Filament Games: A Serious Games Developer

As much as we at Filament like to focus on play, shenanigans, and frivolity, we’re actually a very serious business doing serious things. In fact, you might even say we make serious games, and that’s not just our terminology. Clark Abt coined the term serious games in his 1970 book of the same name, describing games built with a deliberate educational purpose where amusement is secondary to learning. More than half a century later, that definition still holds up. A serious game uses mechanics and systems to change what a player knows or does long after the session ends. Over twenty years and more than 400 projects, we've built serious games for classrooms, clinics, dairy farms, and engineering programs, and the variety of that work is the clearest demonstration of what serious gaming can do. Below are six serious games examples from our portfolio, each paired with the design decision that made it effective, so you can envision the type of serious game that would work for your audience.

Investigation Declaration Turns Students into Historical Investigators

The ideas in the Declaration of Independence took more than a century to develop, and that history can be difficult to convey in a single lesson. Investigation Declaration, developed for iCivics, casts students as secret agents tracing the origins of democratic thought across the Atlantic World. Players follow Enlightenment principles as they travel and evolve over more than a hundred years of history, eventually shaping the founding document of the United States. The investigator role gives students a reason to gather and weigh evidence, which is the same habit of mind historians use every day. When your learning objective is a certain mindset, one of our go-to strategies is to give players an identity that requires that way of thinking.

Be Scam Ready Builds Fraud Awareness Through Safe Practice

Online scams depend on psychological manipulation that is difficult to recognize in the moment. Be Scam Ready, a free browser-based game we developed with Google, lets players step through short, choice-driven scenarios across four distinct character stories. Each scenario surfaces the social-engineering technique underneath the scam, so players learn to recognize the method wherever it appears. Players experience the consequences of every choice inside the game, where a mistake carries no financial risk. That kind of low-stakes repetition is one of the strongest arguments for serious games in any domain where errors in the field are costly.

Contents Under Pressure Trains Engineers to Manage Risk

In industrial settings, small safety compromises can accumulate until they come to feel normal, which is a pattern with a somewhat poetic name - the normalization of deviance. Contents Under Pressure, developed with Rowan University, puts players in the role of a senior engineer making daily operational decisions at a chemical plant. Each choice balances production demands against safety, time constraints, and reputation, and conditions grow more complex as an approaching hurricane raises operational risk. As a testament to the quality and necessity of this design, the game earned a silver award at the 2022 Serious Play Conference and also won the 2023 David Himmelblau Award. 🎉  Games like this are a great way to help your audience engage with systems that compound small decisions over time, allowing learners to feel the long-term consequences that a single isolated scenario cannot show.

Mooving Cows Teaches Low-Stress Cattle Handling

Animal welfare and herd productivity on a dairy farm both depend on how workers move cattle from place to place. Mooving Cows, a mobile game developed with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, casts players as cow movers guiding cattle through barns and pathways. Players apply calm movements and careful positioning, then observe how each action affects the animals' behavior and stress levels. That feedback loop mirrors the observational skill experienced handlers rely on, giving new workers meaningful practice before they ever step into the barn. The game was a 2024 Wisconsin Innovation Awards finalist and a strong example of serious games serving hands-on workforce training. As a serious game developer based in Wisconsin, you know we had to get at least one dairy project in our portfolio - many thanks to UW-Madison for helping us check that box!

FIRMM-pix Helps Young Patients Stay Still During MRI Scans

Clear brain MRI images depend on patients holding still, which can be difficult for anyone, and particularly for young patients in an unfamiliar clinical setting. FIRMM-pix, a game suite developed with Turing Medical, is the first in-scan solution to combine gamification with biofeedback during the scan itself. Players unlock new characters and scenery as they maintain steady behavior, and gameplay pacing aligns with MRI timing requirements. Reducing patient motion this way improves image quality and can potentially lower the need for rescans or sedation. The core mechanic here is stillness, and we thoroughly enjoyed the design challenge of creating a game that rewards you for doing as little as possible. This project is an important reminder that the right player verb is whatever behavior your outcome requires.

Mindful Market Supports Cognitive Rehabilitation in VR

Cognitive rehabilitation benefits from practicing skills within familiar, functional contexts. Mindful Market, a therapeutic VR experience developed with Penumbra, Inc., places patients in everyday scenarios like assembling sandwiches for customers and calculating transaction totals. A therapist guides each session as patients rebuild working memory and executive function through structured, repeatable tasks. The simulation gives patients a safe environment to carry gains from clinical therapy into independent daily life. Commonly used in many medical simulations, VR is an ideal medium for a project like this because the setting itself is part of the lesson.

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Each of these games started from the specific behavior our partners needed to foster and designed the mechanics around that behavior. That principle applies whether your audience sits in a classroom or a clinic, and it explains why the reach of serious gaming keeps growing more than fifty years after Clark Abt named the field. Throughout October, we'll dig deeper into the design and evidence behind serious games, including the mechanics that build retention and the analytics that demonstrate it. Ready to build a serious game around the outcome your organization needs most? Let's talk.

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