Paper Info
Title
Serious games for higher education: a framework for reducing design complexity
Abstract
Serious games open up many new opportunities for complex skills learning in higher education. The inherent complexity of such games, though, requires large efforts for their development. This paper presents a framework for serious game design, which aims to reduce the design complexity at conceptual, technical and practical levels. The approach focuses on a relevant subset of serious games labelled as scenario-based games. At the conceptual level, it identifies the basic elements that make up the static game configuration; it also describes the game dynamics, i.e. the state changes of the various game components in the course of time. At the technical level, it presents a basic system architecture, which comprises various building tools. Various building tools will be explained and illustrated with technical implementations that are part of the Emergo toolkit for scenario-based game development. At the practical level, a set of design principles are presented for controlling and reducing game design complexity. The principles cover the topics of game structure, feedback and game representation, respectively. Practical application of the framework and the associated toolkit is briefly reported and evaluated.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1111/j.1365-2729.2008.00279.x
JOURNAL OF COMPUTER ASSISTED LEARNING
Keywords
Field
DocType
serious games,complex skills,design framework,higher education,scenario-based games
Educational technology,Technology integration,Computer software,Design framework,Information technology,Computer science,Computer assisted learning,Computer system design,Multimedia,Higher education
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
24
5
0266-4909
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
80
5.53
10
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Wim Westera117419.80
Rob Nadolski224522.09
Hans Hummel345836.21
Iwan G. J. H. Wopereis422114.19