Special Issue on New Challenges in Serious Game Design

Serious games are games that have a “serious” purpose besides entertainment. As with any game, they motivate players through their scenario and game mechanics and engage them to achieve the underlying “serious” goals while entertaining them. Serious games are being used in various sectors, such as education, cultural heritage, health care, engineering, emergency management and behavior change. In most cases, positive results have been reported from the use of serious games. However, we are a great distance from creating standards regarding the successful design and evaluation of serious games, which is a challenging task. Several issues have to be further investigated and several questions must be answered.

• Do existing serious/educational game design frameworks adequately support the design process?

Several serious/educational game design frameworks have been proposed in the literature, while conceptual frameworks dedicated to games for specific subjects or audiences, such as computer programming or games for people with intellectual disabilities, have also been proposed. All these conceptual frameworks share common features, but also put emphasis on different aspects of serious game design. Moreover, the roles of all the stakeholders are not always clear or may not be mentioned at all. This makes it difficult for potential users to make an informed choice regarding a serious game design framework.

• What measures should be taken for designing a serious game that achieves the right balance between its serious purpose and entertainment?

Achieving the right balance between a serious purpose and entertainment, or else between pedagogy and fun, is considered by many researchers and game designers as one of the most important challenges in serious/educational game design. Although serious/educational game design frameworks can play an important role towards designing games with the right balance between pedagogy and fun, they are frequently criticized for not making a clear distinction between these factors and providing clear guidelines for achieving this goal.

• What techniques are used in entertainment games for achieving an interesting and undisturbed player experience? How can they be applied to serious games?

Serious games take advantage of the entertainment provided by games in order to engage users in achieving their serious purpose. In this sense, serious games have to encompass the techniques used in entertainment games for achieving an interesting and undisturbed player experience. However, this is not as straightforward as it might seem, since serious games entail a serious goal as well. Therefore, entertainment game design techniques have to be appropriately adopted in serious games, bearing in mind the right balance between fun and pedagogy, as already mentioned.

• What methods are used for evaluating the effects of a serious game and validating/revising its design?

Various methods are used for evaluating the effects of serious games, with one of the most common ones being questionnaires based on the elaborated models that have been devised for evaluating player experience and perceived short-term learning, or even the acceptance of a game and its didactic utility. Other methods, such as pre/post-tests and/or control/experimental groups, are also utilized. However, no matter what methods are used for evaluating the effects of a serious game, it seems that there is a lack of instruments to guide researchers and game designers in actually utilizing the evaluation results for validating and, more importantly, appropriately revising the design of their games.

• Does the scenario or/and the genre of a game affect the achievement of its serious goals/purposes?
• If yes, what type of scenario and game genre is considered more effective based on the purpose of the serious game and what factors should be taken into account for an informed selection?

An important decision that has to be made when designing a serious game refers to its genre and scenario. Although there is some literature that deals with the types of activities that a serious game will incorporate (such as problem-solving or drill tasks, memorization, association and so on) and the type(s) of game genre(s) that better serve the specific types of activities, further investigation is necessary.

Besides the challenges previously presented, there are also several challenges in serious game design that have to be further researched, including:

• Designing and evaluating the role of non-player characters (NPCs) as mentors or co-players in serious games.
• Designing effective support systems for providing educational material and feedback in educational games.
• Designing effective adaptive serious games through the investigation of the effects of different types of adaptation, implementation techniques and challenges.
• Designing serious games with learning analytics capabilities for supporting both players in achieving their goals through the game and researchers/instructors in their research/teaching.
• Designing serious games that can be effectively utilized in formal education, dealing with the skepticism of instructors.
• Designing serious games with augmented reality features.
• Designing serious games for cognitively demanding subjects, such as computer programming, and audiences with special needs, such as people with intellectual disabilities.

A total of seven papers (five research papers and two review papers) that refer to several of the aforementioned serious game design challenges either directly or indirectly, as well as other relevant issues, are presented in this Special Issue.

The first article in this issue is by Stelios Xinogalos and Maya Satratzemi (University of Macedonia, Greece) [1]. It presents a case study that utilized the serious game SQL Island in the context of an assignment on the Structured Query Language (SQL) in a compulsory undergraduate course on Web programming. Data were collected through a questionnaire based on the MEEGA+ model for evaluating educational games targeted at computing education, as well as students’ assignments. Students’ performance in the programming tasks of the game was very good, while the results of player experience and perceived short-term learning were rather positive. This case study presents a good example of utilizing a serious game in formal education and draws conclusions on designing educational games that can be effectively used in the context of programming assignments.

Alexandros Papadakis (Hellenic Mediterranean University, Greece), Anastasios Barianos (Hellenic Mediterranean University, Greece), Michail Kalogiannakis (University of Crete, Greece), Stamatios Papadakis (University of Crete, Greece) and Nikolas Vidakis (Hellenic Mediterranean University, Greece) present the digital eLearning educational tool library ARION that focuses on the synchronization composition and orchestration of learning session data [2]. With the use of learning analytics, multimodal data can be effectively analyzed and provide teachers with invaluable information about the strengths and weaknesses of students, the lesson and the educational process as a whole. The article presents the current architecture and possibilities of ARION, along with an experiment and scenario of use with direct implications for application of the proposed approach in serious games.

The next paper, contributed by Nikolaos Politopoulos and Thrasyvoulos Tsiatsos (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki), deals with the design, development and evaluation of an active video game or exergame [3]. The game, Tennis Attack, utilizes a natural user interface and aims to measure and improve the players’ Simple Reaction Time (SRT). Sixty undergraduate and postgraduate students participated in a 4-week training session with the game. A pre- and post-measurement of SRT and a questionnaire for evaluating the gaming experience of the participants were utilized. Positive results were recorded both in terms of the participants’ gaming experience (satisfaction, ease of use and ease of learning) and significantly improving SRT irrespective of their background.

Agisilaos Chaldogeridis and Thrasyvoulos Tsiatsos (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) present a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on gamification techniques and best practices in computerized working memory training [4]. This SLR aimed to identify the most common game elements (GEs) in Working Memory (WM) training and assessment, and the way they are applied to audiences. The most common GEs recorded are conflict, feedback, difficulty adjustment, action points and levels, and less frequently competition and cooperation. The authors did not find any significant differences between the GEs that are used for different audiences with varying ages and health/pathological conditions, highlighting the need for a meta-analysis and ultimately the design of a framework that will aid in building cognitive training interventions for WM.

Kim Martinez, María Isabel Menéndez-Menéndez and Andres Bustillo (Universidad de Burgos, Spain) present a new measure that can be used both to evaluate the gaming and educational features of existing serious games and to design new ones [5]. The Gaming Educational Balanced (GEB) Model is based on the Mechanics, Dynamics and Aesthetics framework and the Four Pillars of Educational Games theory and aims to deal with the following limitations that are present in some of the existing models: lack of balance between ludic and learning requirements; and lack of guidance in designing new games that achieve such a balance. The authors test the effectiveness of the proposed model by applying it with the purpose of evaluating three indie serious games for raising awareness on mental illnesses that are based on different game genres. The results are validated using statistical and machine learning methods to ensure that the GEB’s metric questions are clearly explained and players are able to distinguish them.

Fahad Ahmed (Queen Mary University of London, UK and University of Genoa, Italy), Jesús Requena Carrion (Queen Mary University of London, UK), Francesco Bellotti (University of Genoa, Italy), Giacinto Barresi (Rehab Technologies Lab, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy), Federica Floris (Piccolo Cottolengo Genovese di Don Orione, Italy) and Riccardo Berta (University of Genoa, Italy), in their study, review 37 interventions for affective disorders in autistic and neurotypical individuals based on 21 different Computer-based Serious Games (CSGs) [6]. The study showed that CSGs can be effective in treating affective disorders in autistic and neurotypical individuals, while CSG design characteristics that might be useful in applications involving depression, anxiety and phobias were recorded and recommendations for CSG interventions for relevant therapies were proposed.

In the final article in this Special Issue, Fahad Ahmed (Queen Mary University of London, UK and University of Genoa, Italy), Riccardo Berta (University of Genoa, Italy), Francesco Bellotti (University of Genoa, Italy), Luca Lazzaroni (University of Genoa, Italy), Federica Floris (Piccolo Cottolengo Genovese di Don Orione, Italy), Giacinto Barresi (Rehab Technologies Lab, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy) and Requena Carrion (Queen Mary University of London, UK) present a study on utilizing a mobile Serious Game (SG) for socio-economic decision making and emotion elicitation in the wild [7]. The mobile SG designed by the authors combined four socio-economic interactions: trust game, ultimatum game, dictator game, and prisoner’s dilemma game. An initial experiment with eight participants showed that SGs are appropriate for emotion elicitation in the wild, while the results recorded are similar to the ones recorded in prior research carried out under controlled settings.

The articles published in this Special Issue have dealt with several of the serious game design challenges initially raised by the guest editors and have highlighted other challenges as well that require further research. In closing, we would like to thank all of the researchers for their valuable contributions.