LudoScience

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Support : Publications
Author(s) : Damien Djaouti
Editor : Thèse de doctorat en informatique, Université de Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier
Date : 2011
Lang :

Description

Nowadays, videogames are an important part of popular culture. Although videogames are most famous as leisure, the wave of " Serious Games " aims to use them for a wide range of serious purposes: teaching, communication, therapy, professional training, advertising, political propaganda…

This thesis focuses on the design of such " Serious Games ". More specifically, we will try to identify means able to ease the creation of Serious Games. To achieve this goal, we will first concentrate on the analysis of means used to ease the creation of entertainment videogames. We will then try to evaluate how these means can be relevant to ease the creation of Serious Games. Through this process, we will specify the difference between the design of an entertainment videogame and a Serious Game. This research was conducted with the help of an industrial partnership involving three companies and institutions. The main contributions of this thesis are:

 

• A global view of the " Serious Game " field through a corpus of 2218 titles.
• An analysis of the " theoretical " tools able to ease the creation of videogames, backed with four case studies coming from our industrial partners. This study of the " theoretical " side of the Serious Game Design process will result in a synthetic methodology to create Serious Games.
• An analysis of the " technical " tools able to ease the creation of videogames, based on a corpus of 400 software tools. This study will result in an open and collaborative database of videogame creation tools.
• An evaluation of these " theoretical " and " technical " tools through a university course whose goal is to teach the basics of Game Design. This evaluation will point out several limitations in the available tools. This study will thus result in a specification of desired features for a tool able to ease the creation of Serious Games in an educational environment.
• Two software experimentations aiming to create a tool embedding all the features listed in the previous specification. The first experiment failed to reach this goal, but the second one shows a promising mid-term result: this prototype tool was successfully used to create one of the Serious Games designed for our industrial partners.

 

Keywords : Serious Game, Game Design, creation, game creation toolkits, modding, videogames, constructionnism , pedagogy

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