Designing Elements for Immersive User Experience in Educational Games Using the Entertainment Game Development Approach

Abstract

Educational games are generally perceived as less interesting and engaging as compared to entertainment or video games. The stigma of having created for entertainment purposes is hindering teachers or lecturers from using educational games in formal educational contexts. Hence, there is a need to learn from experienced and successful video game designers in order to make educational games engaging, particularly on providing game players the immersive user experience (UX) through an emotional context. This study was conducted to examine the attitude, experiences and understanding of prominent game designers in the Southeast Asia region on the concept, definitions and elements of UX when designing immersive games. The designers were interviewed and the recordings were transcribed on verbatim basis to allow coding for narration. The outputs of the narration were mapped on to an emotional context, specifically for designing immersive educational games. The findings revealed that the primary factor of UX is the crafting of players' emotion. Two trustworthy strategies for crafting good UX are giving players the opportunity to be actively involved in the game narrative structure by having an enhanced identification with the avatars they control; and allowing players to make decisions that seemingly make differences and experience a range of emotions as part of the character in the game world. In conclusion, to remove the stigma of educational games, teachers and lecturers should craft students' emotion by offering roles to play in the narrative structure of educational games; while prompting decision making scenarios in the game world.