Where does the idea of creating a Serious Game come from? What are the impulse and the goal? For ‘Aislados’ the answer is clear: How can we approach teenagers speaking their own language? ‘Aislados’ was born to help teachers confront the teenagers’ emotional development in class.
Funded mainly by the Spanish Antidrug Plan with money coming from confiscated goods in antidrug operations, the game goes further than just alerting about drugs. Social behavior, personal choices, acceptance, decision making… teenagers face in a short period of their lives the necessity of learning who they are, how they interact with others and which are the results of those decisions. They have little space for trial and error so basically, a lot of them make mistakes and are judged severely for them.
For educators, the traditional approach of leaflets and speeches is completely obsolete. They need to reach adolescents talking their own language and avoiding a moralist tone that will discourage interest and implication. This is what triggered the idea of creating a game to be used in the classroom. A group of psychologists, social educators and teachers, with the help of SIAD (Spanish for Interdisciplinary Service for Drug addiction Attention Association), created the paper-based first version of ‘Aislados’ and took it to the classroom.
On Serious Games
Diciembre 2015
