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Contributing Disciplines

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Serious Games

Abstract

Creating entertainment games is always an interdisciplinary effort, and becomes even more pronounced when serious game creation involves experts from a specific subject area or supporting disciplines, such as pedagogy. As these experts can come from almost any discipline, it is beneficial for interdisciplinary work to appreciate differences in approach. Understanding diverse technical terms is important; for example, a computer scientist and an artist will associate quite different aspects with the term “communication”. But being in a specific discipline does not only affect vocabulary. Disciplines may have fundamentally different ways of thinking, or different methodologies how to approach a problem. People, who have worked in a discipline for a longer time, might be surprised when they reflect on how much this has shaped them as a person. As it is advantageous in the context of serious games to not only understand one’s own discipline, this chapter contains brief introductions to the major disciplines involved in the field of serious games, with pointers for where to start when one wishes to obtain a deeper understanding of the field. The specific disciplines covered are computer science, art and design, psychology, didactics and pedagogy, and stories and storytelling. Finally, this chapter contains a section on best practices and typical pitfalls when working in an interdisciplinary team.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The term before the “↔” indicates the activity or action of the learner, while the term after the “↔” refers to the role of the teacher or the mechanism in the game.

  2. 2.

    Literature concerning individual disciplines has already been named in the according sections of this chapter. Besides introductory texts and text books, there is a huge body of original literature available. It is worth checking associations of the according discipline whether they offer a digital library. For instance, the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) are well known societies that address all sub-disciplines of computer science. Both provide digital libraries (http://dl.acm.org/, www.ieeexplore.org). Moreover, publishers of scientific journals and books offer also digital libraries (e.g., www.link.springer.com, www.sciencedirect.com). Dedicated search engines (e.g., www.scholar.google.com) might also serve as a starting point for specific literature research. In the field of psycho-pedagogical frameworks, best practise surveys have been compiled by network projects such as GALA (the Game and Learning Alliance), which makes the reports available to the public (GALA 2015). The web-sites of some initiatives to bring multiple disciplines related to serious gaming together can also serve as an entry point for literature search, e.g., the European Serious Games Society or the Serious Games Association in the United States.

Recommended Literature

Literature concerning individual disciplines has already been named in the according sections of this chapter. Besides introductory texts and text books, there is a huge body of original literature available. It is worth checking associations of the according discipline whether they offer a digital library. For instance, the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) are well known societies that address all sub-disciplines of computer science. Both provide digital libraries (http://dl.acm.org/, www.ieeexplore.org). Moreover, publishers of scientific journals and books offer also digital libraries (e.g., www.link.springer.com, www.sciencedirect.com). Dedicated search engines (e.g., www.scholar.google.com) might also serve as a starting point for specific literature research. In the field of psycho-pedagogical frameworks, best practise surveys have been compiled by network projects such as GALA (the Game and Learning Alliance), which makes the reports available to the public (GALA 2015). The web-sites of some initiatives to bring multiple disciplines related to serious gaming together can also serve as an entry point for literature search, e.g., the European Serious Games Society or the Serious Games Association in the United States.

  • Scannell EE, Scanell M (2009) The big book of team-motivating games: spirit-building, problem-solving and communication games for every group. McGraw-Hill Education, New York—this is a typical example of a book that provides some practical guidance in team building which extends also to interdisciplinary teams. A game-based approach to initiate team communication might be particularly beneficial for a project concerned with games

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  • Schell J (2014) The art of game design: a book of lenses (2nd Ed), Morgan Kaufmann, Burlington MA—this book is interesting from an interdisciplinary point of view as it promotes to view the game design process from different perspectives and as such trains game designers to adopt different views

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. RheinMain University of Applied Sciences, Wiesbaden, Germany

    Ralf Dörner

  2. Zurich University of the Arts, Zurich, Switzerland

    Anna Lisa Martin-Niedecken & Mela Kocher

  3. Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, USA

    Tom Baranowski

  4. Graz University of Technology, Graz, Austria

    Michael Kickmeier-Rust

  5. Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Stefan Göbel, Josef Wiemeyer & Paul Gebelein

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  1. Ralf Dörner
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Correspondence to Ralf Dörner .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. Design, Computer Science, Med, RheinMain University of Applied Sci, Wiesbaden, Hessen, Germany

    Ralf Dörner

  2. Technische Universität Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Stefan Göbel

  3. LS. f. Prakt. Informatik IV, Univ. Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

    Wolfgang Effelsberg

  4. Inst für Sportwissenschaft S1|17 112, Technische Univ Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Hessen, Germany

    Josef Wiemeyer

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Dörner, R. et al. (2016). Contributing Disciplines. In: Dörner, R., Göbel, S., Effelsberg, W., Wiemeyer, J. (eds) Serious Games. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40612-1_2

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