Design of Serious Games
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 designi
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Design of Serious Games Philip Mildner and Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller
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.
3.1
How to Design a Serious Game
There are two main reasons to create a serious game for an application area. First, games in general create motivation, e.g., to get in-game awards, to beat the high score, or to be the best player in a multiplayer online game. Millions of players prove this fact every day. Serious game developers use these motivational aspects for other purposes than mere fun and entertainment. This does not mean that serious games should not be fun: on the contrary. Game designers, programmers, artists,
P. Mildner (&) University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany e-mail: [email protected] F. ‘Floyd’ Mueller RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 R. Dörner et al. (eds.), Serious Games, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-40612-1_3
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Fig. 3.1 Involved parties in the development of serious games. Domain experts and users can be included into the process to different degrees, as described in Sect. 3.7
and domain experts have to work together throughout the entire development process to create an enticing game. Moreover, in many cases, developers of serious games have to cope with limited budgets; the details are discussed in Chap. 11. This may result in a sub-optimal balance of the fun parts and the serious parts of the game, e.g., when there are no resources for hiring professional game designers or artists. Figure 3.1 gives an overview of all the involved parties that should work together in the development of serious games. This is very similar to entertainment games, the only difference being that in serious games domain experts are included for the serious part. In addition to these domain experts, game designers play a central role in the creation process. They are the ones who combine characterizing goals and entertainment parts. While details can still be changed during the development process, the big decisions—e.g., game genre, main story and game world—have to be set in the first phase. It is often the game designer’s task to both create the design and to ensure the entire team works on it throughout the development phase. When comparing the game design process of pure ent
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