Why So Serious? On the Relation of Serious Games and Learning

Breuer and Bente's 2010 article examines the term "serious games," arguing that its definition is contested and inconsistently applied across research and industry. The authors contend that the label does not reliably signal an educational purpose or a socially desirable effect, since many games described as serious lack a primary learning goal and some, such as extremist propaganda games, would qualify under a loose definition. Positioning serious games alongside related concepts such as edutainment, e-learning, and digital game-based learning, they maintain that commercial off-the-shelf games can also serve serious ends, which leads them to favor flexible descriptive tags over fixed genre categories.

A central thesis is that play and learning share fundamental qualities, including challenge, interactivity, motivation, self-efficacy, and flow, which make games an attractive vehicle for education. Drawing on Ritterfeld and Weber's framework of reinforcement, motivation, and blending paradigms, the authors argue that effective serious games depend on careful integration of entertainment and learning rather than simple juxtaposition. They also suggest that commercial games can support learning through tangential learning and teachable moments, and they judge existing serious game taxonomies to be frequently redundant or overlapping.

The paper's empirical grounding rests largely on Ratan and Ritterfeld's (2009) analysis of 612 games labeled serious by their developers. That review found academic education to be the dominant category (63 percent of games), elementary through high school students to be the largest target audience (39 percent), skill practice to be the most common learning principle (48 percent), and the PC to be the platform for roughly 90 percent of titles. Because such descriptive approaches exclude games not explicitly labeled serious, as well as emerging pervasive and augmented reality formats, the authors propose a non-exclusive, multi-dimensional tag taxonomy covering platform, subject, learning goals, audience, interaction mode, and related attributes.