GALA NoE Deliverable 2.4: Report 3 - Serious Game Mechanics

The purpose of Serious Games Mechanics (SGM) was to develop a more common vocabulary on the relationships and associations of ludo-pedagogical mechanisms, in the anticipation of resolving some of the many dichotomies between game designers and educational/instructional designers. These are critical components that for the defragmentation process that can be currently observed in the SG field. Even more important, the current dichotomy between game design and pedagogical practices should be regarded as a serious obstacle in the uptake of SGs. Research, also supported by developers and end-users, has revealed that a pragmatic means to enable the formalisation and transition of SG methodologies to deliver aligned learning outcomes is clearly needed. While there are many methods/frameworks for SG design and implementation, there are very few that encapsulates the SG design process. SG researchers and professionals are yet to put forward a design methodology in which pedagogical purposes and the epistemic values of game structures to a learning procedure or process, are both encompassed in a single homogeneous structure. The question of how to design and implement the internal game mechanisms to ensure learning is not simply a tangential outcome of an incentivised programme through gameplay and it is yet to be fully and comprehensively answered. This report documents the fundamental theoretical and practical approaches towards eliciting such expert knowledge and describes the Process-Purpose-Structure methodology (PPSM) workshop series that we carried out in a number of events (GameDays'14 conference, GALA conference 2014, GALA summer school 2014). The workshops were to provide an opportunity to identify transient and longer-term game-learning mechanics and their likelihood of delivering the desired learning outcomes. Independent assessments of the PPSM suggests it to be a pragmatic tool which can be used to untangle the overall dichotomy between pedagogy and game design in terms of practice-based patterns and specific Serious Games frameworks. PPSM could potentially identify which game mechanics can be used to encourage particular ways of learning to achieve specific kinds of pedagogical goals, also including assessment of curricular content knowledge or skill acquisition. Early work indicate that key narrative elements (narrative SGMs) that give consistency and meaning to SGs could be structured to be reusable and made interoperable. This could potential be translated into a reference object or executable for a given curricular content and stored within a repository such as the SGREF. As a forefront for an SG design toolbox, the PPSM has shown to be a generic, yet systematic, means to establish game-pedagogy implications and potential benefits of associated pedagogic practices.