Serious Games For Learning Life Skills: A Design Methodology
What are the pedagogical approaches and principles that game designers should apply when designing a serious game that teaches life skills?
In this work, I present and describe a methodology for game designers to design skill serious games (SSGs), which are games that aim to teach life skills. In order to achieve the teaching objective, it is vital for these games to be both fun and informative. I detail both core game design principles and pedagogical approaches which can be bonded together to effectively produce SSGs. Such pedagogical approaches include efficient learning methods from the educational world that can be applied to games. The core game design principles are general to games and can be adapted to SSGs. To illustrate this methodology in practice I designed Planti, a turn-based puzzle that teaches houseplant care.
