Purposeful by design?: a serious game design assessment framework
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Purposeful by design.pdf
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3.01 MB
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Adobe PDF
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Author(s)
Mitgutsch, Konstantin
Alvarado, Narda
Date Issued
May 2012
Journal
Proceedings of the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG '12)
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Citation
Konstantin Mitgutsch and Narda Alvarado. 2012. Purposeful by design?: a serious game design assessment framework. In Proceedings of the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (FDG '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 121-128.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
The lack of assessment tools to analyze serious games and insufficient knowledge on their impact on players is a recurring critique in the field of game and media studies, education science and psychology. Although initial empirical studies on serious games usage deliver discussable results, numerous questions remain unacknowledged. In particular, questions regarding the quality of their formal conceptual design in relation to their purpose mostly stay uncharted. In the majority of cases the designers' good intentions justify incoherence and insufficiencies in their design. In addition, serious games are mainly assessed in terms of the quality of their content, not in terms of their intention-based design. This paper argues that analyzing a game's formal conceptual design, its elements, and their relation to each other based on the game's purpose is a constructive first step in assessing serious games. By outlining the background of the Serious Game Design Assessment Framework and exemplifying its use, a constructive structure to examine purpose-based games is introduced. To demonstrate how to assess the formal conceptual design of serious games we applied the SGDA Framework to the online games "Sweatshop" (2011) and "ICED" (2008).
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/2282338.2282364
