Call for Special Tracks Papers

Serious games and gamification techniques are often used to capture and maintain the user’s attention, engagement, and motivation in a wide variety of subjects and contexts, including but not limited to health and lifestyle, workplace training, formal, informal, and adult education, social inclusion, and social change. However, like with every other game, attention, engagement, and motivation must be earned, and can only be requested up to a point. It can be hard to design the right balance of interventions to encourage healthy behaviour change and effective education while preventing engagement in harmful behaviour. Designers of serious games seem to mostly keep their distance from entertainment products, perhaps missing opportunities to bring their content to the general population. On the other hand, entertainment game designers often struggle to incorporate educational elements effectively in their games, thus missing opportunities to create long-lasting impact through a form of entertainment enjoyed by a wide and varied demographic. Let’s see what the two sides can learn from each other.