JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Serious games are digital games that have an additional goal beyond entertainment. Recently, many studies explored different quality criteria for serious games, including effectiveness and attractiveness. Unfortunately, the double mission of serious games, i.e., simultaneous achievement of intended effects (“serious” part) and entertainment (“game” part), is not adequately considered in these studies. This paper aims to identify essential quality criteria for good serious games. The fundamental goal of our research is to identify important factors of serious games and to adapt the existing principles and requirements from game-related literature to suit the idea of effective and attractive serious games. In addition to the review of the relevant literature, we also include workshop results. Furthermore, we analyzed and summarized 19 state of the art serious games for education and health. We include successful and well-known games that fulfill “serious” and “game” characteristics. The selected serious games either prove their effectiveness through scientific studies or by winning game awards. For the analysis of these games, we refer to the DIN SPEC 91380 Serious Games Metadata Format. A summarized text states important quality criteria for the “serious” as well as the “game” part and especially the balance between them. We provide guidelines for high-quality serious games drawn from literature analysis and in close cooperation with domain experts based on the proven Metadata Format.