On and ever upward …
Stumbled across this article from australian website itnews.com.au : http://tinyurl.com/27l56y9
While it seems like a little while since it's been necessary to explain what the term “serious games” actually means, there are some really interesting projects mentioned in this article that I was unaware of, like the Hilton Hotel Group's “Ultimate Team Play” on the PSP, of all things, and McDonald's rolling out staff training on Nintendo DS consoles at restaurants across Japan.
South Korea, as with most things digital, seems to have wholeheartedly embraced the concept of games for learning, with the Ministry for Culture, Sports and Tourism setting out their intention to spend more than a quarter of a billion GBP on serious games by 2012.
It's clear that the concept of using games for serious purposes is an idea that crosses the boundaries between cultures, and one that is steadily gaining traction all around the world.

This game was never meant to teach!
Newsweek suggests an interesting opportunity for learning through games. Only instead of players learning by doing, those who create the games can learn a lot about the behaviour of the people playing: http://tinyurl.com/2b3vk8o It might sound a little big-brothery, what with the collection of data involved, but as the popularity of Facebook and similar sites suggests, there are certain things that we are happy to publicise about ourselves. Also, most of us are happy to give our opinion about one thing or another when someone gives us the opportunity. It would be very interesting to explore the sorts of things we could learn about human behaviour through games and simulations, and it's a no-brainer to see how such information could be used to commercial advantage. Definitely beats a market research questionnaire anyway.
The author does make a salient point at the end of the article about the validity of generalising data from what is probably a niche population, but perhaps he underestimates the variety of people that do play the likes of Farmville and Mafiawars. I'm of the opinion that everyone likes a good game, now and again. Then again, I would be …