Abstract
Educational games are praised for their potential in providing engaging and self motivating learning experiences. However, in order to fully leverage those capabilities, game designers have to carefully balance factors that provide an enjoyable experience, without losing the focus on the instructional aspect. This work examines the design and evaluation of educational games focusing on the perspective of individual player emotions and experience. This investigation targets the following research questions: how to include (and balance) both the educational and the player experience elements into the game design? Which specific methodologies are available to evaluate player experience in educational games? After discussing possible answers to these questions, we briefly sketch directions that demand further research.
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Appendix: Literature Review Protocol
Appendix: Literature Review Protocol
In order to draw a representative picture of the state of the art, we formulated the following guiding research questions: (i) what recent papers approached PX in EGs?; (ii) what are the design frameworks expressly proposed to address PX in EGs? And (iii) which tools and methodologies are used to evaluate PX in EGs?
We carried out a search with the terms “player AND experience AND learning”, in ACM Library and IEEE Explore portals, limiting the time span between 2006 and 2016. We then removed duplicated results and selected relevant papers according to the following criteria: (i) does the study consider player experience/user emotions? And (ii) does the study deals with EGs?
Finally, the remaining papers were read completely, and their references were also taken into account, thus expanding the list of analyzed works.
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dos Santos, A.D., Strada, F., Bottino, A. (2017). Investigating the Design and Evaluation of Educational Games Under the Perspective of Player Experience. In: Dias, J., Santos, P., Veltkamp, R. (eds) Games and Learning Alliance. GALA 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10653. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71940-5_20
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