(2.12) Serious Games
Discussion: Train, Crosser & La Migra, Ludoztil, Oregon Trail, Last Resort
Train (Brenda Romero)
Train is impactful because it keeps its context hidden until the end. The mechanics are straightforward and focus on moving pieces efficiently, but the reveal reframes the entire experience. It demonstrates how games can involve players directly in systems rather than simply explaining them. The lesson is conveyed through participation instead of dialogue, and that discomfort becomes the central learning experience.
Crosser & La Migra
Both games simulate border crossing and the pressures of immigration. What stands out is how procedural rules express vulnerability. Randomness, restricted movement, and pursuit mechanics create tension and stress. Rather than explaining immigration systems abstractly, these games simulate constraint and risk, allowing players to feel instability and fear firsthand.
Ludoztil
Ludoztil critiques the manipulation embedded in gamification systems. By satirizing reward structures, it reveals how points and incentives shape behavior even when players are aware they are being influenced. This connects directly to Bogost’s argument that gamification often prioritizes shallow motivation over meaningful engagement.
Oregon Trail
Oregon Trail remains one of the earliest examples of serious gaming. It teaches through consequence, using disease, weather, and scarcity to illustrate the realities of westward expansion. The learning model relies heavily on repetition and feedback, reinforcing behaviorist learning principles through trial and error.
Last Resort
Last Resort addresses homelessness and economic instability. What makes it effective is the absence of easy solutions. It highlights systemic barriers rather than individual failure, showing how serious games can expose structural issues instead of reinforcing personal blame.
Overall Reflection
Across all of these examples, systems communicate meaning more effectively than lectures. Players learn by experiencing constraint, uncertainty, and moral tension.
Play Reflection: Crossing the Bridge and Observance
Crossing the Bridge
This game centers on ethical decision making. It does not reward efficiency or optimization. Instead, it forces players to confront the consequences of their choices. The discomfort created by those decisions becomes the learning moment. Reflection occurs after action rather than during gameplay optimization.
Observance
Observance relies on ambiguity and environmental interpretation. It encourages attentiveness and emotional awareness rather than traditional goal completion. Without clear objectives, the experience feels less like a challenge and more like an immersive reflection.
Combined Takeaway
Both games demonstrate that serious games prioritize reflection over reward systems. The emotional or intellectual impact often happens after the play session ends.
Prototype Concept: The Last Hunt
Core Concept
The Last Hunt is a survival-focused serious game inspired by Appalachian folklore. A small hunting party becomes stranded after signs of a Wendigo attack during winter. As resources diminish, the main threat becomes fear, mistrust, and the decisions players make to keep the group alive.
Player Role
The player acts as the group’s decision-maker, balancing survival needs with social stability.
Prototype Mechanics (Paper Version)
Players track four core resources:
- Food
- Warmth
- Trust
- Fear
Each round includes:
- Resource Phase — supplies decrease and environmental conditions worsen.
- Event Phase — cards introduce challenges such as storms, disappearances, or strange tracks.
- Decision Phase — players choose responses like rationing food, holding a campfire talk, hiding bad news, or honoring the dead.
- Consequence Phase — decisions create long-term effects on group trust and fear.
Deaths are significant and introduce ethical choices around corpse management, such as burial, abandonment, or using resources for survival. These choices affect morale and trust.
Learning Objectives
The game explores:
- Group decision making under stress
- Survival ethics and scarcity
- Fear and social cohesion
- How leadership choices shape group dynamics
The Wendigo serves as both a folkloric threat and a symbolic pressure that reflects the group’s psychological state.
The Last Shift
A simulation of emergency room triage focused on ethical resource allocation and time pressure.
Witness Reports
Players analyze conflicting cryptid sightings to explore misinformation, bias, and evidence evaluation.
Signal in the Pines
A narrative game in which players respond to rural distress signals and must decide how to act under uncertainty.
Cryptid Conservation Agency
Players manage environmental preservation efforts for endangered mythical creatures, balancing public perception and ecological sustainability.
Archive of the Unseen
Players curate fading folklore and decide which cultural stories are preserved or forgotten, exploring how history is shaped.
Each concept uses systems to examine themes such as ethics, media literacy, environmental stewardship, and cultural memory.
Reading Responses
Learning Games and Learning Theory
Oregon Trail aligns with behaviorism because players learn through reinforcement and repeated feedback loops of success and failure.
Minecraft Education Edition reflects constructivism since players build, experiment, and discover solutions through exploration.
Collaborative simulation games align with social constructivism because knowledge develops through communication and shared problem solving.
Among these, constructivist approaches feel the most effective because players actively construct understanding instead of responding to rewards.
Is Gamification Bullshit
Bogost argues that gamification reduces games to points, badges, and superficial incentives, stripping away depth and transforming engagement into manipulation.
I partially agree. Gamification can encourage short term behavior, but without meaningful systems it becomes shallow.
Examples outside class include fitness apps that track streaks, corporate training platforms that award badges, and productivity tools that gamify tasks. These systems often lose effectiveness once novelty fades because they lack intrinsic motivation.
What Is a Serious Game and Why It Is Not Chocolate Covered Broccoli
A serious game is designed primarily for learning, awareness, or reflection, using gameplay mechanics to communicate meaning.
Farber argues that serious games are not chocolate covered broccoli because the learning is embedded within the mechanics. Players do not pause the game for instruction. Instead, the interaction itself creates understanding. When designed well, the system becomes the lesson.
Final Reflection
This week reinforced that serious games rely on systems, constraints, and player agency to generate meaningful learning. The strongest examples do not preach. They simulate. My revised prototype, Cryptid Commune, applies this approach by using folklore aesthetics to explore leadership, belief, and social influence through interactive systems.