Evolving a Framework for Design And Development of Effective Serious Games


Problem Statement

  1. Effective Serious Games are hard to design because it is complex to optimize the entertainment in the same time as achieving serious outcomes
  2. Testing the effectiveness of Serious Games demands long playtesting and iteration periods
  3. Need complex integration of domain knowledge expertise, pedagogy expertise and game design elements
  4. Lack of a unifying language between the different stakeholders

What is a Game?

A game involves a particular mindset or disposition, often characterized by playfulness, engagement, and voluntary participation. The 'magic circle' concept by Johan Huizinga suggests that when people play a game, they adopt a psychological attitude of accepting the game's rules and constraints as meaningful and binding within the context of play.
A game is an unfolding series of events shaped by player actions, choices, and interactions with the system and other players. The dynamic, temporal nature of a game is what makes it a lived experience.
A game is a structured framework of rules that define what players can and cannot do, the objectives, and how outcomes are determined.
A game can be a tangible or digital artifact, such as a physical board, a card deck, or a software application.

Hypothesis

  1. By identifying the fundamental elements that constitute a Serious Game and devising a method for their seamless integration, it becomes possible to amalgamate all the processes involved in Serious Game design.

  2. This amalgamation will allow for the abstraction of a comprehensive framework that guides the design and development of Serious Games.

  3. The premise is that understanding and effectively combining these core elements will result in a more structured, efficient, and effective approach to designing Serious Games, ultimately enhancing their educational and practical effectiveness.

Methodology

(1) Identify Serious Games’ first principles or core elements, (2) Analyze each element based on its discipline, (3) Represent those elements in a common language (Ontology), (4) Find the key relationships between those elements (semantic, pragmatic) by the means of Ontology Mapping techniques, (5) These relationships make the foundation of the idealized convergence of content as expressed by Brian Winn in Design Play and Experience, (6) Use the Ontology as a backend for queries issued by the designers in order to be guided towards the optimal Serious Game design, (7) Automate and smoothen the process using NLP techniques and more specifically Retrieval-Augmented Generative AI in the context of, (8) Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs.

1. Identification of Serious Games’ Elements

// mch: elaborate on the identification of these first principles

2. Analysis of Each Serious Game Element

What is knowledge? The object of learning, the inter-related facts and concepts of a domain. How do we represent it? By means of knowledge bases or ontologies.
How does learning occur? Behaviorism, Cognitivism, Constructivism. How do we design activities to achieve specific learning objectives? Gagne’s 9 events, Bloom’s Taxonomy, etc.
What do games consist of? Entities, Goals, Mechanics.

3. Representation of the Serious Games’ Elements in a Common Language

3.1 Knowledge

3.2 Instruction

3.3 Game

4. Find the key relationships between all the identified elements by the means of Ontology Mapping

5. Use the (merged) Ontology as a backend for queries issued by designers in order to be guided towards an optimal design path

6. Automate and smoothen the process using NLP techniques specially Retrieval-Augmented Generative (RAG) AI using Large Language Models and Knowledge Graphs