Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.

This week, Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca decided to close their seven year old serious games blog, Water Cooler Games.  In a nutshell, they believe that the idea of games for more than entertainment is no longer novel.  The blog sphere on this topic is saturated.

But a more important factor was at work in my decision to close the site. Since 2003, the widespread application of games to learning, news, politics, health, business, advertising, and other uses outside entertainment has become much more common. The very idea of our project was novel then, in a way that it is not now. Isn’t that what we wanted all along?

And it’s not just those in the serious game field talking about this topic.  Just a week prior an article in Health Affairs outlined the market state of health games. Currently, the health games market is valued at $6.6 billion, in comparison to the overall $42 billion video game market, according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers.  The video game business is estimated to grow an additional $26 billion in the next two years.

Will health games follow suit?  Carleen Hawn, co-founder and editor of Healthspottr.com in San Francisco believes health-related digital games have  an “immense” potential for growth in the digital game market, citing successes like Wii Fit, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Humana’s Horespower Challenge.

As the novelty wears off, what should we expect from the market?

If those in the field believe that serious games are starting to lose their novelty, how should we expect the market to react?  I’ve been asking myself the same question these last few weeks. The video game market continues to grow at a remarkably fast pace, but the health games market, although growing, has been slow.  If health games are really becoming a part of our everyday lives, to the point that they are no longer novel, where’s the money? Where’s the market?