Abstract

While the field of serious games has made good progress in identifying some of the design methods that lead to success, there aren’t many specific guidelines to help bridge the gap between the design and implementation of a serious game for learning. Issues can arise because of a variety of factors, such as conceptual confusion or competing perspectives among team members, incomplete or conflicting design of gaming and instructional elements, arbitrary software implementations of the design, and conflicting gameplay experiences for the player. We present several recommendations for how to approach your design and implementation efforts in your team to minimize these issues and align the instructional elements and gaming elements. We discuss the value of working toward a common dialog on instructional and gaming elements, particularly those for goals, control, actions, guidance, and feedback. We discuss the benefits of adopting design patterns for learning game elements to make your game easier to create, understand, test, and maintain. In particular, we discuss the use of patterns for designing the gaming experience in terms of instructional situations that teach particular learning objectives using particular instructional methods and in terms of instructional mechanics that provide specific instructional content and learning opportunities using specific gameplay interaction methods. We introduce a number of design patterns for incorporating goals, control, actions, guidance, and feedback into your game. Finally, we discuss how to address some practical issues that arise when using design patterns during design and development to help make your gameplay experience both instructionally effective and cohesive for the player.