Healthcare Games and the Metaphoric Approach

Many serious games dedicated to the health sector have been identified. Within this wide range, the authors have explored the Serious games offering an educational dimension and targeting either individuals or health-care professionals. Based on a corpus built around this orientation, the goal is to determine whether or not it is possible to find a use, targeted or not, involving metaphorical contexts among different titles. In the corpus studied, no metaphor is used for serious game targeting health-care professionals contrary to serious games targeting individuals. For this target, the game universe is mainly metaphorical. A discussion in the light of didactic and motivational arguments suggests that a metaphorical universe could be beneficial in the case where more transversal skills are targeted.