Balancing pedagogy, game and reality components within a unique serious game for training levee inspection

Most educational or training games, also referred to as serious games, have been developed without an underlying design theory. In order to make a contribution to the development of such a theory, we present the underlying design philosophy of Levee Patroller, a 3D first-person game used to train levee patrollers in the Netherlands. This approach stipulates that the design of a serious game is a multi-objective problem where trade-offs need to be made. Making these trade-offs takes place in a 'design space' defined by three general boundary criteria: 1. fun (game), 2. learning (pedagogy), and 3. validity (reality). The various tensions between these three criteria make it difficult to `balance' or create harmony in a serious game. We illustrate this process with a discussion on the design of Levee Patroller. In addition, we translate the aforementioned general design criteria into a number of concrete design requirements for serious games.

@InProceedings { HGMB07a,
  author       = "Harteveld, Casper and Guimaraes, Rui and Mayer, Igor and Bidarra, Rafael",
  title        = "Balancing pedagogy, game and reality components within a unique serious game for training levee inspection",
  booktitle    = "Technologies for E-Learning and Digital Entertainment, LNCS 4469 - Proceedings of Edutainment 2007",
  pages        = "128--139",
  month        = "jun",
  year         = "2007",
  editor       = "Hui, K et al.",
  publisher    = "Springer",
  address      = "Hong Kong, China",
  note         = "ISBN 978-3-540-73010-1",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2007/HGMB07a"
}