Challenges in Serious Game Design and Development: Educators’ Experiences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background. Relatively little is known about the role of educators in serious game design and development and their experiences with serious game implementation. We investigate educators’ perceived challenges deriving from their involvement as subject matter experts during the serious game development trajectory. Methods. A secondary analysis of data collected through an exploratory survey about serious game design and development approaches was carried out. The sample included 41 educators from post-secondary education institutions across North America. An in-depth analysis of qualitative data revealed educators’ roles in game development, the challenges they faced, and the strategies they deployed in serious game design, development, and implementation. Results. Educators, as serious game designers, perceived challenges to be administrative, design-related, attitudinal, and communicative. Strategies deployed to overcome challenges during the concept development, pre-production, and production stages of game design include the creation of games that balance learning and fun, and enhanced team collaboration through cultural mediation. During the post-production stage, although challenges are acknowledged and some strategies, such as improving the usability of a game, are deployed, a clear pattern in challenges and mitigating strategies could not be observed. Conclusion. Serious game design and development can be improved by nurturing diversity of ideas and adopting creative design and development methodologies. Serious game implementation can be improved by devising effective administrative and attitudinal strategies, and incorporating diversity of ideas into target curricula. Additionally, clear directives about usability should be devised, and academic objectivity towards serious games needs to be be created. Strategies to achieve these goals should focus on developing trust between target users, the technical development team, and educators as serious game implementers.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".