Use of serious games for creating awareness about social enterprises

Abstract

India has 3.17 million registered not-for-profit social enterprises with an estimated 83.3 million people engaged with them as employees or volunteers. In the absence of a widespread formal education system for social enterprises, learning by experience has been the main knowledge driver. In recent years, the social sector has drawn more people towards it. The present authors have designed a board game to create awareness about social enterprises. A pilot run, with 48 participants in the age group of 15–74 years, conducted in India, indicates that the challenge before the social sector in India is to create awareness and image building of the sector, to conduct training and workshops, attract more people and organizations to participate in their activities, and possibly make it an integral part of the education system. The board game version can be adopted in electronic format for a wider reach. In a vast country like India, the latter game version can also overcome the traditional barriers of education, language, cost and time to spread awareness on social issues. The social entrepreneurship board game shows the effectiveness of serious games for awareness creation and its potential to impact the thought process. It is an effective method of learning for topics and subjects, in which people normally would not invest in terms of time, efforts and money. This is corroborated by the FloodSim experience in London which used a serious game for a similar objective. Serious games could be designed to address specific social issues like civic discipline, sanitation, health, hygiene, water, power, and environmental protection.