Revisiting Serious Play

I had made a couple posts back in September about Serious Games, specifically about an article that was a Socratic Dialogue between Dr. Geoffrey Rockwell and Dr. Kevin Kee as a plenary presentation to the 2009 Interacting with Immersive Worlds Conference at Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada.   Well, the time has come to revisit this lovely dialogue in order to support the argument about the rhetoric of video games.  In order to establish that play can be serious, I will be reviewing the arguments made by these gentlemen in their mock argument, some of the assertion I made in those previous posts, and looking at the presentations made at the Serious Play Conference.

I am going to have to review the presentations made at the conference and check back in.  From what I have seen so far, there are a wide variety of subject areas, including games for learning, simulations, military games, health industry games, and corporate games as well.  This is an excellent shot in the arm for the thesis, as all of these subject areas would seem like the unlikeliest candidates for games, as they are all of the "important" or "serious" realms of our lives, not a place for fun.  Instead, learning through fun games can inspire all types of learners-- whether it is to teach certain skills to the members of the armed services, or to train health care professionals in new regulations or budgetary practices, this conference is aimed at producing effective yet entertaining media that is the wave of the future.  This will support the fact that video games do have a place in the classroom, and that there is indeed a form of serious play.  Even the games that are entirely fun can be appreciated and understood in literary terms-- I think that once the "Rhetoric & Serious Play" section of the thesis is finished, it will naturally lead right into the "Narrativity of Games" section.