The 2016 Serious Games Showcase & Challenge: Winners by Category

U.S. Army STARS Elements, subtitled Fun with Chemistry, came from Army Game Studio and took three awards: Best Mobile Game, Students' Choice and People's Choice. The USC Institute for Creative Technologies, together with the US Army Research Laboratory, won Best Government-Developed Game for USC Standard Patient. ARA Virtual Heroes won Best Business-Developed Game with the Post Attack Reconnaissance (PAR) Virtual Training Module. The business category is the contest's historically largest, which makes that award the hardest fought.

Bots & (Main) Frames, from the New York University Tandon School of Engineering, won Best Student-Developed Game. The Innovation Award was new in 2016 and went to two games: ADAPT-MP from Design Interactive and Limbitless Training Games from the University of Central Florida.

Seven award names were in play, and the Innovation Award was the only one with two winners. Three of the awards split games by who built them: businesses, government bodies or students. Best Mobile Game sorted by platform. The same game could take several prizes, as U.S. Army STARS Elements did, so six titles account for eight awards.

Nineteen games reached the finalist list: A Fine Line, ADAPT-MP, Bots & (Main) Frames, Cognify, Crime Scene Investigation (CSI), Evergreen FRS Virtual Team, Limbitless Training Games, Musikinésia, NBCOT Navigator, Night of the Living Debt, Pediatric Vital Signs, Post Attack Reconnaissance (PAR) Virtual Training Module, Project Zap, Robonaut, Sales Command, SimScientists Food Web Game, U.S. Army STARS: Elements, USC Standard Patient and Vetor. Eight awards went to six of them, and one game, U.S. Army STARS Elements, collected three.

The contest's results page for 2016 lists the same winners next to the full list of finalists. One finalist, Night of the Living Debt, is a financial literacy game that can still be played in a browser.

The contest itself continues. A banner across its website announces that submissions for the 2026 edition are closed and invites visitors to meet at I/ITSEC 2026. The 2016 list is a mix of Army, university and company entries, with the Army-built STARS Elements the most decorated title. Whether the other 2016 winners can still be played is a separate question: the results page does not track it.