Activity-Based Scenario Design, Development and Assessment in Serious Games
Serious gaming environments provide the potential to create player activities and opportunities to design for experience. A flexible, powerful and rich way to create, represent and characterize player activities in serious games is through scenarios. Scenarios are stories: they are realized through text descriptions and supporting artwork such as storyboards and sketches. In this way, they illustrate a game’s scenes, settings, circumstances and situations, as well as the possible future sequence or choice of events that make-up a game’s narrative flow. While the flexibility of scenarios makes them useful for describing player activities, the lack of tools and methodologies to guide their design may lead to the use of ad hoc non-standardized language. Borrowing from film, HCI, and activity theory, this chapter describes a hierarchical activity-based framework that on the one hand is sufficiently flexible to support the design and development of scenarios at any level of complexity, while on the other hand provides a standard template and language with which to frame scenarios in serious game design. The proposed framework provides a way to bridge the gaps between design, development, and implementation of serious games. In addition, it incorporates a multi-level structure providing multiple units of analysis (a variable lens) for analyzing learning from objectives to goals and subgoals.