Avoiding Failure in Modern Game Design with Academic Content A Recipe, an Anti-Pattern and Applications Thereof Kay Berkling, Heiko Faller and Micha Piertzik Cooperative State University of Baden W¨ urttemberg, Erzberger Str. 121, Karlsruhe, Germany Keywords: Games, Content, Design, Addiction, Education, Gamification. Abstract: Educational Games tend not to be designed by game engineers. They usually do not compare either in graphics or in addictiveness to small games that people have installed on their mobile devices. In order to understand why people play today, a survey was conducted to determine players’ explicit and implicit knowledge about motivators in addictive games. Based on the results of the questionnaire, we studied demographic preferences and commonalities in order to develop a recipe for the design that fits the general current market. An anti- pattern was a by-product of this process. Both are then applied towards an analysis of existing games and the design of a new one. 1 INTRODUCTION Playing games can be addictive and fun. In contrast, learning in the official context of education is often stressful or perceived as a duty (Few, if any, stud- ies look at the academic stress caused by educational methods in schools today). Rare are the students who cannot wait to get up in the morning to continue their learning from last night, more frequent in first grade than the later years. To improve the learning ex- perience, researchers and educators have introduced games into the classroom in different ways: By using existing games in class or adding gamification me- chanics to educational content. Due to the large num- ber of publications in this area, we focus on literature overview papers to establish the current status-quo in this field of study. 1.1 Gamification Gamification pertains to the analysis of mechanics that make games fun and then applying these to situ- ations outside of gaming in order to recreate the feel- ing of fun or addiction to new applications such as learning or marketing or the solving of mundane tasks (rephrased from Oxford Dictionary). According to (de Sousa Borges et al., 2014), there have been a number of papers on various topics re- lating to gamification in education. Very few, how- ever, deal with actual game design for experience, so- lution proposal, and validation with respect to master- ing skills. Dicheva (Dicheva et al., 2015) lists the papers that have studied various features in gamification usage for education. The most frequently studied mechan- ics in order of popularity are: ’Status’, ’Social En- gagement’, ’Freedom of Choice’, ’Freedom to Fail’, ’Rapid Feedback’ and ’Goals and Challenges’. Re- searchers have studied gamification of educational material and shown that there is a strong interest in using game mechanics for education. We believe that there remains a significant gap in actually designing and validating the use of games with academic content, going beyond gamification. 1.2 Games Game-based learning (GBL) builds on existing games, such as Civilizations, and re-uses it for an ed- ucational purpose, like economics or history (Squire, 2006; Wiggins, 2016). Games are only starting to make a very slow move into schools (Dickey, 2013; Salen, 2011). The idea of using games in education is sometimes treated differently in the literature and called Educational Games or Serious Games (for ex- ample, (Vaz de Carvalho et al., 2016)). These are designed specifically with academic content in mind. For the purpose of this paper, we prefer not to distin- guish between games and serious games (this is not unusual and seems to agree with the findings in the lit- erature overview on the subject (Boyle et al., 2016)). According to Merriam Webster, a game is defined as: Berkling, K., Faller, H. and Piertzik, M. Avoiding Failure in Modern Game Design with Academic Content - A Recipe, an Anti-Pattern and Applications Thereof. DOI: 10.5220/0006281800250036 In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2017) - Volume 2, pages 25-36 ISBN: 978-989-758-240-0 Copyright © 2017 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved 25