Improving Serious Game Design with Collaborative Storytelling

It is challenging to design a serious game. In addition to being fun, such a game needs to be valid and meaningful. For this reason, requirement and domain knowledge elicitation are more important in designing serious games compared to designing entertainment games. Despite this importance, the elicitation occurs frequently in an unstructured manner. In this paper, we propose to use and embed collaborative storytelling in the serious game design process. We expect that this improves the quality of the game as it helps game designers to better understand the domain for which they design it. Furthermore, it will allow clients, users, and subject-matter experts to participate in and learn from the design process. We reflect on the use of collaborative storytelling by describing how an actual storytelling tool could have been used during the game design process of an existing serious game.