The Value of Serious Games Continues to Grow in Appreciation - IBM

While serious gaming and gamification of learning companies like Designing Digitally, Inc. have been working hard to develop serious game models for several years now for business, industrial and even military applications (visit our Portfolio Pages for yourself to see examples of some of these great eLearning and 3D training simulations serious games we’ve created), many of the bigger companies who helped to create I.T. in the first place have seemingly not been as vocal in promoting this fascinating technology.

A 2009 newsletter from IBM we discovered is decidedly for serious gaming, going so far as to proclaim it to be “the future of learning.” The newsletter included some potent facts from many sources about this milieu - pretty convincing material when it comes to proving the worth and value of gamification as a tool for all manner of education. Among the stats and facts IBM reports in-support of serious games are these gems:

• "Students remember only 10 percent of what they read; 20 percent of what they hear; 30 percent if they see visuals relatedto what they hear; 50 percent if they watch someone do something while explaining it; but almost 90 percent if they do the job themselves, even if only as a simulation." – Federation of American Scientists
• The average age of gamers today is 35. 67% of the U.S. heads of households play games, with a higher percentage in Asia. – Entertainment Software Association 2008 report
• From a higher academic perspective, there’s a “near-universal antipathy to the undergraduate lecture experience, showing that 98 percent who leave science and engineering majors cite ‘poor teaching by faculty’ as a major concern and that even 86 percent of those who stay say the same.” – The Kauffman Foundation

What these disparate statistics say together is that many, many post-collegiate individuals play gaming systems long after their college years, students in college are not satisfied with a purely lecture-based form of education, and the most efficient form of education (training for those after college) is a hands-on model that requires interactive experience.

Or as IBM explains it in their newsletter, “serious games can help today’s and tomorrow’s organizations work smarter by providing a broad understanding of business and organizational dynamics. Games acclimatize individuals to synthesize information in real time and to collaborate on developing solutions, thus making them a superior learning vehicle.”

We couldn't have said it better ourselves. Learn more about serious games from Designing Digitally, Inc. here.