A 'Serious' Growth Area For Game Developers?

simoniker writes "The recently launched Serious Games Source website, which deals with games created for training, health, government, military, and educational uses, has an interview with the Serious Game Initiative's Ben Sawyer, in which the non-profit director, looking back at E3, comments controversially: 'I believe that every company in the games space will have a serious games related business position in the next ten years.' Sawyer especially referenced Square Enix's recent announcement that it has created a subsidiary to 'develop and distribute edutainment style software'. How many of our traditional education and training courses will be taken over by games over the next few years?"

Virtual Heroes

[Anonymous Coward]

Virtual Heroes, the development house behind Americas Army, is working on several pretty neat titles. I don't know how much I can talk about these, since I toured their development studios - but they're working on a collaborative team-based puzzle space game, where teams are provided a problem and have to work out a solution (think Apollo 13). They're also working on nurse and emergency responder simulation training games - editing a game to include new basic emergency responder techniques is easier and faster to distribute than manuals and training personel.

Social Skills Building Games

[Lord_Dweomer]

I'd really love to see some development in games dealing with building social skills. That may seem like an oxymoron but there's really something to be said for learning skills in an environment that does not induce the full amount of stress that the real world situation does.

I think dating sims are a great start to this, but they are all fantasy based, very unrealistic etc. I'd love to see a video game that uses real life video of people to train you to better read facial expressions and body language as well as to learn good responses to situations that may cause social anxiety.

If anybody can think of any currently existing titles that are good for this, by all means please post them.

And for you smartasses who are going to answer "I got a game for you, its called Real Life"....my response to you is that as someone with Social Anxiety Disorder, it isn't always as simple as "oh, I'm nervous around people so I'll go talk to as many as I can to try to get over this". Often times there is a specific underlying fear of the social interaction itself (or many fears) that need to be worked on before someone is able to test their skills out on a real person. I honestly think that the one person qualified to make such a game would be David DeAngelo. Some of his stuff may be fluff and an attempt at pushing more product, but at his core, he knows his shit and he speaks the brutal truth about interaction with the opposite sex.