David Farrell

Serious Games design involves bringing together the multidisciplinary field of game design with pedagogical or behavioural outcomes from some other field like education or health. A well designed Serious Game balances the myriad elements in such a way that players enjoy and are interested in the experience whilst noticing and learning the educational components, or altering their behaviour in some other desired way. Current Serious Game design practice struggles with this task and designers would benefit from having tools and methods that help them take advantage of findings from psychology without having to become experts in those areas.

This research aims to address this problem by bridging the gap between scientific theory and real-world game design practice. Experimental design methods are being created by mapping models of motivation and pedagogy onto the game prototyping process. These methods are evaluated through creating Serious Games and assessing both the experience of the designer as well as the measurable outcomes of the designed games.