Workshop - Serious Games and Open Source: Practice and Futures

Computer games are increasingly used throughout our society with people playing on the bus, at home and at work. Computer games thus affect larger and larger number of people and areas in the society of today. There are even scholars who advocate that games create better environments for learning than traditional classrooms. This situation motivates the use of games and game technology for additional purposes, e.g. education, training, health care or marketing. This new use distinguishes between entertainment games and games for other uses, with the term Serious Games being the most common for the latter category. Although the term itself is well established in both academia and industry, there is no current single definition of the concept. However, a common component of these definitions is that is the addition of pedagogy (activities that educate or instruct, thereby imparting knowledge or skill) that makes games serious. For the purpose of this workshop we define Serious Games as: