Teaching Serious Games

Abstract

Game development is a challenging and diverse field. It integrates different disciplines such as computer science, design, art, and psychology. Many different skills are required to create successful games, posing great challenges for education. These challenges also apply to the area of Serious Games with the additional difficulty of adding goals beside entertainment to the design. We report on our experiences with designing and implementing teaching formats to further the development of curricula and formal education in the area of Serious Game development. Our approach combines theoretical as well as practical elements. To reinforce and motivate our students we connect our courses to external events such as game development competitions. Furthermore, we experimented with using meta-games as a way of teaching game design.