Playability Guidelines for Educational Video Games

Learning through play is currently an effective and attractive educational strategy. However, are all educational video games (EVG) successful and do they always keep the player motivated? Here, the authors emphasize that the success of an EVG will be more achievable if the game quality is measured, and suggest the use of playability property as a suitable and effective tool to do this. To this end, they present a set of guidelines that are based on Educational Playability (Playability in EVG), which were compiled by analyzing the existing game guidelines to achieve a good EVG design, to form a basis for evaluating the EVG quality, acting as useful tools for developers to enhance videogame playability. The authors propose that through the use of guidelines an acceptable level of playability can be achieved and this ensures the players’ motivation, which is a complicated process requiring the consideration of many aspects (playful, educational, etc.).