in the serious games space. It seems a bit US-centric. But definitely a good companion for anyone wanting to do serious games.

As a Serious Game Developer, I am keenly aware of the state of our industry, of our movement. We have in a few years achieved a meteoric rise in exposure and progress but this is not enough. There are a multitude of new ideas and projects that don't know what is out there, that don't know we are out there. There is much still to be learned and only by knowing what is out there here and now can new (and old) projects hope to succeed in this nascent field.Enter this book.David Michael (author of "indie game developers survival guide") and Sande Chen have provided an indispensable review of this area in their book "Serious Games: Games that Educate, Train, and Inform". Touching upon all the major areas, they provide a blanket survey of the past and present efforts in this arena, introducing us along the way to the people and the companies that are changing the landscape of video games into something that transcends entertainment. The reading is light and the pace is brisk. The content is clearly broken up so that a person can skip straight to their area of interest or read it front to back and take it all in. The coverage is complete and I feel that no area of the Serious Games space was missed.I wish I would have had this book three years ago when I started my projects. I would have had a much better idea of where I'm coming from and where I'm going. I am thankful to David and Sande for putting this book together in hopes that future developers will not have to struggle as much as I have.

This is a status review of Serious Games as of 2005. It covers a wide arc of where Serious Games were in 2005 with a useful bibliography and a web site listing and the results of a short survey. Now ten years old it's interesting to see what's changed and what hasn't.