The Leisure of Serious Games: A Dialogue

Abstract

This dialogue was performed by Dr. Geoffrey Rockwell and Dr. Kevin Kee as a plenary presentation to the 2009 Interacting with Immersive Worlds Conference at Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada. Kevin introduced Geoffrey as a keynote speaker prepared to present on serious games. Instead of following convention, Geoffrey invited Kevin to engage in a dialogue testing the claim that "games can be educational". Animated by a spirit of Socratic play, they examined serious gaming in the light of the insights of ancient philosophers including Socrates, Plato and Aesop, twentieth-century theorists such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bernard Suits, Johan Huizinga, and Roger Callois, and contemporaries such as Espen Aarseth, Bernard Suits and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Their dialogue touched on topics ranging from definitions of play and games, to existing examples of “serious games”, to divisions between games and simulations, and the historical trajectories of comparable media. Their goal was to provide an introduction to these topics, and provoke discussion among their listeners during the conference that followed. In the end, they agreed that the lines of separation between "games" and "learning" may not be as clear as sometimes assumed, and that in game design we may find the seeds of serious play.