The Key to Adventure Game Design: Insight and Sense-making

Abstract

This paper aims at understanding how adventure games can support educational goals by understanding the foundations of their design, and what how inherent properties lend themselves to specific types of learning. The potential of adventure games as educational tools has been repeatedly discussed from the standpoint of education (Carroll, 1982; Cavallari, Hedberg & Harper, 1992; Ju & Wagner, 1997; Amory, Naicker Vincent & Adams, 1999; Moser, 2002; Dickey, 2006), usually focusing on the narrative framing that adventure games provide (Dickey, 2006), but not on their specific design conventions. Understanding adventure games entails understanding how their design helps the player learn. There are two key aspects of adventure games that are discussed here, derived from the puzzle-driven nature of adventure games: domain knowledge and insight. The domain specifies the knowledge that the player must have in order to solve the puzzles in the game, whereas insight takes place when the player figures out the solution to the puzzle. This paper analyzes how game design can set up the domain, what are the aspects of the game that facilitate insight and, more importantly, how these design properties of adventure games can be harnessed to develop educational games.