Despite our preconceptions about gaming in many cases it goes beyond the simple yearning for entertainment, often fulfilling a deeper need.
The education sector has long been talking about the benefits of introducing gaming elements into the classroom to help students engage and learn better. And a recent survey conducted by academics in the United States has now found that gaming can also be used to improve the effectiveness of traditional health interventions.
The researchers, whose work was funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research: Research Protocols, found that by integrating social gaming elements into a behaviour-tracking programme, they were able to encourage participants to exercise more frequently, with obvious health benefits.
During the course of the 10-week project, scientists from the University of Southern California and the University of Buffalo studied young and middle-aged adults whose lifestyles ranged from ‘sedentary’ to ‘very active’. The researchers discovered that the combination of keeping a diary and engaging in social gaming increased a subject’s likelihood of exercising more frequently. The findings also show that subjects who engaged in social gaming from the beginning of the programme benefited more than their opposite numbers, and that these effects persisted after the study had finished.
While we’re not trying to cure anything – and certainly not about to claim that gaming is a global panacea – our own experience as one of the world’s leading online gaming platforms is that there is often a lot more to gaming than the simple, top-line entertainment factor. And this survey highlights that nicely.
Our own research from a range of focus groups prior to the launch of Sara’s Cooking Class,for example, found that – certainly for the younger generation – gaming offers a safe environment to learn and act out their future life. And although Sara’s Cooking Class targets young girls aged 6-12, the concepts can easily be ported across to any segments.
For example, we know from some of our other games that young boys need to discover their own identities through setting high scores, gaining achievements and winning. This means that their choice of games is much more about competition than creativity and collaboration. This same philosophy also carries over to adult men, while we also know adult women play games primarily to break away from their daily routine – or escape from reality – and at the same time get some mental stimulation. However, for the purpose of this article I’ll continue to focus on our findings from this particular survey.
Our focus groups found that young girls’ lives today can in general be summarised as very busy, mostly scheduled by parents and supervised by adults and with limited freedom to explore. And with parents’ lives equally fraught in what is increasingly a time-poor society, girls can feel restricted and unable to express themselves.
As one of the key pillars of our business model, we have a lot of experience of the tween girls market, and our research has shown that this sector likes to explore their future lives through role-play; and that acting out grown-up situations helps them understand and make sense of the world around them.
Online gaming offers them the opportunity to have these experiences and enjoy themselves at the same time, as well as also encouraging creativity and sharing and this can be combined with a sense of reward and achievement when certain criteria are met. They do this very often through a range of different types of games, including quizzes, tests, games where they run a business, cooking games and dress-up games. This, in short, is what we would term edutainment.
Ironically, online gaming can also help bring families closer together – with mothers and daughters, and fathers and sons able to take short breaks out to enjoy casual gaming together. This flies in the face of the popular perception of online games being all about teenagers shut away with their consoles for hours at a time.
Indeed, when researching girls’ online and video gaming behaviour, researchers saw a 20% increase in positive indicators including feelings of being connected to the family in parents who play with their kids. While, a study from Brigham Young University also shows that daughters whose parents interacted with them during gameplay felt more connected to their families.
We’re not going to solve all the world’s problems through online games, however more research like that above will go a long way to removing some of the stigma around gaming and help us to embrace its power for good; and to stop focusing on the negatives.
Oscar Diele is the Vice President of Global Brands at Spil Games.
Originally posted May 14, The Wall