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Top2. Literature Review: Design Methods For Serious Games
There are several documented process models for designing Serious Games. In order to carry out a literature review, we assembled a corpus of texts using the keywords “serious game”, “design”, “methodology” and “method”, in English and in French, via the Google Scholar search engine. We choose to use only Google Scholar to perform our literature review as it allowed us to easily search for academic works written in either English or French language, and also because it’s currently the largest academic database available (Gusenbauer, 2019). To confine the scope of our study, we selected only texts that were published from 2002 onwards, because the 2002 year marked the start of the current wave of Serious Games (Djaouti, 2014). Among the works identified through this online search, we focused on the ones clearly stating a series of steps to design a Serious Game. This focus was required to later compare the design methods. But it also introduces a scope limitation in our study. Therefore, the current study does not aim to provide an exhaustive view. Instead, our goal is to compare a sample of the available Serious Game design methods to try to devise a generic design process model.
Taking those limitations into account, our literature review enables us to identify nine methods used for designing Serious Games. Those nine methods are mainly taken from academic publications (books, dissertations and articles), although some of them are the fruit of collaborations between companies and universities.