Abstract
Most educational or training games, also referred to as serious games, have been developed without an underlying design theory. In order to make a contribution to the development of such a theory, we present the underlying design philosophy of Levee Patroller, a 3D first-person game used to train levee patrollers in the Netherlands. This approach stipulates that the design of a serious game is a multi-objective problem where trade-offs need to be made. Making these trade-offs takes place in a ’design space’ defined by three general boundary criteria: 1. fun (game), 2. learning (pedagogy), and 3. validity (reality). The various tensions between these three criteria make it difficult to ’balance’ or create harmony in a serious game. We illustrate this process with a discussion on the design of Levee Patroller. In addition, we translate the aforementioned general design criteria into a number of concrete design requirements for serious games.
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Harteveld, C., Guimarães, R., Mayer, I., Bidarra, R. (2007). Balancing Pedagogy, Game and Reality Components Within a Unique Serious Game for Training Levee Inspection. In: Hui, Kc., et al. Technologies for E-Learning and Digital Entertainment. Edutainment 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4469. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73011-8_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73011-8_15
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