Developing a cognitive evaluation method for serious game engineers

Serious game is an application that has been recently designed for a specific purpose in areas such as education, healthcare, management, and engineering with the core components in games. There have been recent attempts to evaluate the effects of serious games through cognitive aspects used in empirical research, yet there are struggles for application designers to apply these cognitive neuroscientific principles to validate their proposed programs. In this paper, simple tools in cognitive psychology are introduced for analyzing serious game designs through empirical testing. The experiment is designed to investigate the effects of a tangible walking game on attention, memory, and emotion. Results revealed that the group that directly played the tangible walking game showed a slightly better performance on word recall than the control group that just watched the game. We are proposing, in this paper, an experimental method for validating a tangible walking game that can be potentially applied to other serious games. A cognitive evaluation procedure has been developed showing how to exploit simple empirical testing to validate the effectiveness of the proposed tangible game through the cognitive aspects of information processing.