Designing immersive serious games

Abstract

Serious games, designed for more than entertainment, can be used for educational purposes in order to more effectively teach certain ideas. One particular element which has not been investigated fully is the idea of immersion in educational games, in terms of how to engage learners with such games and to keep them engaged while playing. The subject has been approached from various perspectives, including education and gameplay, but the theories presented miss important aspects shown in others (such as designing gameplay towards learning outcomes), which makes further advancement in the field more difficult. To solve this problem, the Immersive Educational Games Model was proposed in this thesis, which will help the design of immersive serious games, in terms of providing engaging content and educational value. The model integrates key characteristics of instructional design, gameplay, immersion, and serious game theories to outline the key considerations in creating compelling educational gameplay.

To validate whether the model can be used to measure immersive qualities, a questionnaire-based instrument was created and tested through three experiments, utilising an established immersive serious game. While the results show a need for further investigation into measurements for immersive states, the instrument demonstrated that the model may be used to reliably identify aspects that make a serious game immersive.

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Identifiers

ORCID for James Baker: orcid.org/0000-0001-5099-9228

ORCID for Gary Wills: orcid.org/0000-0001-5771-4088

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