Using Games for Better Living: Interactive Media Arts and Digital Games in China
I have been conducting research on serious games. Serious games are games designed for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment, such as curing mental trauma including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), preventing or improving dementia, addressing social issues, or conducting training, education, or campaigns. While a lot of research has demonstrated benefits of serious games for these purposes, some research has pointed out that games are just for entertainment and it is against the nature of games to have a purpose other than enjoying them. Moreover, there are many similar but different concepts such as gamification, game-based learning, G-Learning, or Edu-games. For these reasons, serious games have been considered as having contradictory concepts and they thus cannot be defined clearly. I am interested in how serious games have been applied to educational fields, how we should do to apply serious games to educational fields effectively, and what method(s) and assessment model(s) can measure the effect more accurately. My research mainly focuses on South Korean, but I also conduct case research in other countries to make comparisons.
This time I visited Dalian Polytechnic University as part of my surveys. In the university, the concept of interactive media arts is used as a new educational tool toward the future. The university aims to cultivate human resources who can contribute to society through various collaborative activities with communities as well as designs themselves in its curriculum. According to researchers I met there, interactive media means combination of digital technologies and contents, and they call art works which are highly emphasized each other as interactive media arts or new media arts.
In South Korea, serious games are used to erase the doubt about the effects of games and negative image of games. On the other hand, in China the concept of interactive media arts is used to apply digital technologies to other fields including serious games. Through this survey, I found out that the concept of interactive media arts using digital technologies has been recognized positively in China where people have negative image about games, especially digital games.
Compared to before, the number of research which demonstrates the positive effects of serious games has been increasing. However, the number of research which can makes an objective assessment of serious games is still limited. In addition, people have still doubts or worries about applying games, especially serious games to educational fields. However, how we use games is also important as indicated in the case of interactive media arts in China. Games provide some kind of experience for players and produce various interactions. In my opinion, this is the greatest strength when we apply games to educational fields.
I would like to continue my research, hoping that social values of games will be enriched through application of serious games to educational fields.
SHIN Juhyung
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This research achievement was financially supported by the research fund “international research activities,” a support system for enhancing the research quality of young researchers of the Research Center for Ars Vivendi in the academic year 2017.
