Purposeful games alternately called as serious games or applied games are games with a purpose in addition to entertainment. The purpose of such games can range from providing learning, creating awareness, solving problems to changing behaviors. Increasingly, businesses, governments, non-government organizations and educational institutions are looking at purposeful games for a variety of purposes - to promote their commercial causes, to promote social change or causes (such as road safety or environment-friendly practices) or facilitating academic learning.

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Focus

In this workshop, we focus on games in the citizen behavior space, such as games to promote road safety awareness or environment-friendly living. We recognize that the major challenge with such games is getting users to play them. We, therefore, need to explore ways in which such games can become omnipresent and be played through novel interfaces so that users interact with them in their daily routines. We also need to identify novel techniques for user motivation, going beyond the tricks of gamification.

 

Serious games also demand that a fixed message should come out because that is the purpose of the game. This is in conflict with the idea of games which has free play, even chance of winning and fun. (Can a bandit win against the police? In a normal game he can, but in serious it defeats the purpose. Or Ram losing to Ravan?) 

 

Participation

The workshop will consist of practical concept building session, discussions, as well as theoretical talks by leading designers and researchers. We encourage workshop participants to come up with ideas and concepts that push the boundaries of present day player interaction methods and motivation techniques. We expect participants to contemplate the use of technologies such IOT, biomedical sensors, AR-VR interfaces etc. as well use of hybrid and distributed approaches in the design of citizen centric games.

 

​The target audience of this workshop are design students, professionals, researchers and academicians with a keen interest in purposeful games. The participants will be taken through the mechanics and principles of serious game design. They will also be shown industry examples of serious games ranging from board games to those created using emerging technologies.