| | December - 20198IN MY OPINIONIn recent years there has been a growth in the use of both serious games and gamification in adult education, in colleges, universities, and workplaces. While the use of both approaches have their benefits, they are not without their problems, and in this article I shall explore their limitations and present playful approaches as an alternative way to engage learners and support innovation and learning throughout adulthood. Serious games are typically digital games that have a primary purpose other than for pure entertainment, for example to market a product, influence behaviour, or to support learning. They can be deeply engaging and create rich problem-based learning environments, but good educational video games can be very expensive to develop and getting the right mix of playability and learning content is something of a dark art of which many serious games fall short. A more insidious concern is the use of the term `serious' as a way of legitimising games in an educational sphere; I argue that it is the very lack of seriousness ­ the nature of play itself as abstracted from the solemnity of the real-world ­ that is key to its potential for learning. In contrast, gamification makes no such claims to gravity; it is the application of game mechanics, such as points, badges, competition, or achievements, to non-gaming activities as a way of adding an external motivational layer to achieve desired behaviours in the user. While this is potentially a benefit of gamified learning systems, it is also their main drawback­extrinsic motivators will not engage everyone or even many people for very long, and may well distract from the core intended activities. Playful learning in the context of adult education is an evolution of both serious games and gamification, which has been growing in popularity over that past five years. It emerged as a way of explicitly countering the seriousness of other game-based approaches, and highlighting the importance of intrinsically-motivated play. Recent theoretical work in framing the field of playful learning has given it a wide conceptual base, highlighting its implementation as tools, techniques, and tactics. Tools, in this case, are the artefacts of play such as games, toys, or puzzles; techniques are described as pedagogic approaches with the potential for play Playful Learning: Innovating Beyond the TechnologyBy Nicola Whitten, Director of the Durham Center for Academic Development, Durham UniversityNicola Whitten
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