An Assessment of Serious Games Technology: Toward an Architecture for Serious Games Design

Table 1

The grid of questions used during the classification.

Level one: works proposing serious game implementation
Questions	Clues	Examples	Criteria
How to play the Serious Game?	Playing the Game requires knowledge of the teaching content.	Playing the Game proposed by the authors in [16–18] requires knowledge of the teaching content.	Endogenous
	Playing the Game is the reward after completing a serious activity where the game is used to teach content.	Playing the game (“SimCity-style building” [13]) is the reward after completing a serious activity (exploring the knowledge base) or the game (“Angry Birds” [19]) is used to teach content (kinematics and dynamics in physics field).	Exogenous
How teaching content is represented in the serious game?	The serious game clearly presents the teaching content.	The games presented in [16–18] clearly represent the teaching content, except the case of two games [17, 18] which incorporate symbolic representations (the reader is invited to consult the experience on the advantage of symbolic representations for learning [20]).	Direct Representation
	The serious game represents the teaching content with different elements from another domain.	As suggested by the authors in [12], to teach the immune system (the source domain) is like teaching the defence of the territory (the target domain); also, the authors in [7] mention that when fighting a dragon the children can learn fractions; more precisely the authors in [21] clearly specify the use of analogies in serious game design. However, in order to gain insight into the importance of using analogical representations in the learning process, the reader is invited to read our recent work on analogical representations [22].	Analogical Representation
Level two: model to design serious game accompanied or not by an implementation
How does the model structure the serious game design?	The model proposes a set of organized activities that interact to achieve a result (often refers to a product)	The model proposed by the authors in [12, 13] presents a set of organized activities to conceive a serious game.	Process
	The model proposes an implementation that targets a single type of game that accepts the integration of a single content type.	As we pointed out in the Discussion, the game structure “Problems and Programmers” [16] can be used to integrate content from the manufacturing domain. Other examples can be found in Google Play Store at the web address referenced in [23] in which we can find two serious games that have the same structure and mechanics, where the first one aims to help children memorize the “Basic Music Notes” and the second one for memorizing the “Tifinagh Alphabet”, which is the writing used by Berbers in North Africa.	Technical architecture
	The model proposes a set of functionality for designing serious games.	The model proposed by the authors in [24] presents a set of functionality for designing serious games.	Functional Architecture