Serious Games Design Capstone

Aaron’s Capstone Project

What is a Serious Game?
A game that is not purely for entertainment it will also be explicitly made to do one or more of the following:
Teach
Advertise
Train
Editorialize
Burn Calories

Why bother?
‘ cause I want to
It’s interesting
Americans spend more on games than music now
Games are the #1 activity online now
Serious games are getting more and more money thrown at them by big orgs like DoD & DoE and corps.

Who will use it?
Me
This is in uncharted territory, so maybe no one else
Perhaps it will become one more academic paper that no “real world” designer will actually use
Maybe it will make a small contribution to the growing body of ludology

Situating the Problem

Possible Components of Framework

So what will I actually do?
Look at the applicability of the possible components of the framework
Choose N powerful, interesting, or unexplored concepts from those components
Learner-Centered Design, Contextual Inquiry, present-to-hand,
Choose N specific Serious Games
Incident Commander, A Force More Powerful, America’s Army
Play said games, but make notes and reflect on gameplay
Use those concepts to analyze those games to get some data
Upon playing I note that in A Force More Powerful that it seems to be more teacher-centered, rather than learner-centered because of X &Y
I conduct contextual inquiry with potential player, or talk to designers to see what HCI methods they use, if any.
Ask something like: If constructivist notions of learning have been so popular in the last decades, why are almost all serious games linear and rationalist in their presentation?

I have my data then what?
Summarzie & Analyze data
Hope & Pray 

Future Work
Use this as a jumping off point for a much larger question:
Create the first serious game design framework that is systematic and firmly grounded in theory
This will almost certainly be descriptive, not prescriptive in nature.
Could be used as the basis of practice and curricula in SGD

Serious Games Design Capstone

by guest3e990d on Oct 25, 2007

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Serious Games Design Capstone — Presentation Transcript