Serious Games Development and Impact for Business Education

*Dario Liberona, Aravind Kumaresan, Lionel Valenzuela and Giovanny Tarazona*

### **Abstract**

Learning methodologies and experiences have changed over the recent years thanks to the incorporation of digital technology, among many of these technologies are Serious Games, that has a better opportunity to be used during recent pandemic times, the process of designing and incorporating games technologies is not easy and there are very few available development tools, this paper focus on basic guidelines and a practical experience. Review the process of developing a serious game and address some of the challenges of making a serious game from scratch. The objective is also to understand the challenges of developing and implementing gaming mechanics in Serious Games and the impact and results of the experience of using it with students'samples from Latin America and Europe. The results of this study is that gamming has a very positive impact in the learning process of higher educations students, whom value the use of this technologies in their education, however in general these technologies are not being use in higher education, there is more simulation type implementations, especially in marketing and logistic areas. There is a need to train teachers and create pedagogical departments that will enhance and develop this experiential learning tools.

**Keywords:** serious games, edutainment, entrepreneurship, gaming base learning, startup education, gaming mechanics, startup journey game

### **1. Introduction**

Higher Education is one of the key strategic factors that are helping to sustain and increase development and social mobility [1, 2], the world is rapidly changing, now we have almost complete generations that have play many games since very early childhood like generation alpha, meanwhile generation Z is mostly on University students and joining the labor force are super familiar with games, the first generation that had games and social networks since very early stage [3], generation Alpha is the first totally digital natives generation and already are playing games like never before, they will be joining universities around 2030 with more experience in digital gamming that any other generation (**Table 1**).

Computer games have already set their foundation on mainframe computers and then extended its use to personal computers and many devices and ways, electronic


#### *Computer Game Development*


*Serious Games Development and Impact for Business Education DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.103085*

> **Table 1.**

*Characteristics of generations and most popular games (own elaboration).*

games have been close to at least the so-called generations X, Y, Z many of generation Z are studding at universities now and soon generation Alpha born on this century will be joining higher education with a big exposure to gaming has never seen before. In the last 50 year we have seen tremendous growth in the gaming industry and since a decade or some gaming has become serious with a new branch of edutainment, new games with the purpose of helping to teach certain specifics concepts and decisionmaking experiences.

After generation Y some concepts of learning were incorporated into education, but it was generation Z the one that learned many concepts, math, sciences, languages, and others with interactive games mostly.

**Table 1** shows the different generations and their most common games, we can clearly see how gaming has become more and more popular each decade, most of the generation Z and Alpha, the current and future higher education students have a culture of gamming and are familiar with diverse gaming technologies like never before, and generation Alpha has been using virtual reality and augmented reality, this generations have been very active in this 180 billion dollars industry.

Serious Games, also called educational games or applied game, Clark Abt is credited for coining the term "serious game" in the 1970s, defined as "games have an explicit and carefully thought-out educational purpose and are not intended to be played primarily for amusement" [4].

Digital games whose main purpose is "serious" in the sense that the learning outcome is more important than to simply entertain the players. The primary "serious" purposes can be to teach or train in specific areas providing learning experiences for students.

There are some video games that can be used for learning skills competencies, as they have an educational setting, such has Sims City, perhaps other areas such as Astronomy and Space-Themed Mobile Games.

However, these games need many video game design skills in order to be attractive for students, there are many categories of Digital games, simulations, virtual environments and mixed reality/media that have been applied to teach or train through responsive narrative/story, gameplay or encounters.

Nowadays constant innovation is needed in all industries, specially education, and the incorporation of serious games is a technology that has been evolving and helping to improve the students learning experience since the early 2000s, and has been slowly incorporated into university classrooms activities, there is still a big gap for teachers to adopt this new roles as game designers and game coordinators, they need to build new instructional design models that will benefit of both new technologies available and the new generations of students with long gamming experiences [5].

It is important to incorporate serious games and educational technology in order to teach skills and competences that are more practical and changing very rapidly, there is a need to give a more experiential dimension to the acquisition of knowledge from students, in this regards some games and digital simulations have been developed over the last decade [6–8].

The research group wanted to use this tool to improve the experiential learning of business development with a serious game denominated "Start up journey game", the objective of the game was to train and practice basic startup concepts.

The first steps were to determine what were the fundamental concepts to teach and then work with a specialized Game creation venture that will add the game experience best practices.

#### *Serious Games Development and Impact for Business Education DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.103085*

**Figure 1.**

In figure one we can review some of the educational technologies that have being incorporated in the last decade in higher education [1], here 21 new technological trends are identified, and we can see that games and gamification and many related technologies that complement this technologies such has analytics (that helps analyze students behavior and learning process), the use of mobile technologies and mixed reality. New technologies are being incorporated and the challenges of virtual education debt to the Covid pandemic has accelerated this incorporation (**Figure 1**) [9].

During this research we have made various surveys involving more that 375 students that have taking the Start Up Journey game in different countries and in different levels of higher education.

Some good practices applied to game developing and course implementation are review on this work.

It is not easy to produce full serious games, it takes time and could be very expensive, in the making there is two main challenges the content development in terms of the learning objectives and then what kind of gaming activities and type are the best to learn this, the gamification process that requires very specialized gaming concepts for users students that have a big expertise in gaming, but there are some companies developing simulations and tools that will help teaching specific contents.
