LudoScience

To understand how Serious Games fit into the videogame landscape, we can draw an analogy with the world of cinema.

In the film industry, we primarily find big-budget entertainment films, also known as “block busters”.

In the video-game industry, the equivalent would be AAA (triple-A) titles. 

Next come auteur or independent films. This is where we find the independent games community.

As for art films, we identify Arts games such as Jason Rohrer's Passage.

Then we come to documentaries, and in particular docu-fictions, which can be compared to Serious Games. The aim here is to convey a message (educational, informative, opinionated, etc.) via a genre that is both instructive and entertaining.

To stop our analogy at this point would undoubtedly be rather limited.

Indeed, if we explore the audiovisual register, we find many other registers: reports, commercials, educational films...

How might we position them in relation to the videogame industry?

To answer this question, let's try to analyze what makes a cinematographic film special: the story it tells.

So, to establish our analogy between the film and video industries, we finally compared a story to a game.

A docu-drama tries to blend utilitarian content with a story that's fun to watch and listen to.

This is also what the Serious Game attempts to do, with the idea of making utilitarian content pleasant to consult via play.

With this in mind, we can extend our analogy to the audiovisual world, by listing all productions that combine utilitarian aspects and storytelling: 

An advertising spot, or even a propaganda film in fictional form, would be the equivalent of an advergame or political game. In other words, a Serious game by extension. In simple terms, any player who does not come from the entertainment market and commissions a film that combines a story with utilitarian content would be the equivalent of a Serious Game in the videogame world.

Having drawn this analogy between the audiovisual and video-game industries, we can see that equating Serious Games with video games is like equating documentaries with films. Formally speaking, both are documents that could be found on film or video, but the genres are different.