Serious games for health: three steps forwards

Abstract

Serious games are educational tools which are more and more used in patient and health professional education. In this article, we discuss three main points that developers and educators need to address during the development of a serious game for health. We first explain how to develop motivating serious games by finding a point where the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of end users can converge. Then, we propose to identify the features of serious games which enhance their learning effectiveness on the basis of a framework derived from cognitive science and called "the four pillars of learning." Finally, we discuss issues and solutions related to the evaluation of serious games.

Keywords: Health education; Medical education; Patient education; Video game.

Fig. 1

The three main points to discuss during the development of a serious game. Firstly, users need to be motivated to play the serious game in order to access the learning content. Motivating serious games integrate the extrinsic motivation of the player for a specific outcome (e.g. practicing as a medical doctor) into the learning activity (e.g. a simulation game on the management of cardiac arrest), making this learning activity desirable (apparition of intrinsic motivation for the learning activity). This phenomenon was called “the convergence of motivations.” Secondly, the learning potential of serious games should be maximized. The “four pillars of learning,” a framework derived from cognitive science finding [12], may be useful for developers and educators to enhance the learning effectiveness of their games. Finally, serious game should be evaluated in order to progress towards evidence-based education

Fig. 2

Pillars of learning (in orange) and the value of video games (in blue)