Gaming that's more than just fun in games.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Jramale. Imagine you're a national security official charged with monitoring marine activity off the coast of your fictitious country.

Suddenly a large tankership in your area goes silent. Its location sensor is

offline and it's not responding to radio communication.

What do you do?

It's a question Francesca de Rosa poses in the reliability game, which she designed.

We're actually going to play it on the show in a couple of minutes.

It's part of the genre known as Serious Games.

De Rosa is Chief Scientist for Gaming at the Center for Advanced Preparedness and Threat Response simulation or captors.

She says while serious games can be fun, they're really meant to prepare people to

handle all kinds of situations.

The scenarios can be really, really very broad. You go from emergency

response but also planning international relationships and so forth and especially the most ancient forms of

serious game if we want to stick to the broader definition we're very defense focus

because actually the whole serious game domain is born out of war gaming.

Word gaming has been around for 200 years so it's definitely not something new and

it's really looking at decision-making in defense and

war-fighting situations.

This techniques have slowly started percolating to the civilian world and have basically started

started to living a whole development cycle on their own.

Well, let's talk about this game that you developed called the reliability game. Can you describe this

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