5. Discovering Strategies for Design of Purposeful Games—A Preliminary Study

Purposeful games are games having a purpose such as education, in addition to entertainment. Though there has been significant interest and research in educational game design recently, the design of games that seamlessly deliver engagement and learning is still a challenge. Games with endogenous design are likely to balance engagement and learning. Endogenous design implies that the gameplay emerges from the educational content. We, therefore, focus on discovering strategies for the endogenous design in our research. As part of preliminary study, we conduct an exploratory workshop as well as pilot studies using protocol analysis to understand strategies that designers use. The main contribution of this paper is an early report on strategies for the endogenous design of educational games. We find three broad themes of strategies—(a) the process and the steps, (b) the extraction of ‘gameable’ elements from the content, and (c) the translation to game elements. This research is a stepping-stone toward deeper research into endogenous design of educational games.