Abstract
This chapter covers the topic of creating the design of a serious game. It first presents background information on games in general, and how they create engagement in particular—essential for serious games. The actual design process is similar to designing entertainment games; however, it differs when it comes to integrating the serious content itself. This chapter emphasizes these differences. It also presents solution strategies for how to create serious games. Beginning with an initial game idea, the steps of defining constraints for the game and adding suitable game mechanics are described. Finally, ideas are presented for how to organize the development process in a holistic approach, with a tight coupling of both the gaming and serious aspects.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsRecommended Literature
Salen K, Zimmerman E (2004) Rules of play: Game design fundamentals. MIT Press—Covers game design with a lot of background and theoretical information; a good introduction for readers interested in the core mechanics of games
Fullerton T (2014) Game design workshop: A play-centric approach to creating innovative games, 3rd edition. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL—Presents the topic of game design with exercises, examples, and interviews from actual game designers. With this practical scope, it is especially suited for learning the basics of the creative aspects of game design
Schell J (2008) The art of game design: A book of lenses. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA—Builds up the game design process by working along so-called lenses, or small units of the process, and gives the reader many possibilities to reflect on the covered topics to get started with game development
Adams E (2010) Fundamentals of game design, second edition. Pearson Education, Berkeley, CA, USA—Covers the topic of game design from a very technical perspective; suited for readers that want to start designing a specific game
Prensky M (2007) Digital game-based learning. Paragon House—A book specifically for learning games, describing theoretical foundations and different application fields. It is a useful resource when creating educational games
Rabin S (2009) Introduction to game development, 2nd edition. Course Technology PTR, Boston, MA, USA—Covers the entire game development process and thus provides a good overview beyond the scope of game design itself; helps to keep the big picture in mind
Michael DR, Chen S (2006) Serious games: Games that educate, train and inform. Thomson Course Technology—Gives a broad overview of the field of serious games and is a good introductory lecture for readers new to the field
References
Abeele VV, De Schutter B, Geurts L, Desmet S, Wauters J, Husson J, Van den Audenaeren L, Van Broeckhoven F, Annema, JH, Geerts DP (2012) A player-centered, iterative, interdisciplinary and integrated framework for serious game design and development. In: Serious games: the challenge, Springer, pp 82–86
Adams E (2010) Fundamentals of game design, 2nd edn. Pearson Education, Berkeley, CA, USA
Antle A (2004) Supporting children’s emotional expression and exploration in online environments. In: Proceedings conference on interaction design and children: building a community, ACM, pp 97–104
Apter MJ (1991) A structural phenomenology of play. In: Kerr JH, Apter MJ (eds) Adult play: a reversal theory approach. Swets and Zeitlinger, Amsterdam, pp 18–20
Bartle R (1996) Hearts, clubs, diamonds, spades: players who suit MUDs. J MUD Res 1(1):19
Bisson C, Luckner J (1996) Fun in learning: the pedagogical role of fun in adventure education. J Exp Educ 19(2):108–112
Blindscape (2015) http://www.blindscapegame.com/. Accessed 17 Feb 2016
Blumberg FC, Almonte DE, Anthony JS, Hashimoto N (2013) Serious games: what are they? What do they do? Why should we play them? In: Dill KE (ed) The Oxford handbook of media psychology. Oxford University Press, pp 334–351
Brandt E (2006) Designing exploratory design games: a framework for participation in participatory design? Proceedings ninth conference on participatory design: expanding boundaries in design, vol 1. ACM, pp 57–66
Breuer JS, Bente G (2010) Why so serious? On the relation of serious games and learning. Eludamos J Comput Game Cult 4(1):7–24
Caillois R, Barash M (1961) Man, play and games. University of Illinois Press
Campbell J (1968) The hero with a thousand faces. University Press, Princeton, NJ, USA
Charsky D (2010) From edutainment to serious games: a change in the use of game characteristics. Games Culture 5(2):177–198
Chatham A, Schouten BA, Toprak C, Mueller F, Deen M, Bernhaupt R, Khot R, Pijnappel S (2013) Game Jam. In: CHI’13 extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems. ACM, pp 3175–3178
Christel M, Trybus J, Shah SD, Chang BH, Dave R, Pavani A, Sawant, OD, Song J, Inglis J, Kairamkonda SS, Karrs C, Ke X, Kron E, Lu X (2015) Bringing biome exploration into the classroom through interactive tablet experiences. serious games. In: Huddersfield, UK, Göbel S, Ma M, Hauge J B, Oliveira M F, Wiemeyer J and Wendel V (eds) 1st joint internat conf on serious games JCSG (2015) Springer LNCS, vol 9090. Springer, Heidelberg/New York
Csikszentmihalyi M (1991) Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. Harper & Row, New York, USA
Deen M, Tieben R (2012). Swimitate Swimgames. http://www.swimgames.nl/. Accessed 17 Feb 2016
Deen M, Cercos R, Chatman A, Naseem A, Bernhaupt R, Fowler A, Schouten B, Mueller F (2014) Game jam: [4 research]. CHI ’14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 25–28
Dow SP, Glassco A, Kass J, Schwarz M, Schwartz DL, Klemmer SR (2010) Parallel prototyping leads to better design results, more divergence, and increased self-efficacy. ACM Trans Comput Human Interac 17(4):18
Druin A (2002) The role of children in the design of new technology. Behav Inf Technol 21(1):1–25
Fullerton T (2014) Game design workshop: a playcentric approach to creating innovative games, 3rd edn. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, USA
Garris R, Ahlers R, Driskell JE (2002) Games, motivation, and learning: a research and practice model. Simulation and gaming 33(4):441–467
Goddard W, Byrne R, Mueller F (2014) Playful game jams: guidelines for designed outcomes. In: Proceedinigs 2014 conference on interactive entertainment, ACM, Newcastle, NSW, Australia, pp 1–10
Hourcade JP (2008) Interaction design and children. Found Trends Human-Comput Interac 1(4):277–392
Huizinga J (1955) Homo ludens: a study of the play element in culture. Beacon paperbacks, Beacon Press, Boston, MA, USA
Hunicke R, LeBlanc M, Zubek R (2004) MDA: a formal approach to game design and game research. In: Workshop on challenges in game AI, association for the advancement of artificial intelligence. Miami, FL, USA
Isbister K, Flanagan M, Hash C (2010) Designing games for learning: insights from conversations with designers. In: Proceedings SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. ACM, pp 2041–2044
Khaled R, Ingram G (2012) Tales from the front of a large-scale serious games project. Proc ACM SIGCHI, ACM, New York, USA, pp 69–78
Khaled R, Vanden Abeele V, Van Mechelen M, Vasalou A (2014) Participatory design for serious game design: truth and lies. In: Proceedings first ACM SIGCHI annual symposium on computer-human interaction in play. ACM, pp 457–460
Kensing F, Madsen KH (1992) Generating visions: future workshops and metaphorical design. L. Erlbaum Associates Inc
Malone TW (1980) What makes things fun to learn? Heuristics for designing instructional computer games. In: Proceedings 3rd ACM SIGSMALL symposium and the first SIGPC symposium on small systems. ACM, pp 162–169
Malone TW (1981) Toward a theory of intrinsically motivating instruction. Cog Sci 5(4):333–369
Mildner P (2014) Word domination. https://www.knowledge-gaming.de/. Accessed 17 Feb 2016
Mildner P, Campbell C, Effelsberg W (2014) Word domination: bringing together fun and education in an authoring-based 3D shooter game. In: Göbel S, Wiemeyer J (eds) Games for training, education, health and sports, lecture notes in computer science, vol 8395. Springer, Heidelberg/NewYork, pp 59–70
Millington I, Funge JD (2009) Artificial intelligence for games, 2nd edn morgan kaufmann series in interactive 3D technology. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers/Elsevier, Burlington, MA, USA
Oculus (2015) The oculus rift. www.oculus.com/en-us/rift. Accessed 17 Feb 2016
Prensky M (2007) Digital game-based learning. Paragon House, St Paul, MN, USA
Preston J (2014) Serious game development: Case study of the 2013 CDC games for health game jam. In: Proceedings 1st internat workshop on serious games. ACM Internat Conf on Multimedia, Orlando, FL, USA
Rabin S (2009) Introduction to game development, 2nd edn. Course Technology PTR, Boston, MA, USA
Salen K, Zimmerman E (2004) Rules of play: game design fundamentals. MIT Press, Boston, MA, USA
Schell J (2008) The art of game design: a book of lenses. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc, San Francisco, CA, USA
Spinuzzi C (2005) The methodology of participatory design. Tech Commun 52(2):163–174
Squire KD, Barab SA (2004) Replaying history: learning world history through playing civilization III. Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA
SteamVR (2015) Steam VR. www.steampowered.com. Accessed 17 Feb 2016
Tinwell A (2015) The uncanny valley in games and animation. CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, USA
Wendel V, Gutjahr M, Göbel S, Steinmetz R (2013) Designing collaborative multi-player serious games. Educ Inf Technol 18(2):287–308
Yee N (2006) Motivations for play in online games. Cyber Psychol Behav 6(9):772–775
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mildner, P., ‘Floyd’ Mueller, F. (2016). Design of Serious Games. In: Dörner, R., Göbel, S., Effelsberg, W., Wiemeyer, J. (eds) Serious Games. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40612-1_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40612-1_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-40611-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-40612-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)