Educational Game Design

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As with any commercial game, your game has to have describable in-game and educational goals, metaphoric and narrative contexts, target audience, educational setting etc.

Expect these or similar questions to come up if you're an educational freeelancer and want to start a project with public funds, or if you're a teacher and try to establish an educational game at your school or in your class!

GBL Design Questions

• Target group: Who will play the game? What is to be expected in knowledge, skill, competencies, attitude in this group concerning the game topic? (age group, previous experiences, attitude towards the topic (e.g. interested, ignorant, shy, critical, rejecting etc.))
• Situation: Where will it be played, what are the conditions concerning locality, distraction, supervision, motivation? (school project, free pasttime, alone at home, in groups, in a classroom)
• Duration: How long is the game supposed to last? (5 minutes, as long as a school lesson, an evening, a weekend, several evenings in a month, several years)
• Learning objective: What kind of knowledge, skill, competence or attitude is to be gained or challenged by the game? Is it a related set of skills, or just some newsworthy fact that the game will strive for? (factual/reproductive, functional/productive, critical/reflective; is the knowledge to be ransfered about "ruled systems" or "rule systems"?)
• Motivational aspects: Where is the motivation coming from that keeps the player in the game, keeps him coming back to it, or leads him to want mastership? (narrative framing, internal unfolding or evolving story, visual appeal, highscore, personal relevance, etc. etc.; see e.g. Keller's and Spitzer's motivational theories, Bartle's taxonomy of MUD-players)
• Game design aspects: What are the basic game mechanics? (strategy, action, story-driven adventure, puzzle, communication and interpretation, collaborative or competitive, etc.; or combinations of the above); What are the basic narrativ elements? (basic metaphors, narrative framing, contextualisation, dramaturgy, meaningful development of storyline, characters etc.)
• Integration of ludic aspects: What are the relations between what is to be learned and how the game is to be played an/or perceived? (arbitrary: gameplay as reward for learning; causal: continued gameplay by use of the recently learned; external: gameplay as base for critical thinking about what is played), also: Are the rule dimensions adapted to the learning content?
• Justification of ludic aspects: Can the ludic approach make use of the (digital or analog) medium's unique strengths, and avoiding it's weaknesses? (for example Interactivity, Adaptivity, Configurability, Shareability; restricted or no real communication, exclusion of physical experience, need for expensive hardware to run); what are the advantages compared to other approaches like a serious simulation or other possible forms of GBLs?
• Ergonomic aspects: Is the gameplay balanced, the interface easy to use and the aesthetic realisation intriguing enough to capture the player's attention and faciltate joy of use? (graphics, animations, metaphor of interface, environment)
• Distribution and repurposing: How free is the player with the game? Can she alter the game, the rules, the content, visuals, audio, aesthetic appeal? Maybe there is even an option for it (e.g. a game editor)? Can she turn the game into a toy or a tool? (is it shareware, open source, can it be expanded without problems, is it small enough to be sent by email, is it bound to a specific OS?)

Caveats

This touches the delicate balance between fun and seriousness:

• Beware of the Ludic Fallacy [[1]], both for the game designer and the player, the possibility to mistake the premises of a game for reality. Many commercial learning/teaching software use the promise "like reality" as sales argument. A game isn't and it shouldn't - see our sessions about learning theories, theories on playing and gaming, and on systemic restrictions.
• Beware of the intoxicating experience of creating a game - keep the learning objectives in view. If someone asks you "What can be learned or experienced in your game?" you should be able to vindicate your design decisions and have an edcuational setting handy.

Related Topics

German example for a project draft of a Lingo/Director-Project, a GBL-application "Everyday Life in ancient Rome"

• Intro and explanation why using a draft [[2]]
• Exemplary draft [[3]]

--Weytan 13:36, 25 May 2009 (UTC)