Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen was an avid gamer studying psychology at the University of Copenhagen. His interests surrounding gaming and learning eventually led him to a PhD on the same topic at the IT University of Copenhagen. His own experiences and his research made him conclude that there was great unexploited potential to use games for purposes beyond entertainment. More specifically, games could be used to educate people about important matters in the real world. To explore this potential, he created Serious Games Interactive.
How did SG evolve since your initial vision?
Serious Games Interactive was formed in May 2006. From the start, we worked very hard on getting our first title “Global Conflicts: Palestine”, a game about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, out onto the market. The game was a serious game with an explicit learning purpose and at that time serious games were made on very small budgets and graphics and gameplay could not compete with the big commercial titles. We believed that in order to engage people in the topic, we needed to develop a game that was comparable to other commercial titles. This meant that we had a relatively high minimum level requirement to the graphics and we wanted the gameplay to provide a unique game experience.
With a team of seven people, we launched the game in July 2007, receiving great media coverage. Everybody in the team felt that we were doing something important which is what lead us to start working on our second title “Global Conflicts: Latin America”, which focuses on debt slavery, corruption, globalization and the emergence of new democracies in Latin American countries.
Today we are 15 people working out of our office in Copenhagen. We have developed a number of serious games projects for museums, NGOs, and corporations and are currently working on our third title “Global Conflicts: Africa” where the first mission focuses on the use of child soldiers
What is your mission? What do you offer?
Our mission is to develop and market engaging and remarkable serious games experiences. The games we make must create value for our users, partners, shareholders and societies. This implies that we take our corporate social responsibility very seriously, while we also recognise that, together with our partners, we need to earn money in order to keep developing the games we believe in.
What have been your main milestones?
I think the company has several milestones. From a development perspective, the obvious milestones are the releases of our own two games “Global Conflicts: Palestine” (July 2007) and “Global Conflicts: Latin America” (October 2008). However, our games are not worth anything if nobody plays them, so from a marketing perspective, the milestones are our first distribution agreement with a commercial game publisher, dtp Entertainment, Germany, (June 2007) and our first distribution agreement with an educational publisher, Bonnier Utbildning, Sweden, (November, 2007). We have just launched an online web portal from which our games can be bought and played, lately. This marks the latest milestone in the development of the company.
Any particular moment or achievement you want to share?
The moments we love are those where we realise what our games mean to people. It was a great moment when we got the feedback from 500 Danish students that had tested “Global Conflicts: Palestine” for the first time, and 90% of them thought it was a good educational material and 60% thought that they had learned more than they would have in a comparable traditional lecture. Another great experience has been all the positive emails we receive from people around the world finding our games interesting and important. Currently, we are testing ‘Global Conflicts: Palestine’ in Israel and Palestine; finding out that the initial feedback from people living in the region has been positive was really nice.
What kind of an impact do your games have?
Our games provide the users with an experience-based understanding of the main issues of the conflicts we focus on. They enable ‘contextual bridging’, meaning that they deal with abstract concepts and are then able to give these concrete meanings. Human rights violations, for instance, can be difficult for people living in most Western countries to relate to and understand the implications of. Through the games media we aim to let our users experience what human rights violations actually mean, how they occur and how this affects the everyday life of people living in conflict zones.
What sets you apart from similar companies?
I don’t know whether they set us apart but there are three things I love: (1) people in the company like what they are doing and are good at it; (2) we are a very diverse group of people spanning from areas such as programming and design over psychology and social studies to project management and economics; (3) we all believe that what we do is important and that we can make a positive contribution to society.
What is the feedback from NGOs and users?
We have had a very good feedback from NGOs so far. Amnesty International has bought our games to sell through their website. New Internationalists in Australia also offers our games through their online shop. We are also working with a number of NGOs in Denmark including Amnesty International Denmark, Crossing Borders and Mellemfolkelig Samvirke. In terms of our users, the ones that buy our games are very enthusiastic about them. Yet, the market for serious games is still rather small and we have a big challenge in broadening our user base and getting more people engaged in serious topics through the games we develop.
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