Design of Serious Games

Serious games are games that are designed for a serious purpose and not only for entertainment. This serious purpose can be related to defense, education, science, health care, emergency management, urban planning, engineering, religion, politics, and so on. Digital Learning Games is a multidisciplinary programme that combines game design, interaction design and instructional design. Its objective is to bring together experts with different backgrounds (art, ICT, pedagogy, psychology) and design and develop serious and learning games in heterogeneous teams.

During this intensive winter course participants will learn the essentials of designing serious and learning games. Students with different backgrounds from all over the world will form teams and design new serious games from idea to working prototype. The environment used for prototyping does not require programming skills.

Course topics:

1. The nature of serious games
2. Examples of serious and learning games
3. Game design process and roles
4. Finding the idea and defining goal for the serious game
5. Gameplay: challenges and actions
6. Game core mechanics: objects and conditions
7. Design of game assets: game world, characters, story
8. Game Development environments
9. Game Development in eAdventure