Design and Development of Effective and Customizable Educational Business Games

Abstract

Serious Games are becoming increasingly popular. In all domains they are used to transfer content to players by mixing learning with pleasure in order to make teaching more easy and fun. However many of them are designed in an ad-hoc way without structure. Several research efforts have been conducted to tackle this deficiency and to improve the design of these games. Despite the vast literature, the domain is still in its infancy and scattered. Serious games offer great opportunities for learning, but only if the game is designed effectively. In this thesis, we design and develop an educational business game according to state-of-the-art methods from the literature. This game has been designed using the proposed Educational Game Design Framework and Educational Game Design Checklist created in this thesis by combining best practices and guidelines. The game, called ‘Hotel California’, has been evaluated on its effectiveness as a teaching tool. The first results obtained through two evaluation sessions are promising and indicate that following the guidelines found in scientific literature can be useful in designing an effective Educational Business Game. This thesis contributes to the domain of serious gaming by proposing a Framework with a corresponding Checklist that can be used for the design of new serious games and the evaluation of existing serious games.