ABSTRACT
TRADITIONAL GAMES FOR SERIOUS PURPOSES/CATEGORIZING EDUCATIONAL COMPUTER GAMES/THE RATIONALE BEHIND EDUTAINMENT/THE INSTRUCTIONAL APPROACH TO EDUTAINMENT/THE MODERN APPROACH TO THE EDUCATIONAL USE OF COMPUTER GAMES/THE EDUCATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS OF VIDEO GAMES/ POLITICAL GAMES AND NEWSGAMES/ADVERTAINMENT/GAMIFICATIONPLUG’N’PLAY GAMES FOR REAL?/GAMES-FOR-CHANGE-REVOLUTIONARIES RISE/FINAL REMARKS
Games are really growing. It used to be mostly about entertainment, and now it’s about pretty much everything else as well. The area of “serious games” has benefi tted from the omnipresence of games, but has also helped infl uence them by showing how games can be so much more than run-of-the-mill shooters for teenage boys. During the last 20 years the game industry grew in value from €15 billion to €75 billion, and each week the people of this planet are spending something like three billion hours playing. We’re playing in a number of different ways. 1 We see people doing it on their phones, on Facebook, on their TV screens, and on websites. The range of platforms, channels, and genres offered for different player types is immense, and the game industry seems to have “cracked the code” for making games a mainstream offer.
