Integrating serious content into serious games

William Ryan, Dennis Charsky
2013 International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games  
This paper addresses the integration of training content into serious games. Many possibilities exist for how to approach this process, but there are also many opportunities and consequences afforded by these various approaches. Prior literature in the field gives us some sense about how to approach them, but much of this literature is based on theory in instructional systems or game design separately. Serious game designers utilize some of this theory, but also rely on other methods and
more » ... es for completing these games. This practitioner perspective is the one we adopt in this paper. This paper reviews current approaches suggested in research on serious games, derives what that research means for studies of serious game practice, and describes a study of how learning content is transformed in serious games. This paper finds practitioners have a learning objective focus to game design aiding their choices of the right mechanics and representation, balancing fun and education, and evaluating the game. We find serious game designers also must deal with a number of organizational and other exogenous factors as well. This study provides an important contribution to the literature on serious game design from this practitioner perspective.
dblp:conf/fdg/RyanC13 fatcat:qzm2otjclvcjtmesbb6ued3sme