On the development of learning games

The use of games in educational contexts is a highly popular subject of discussion among game scholars, educators and legislators alike. And although the potential of games as educational tools has been evangelized with varied intensity for a long time, examples of successful executions of the concept are still sparse. This has been attributed to many different factors, for example an inherent incompatibility between games and education, and various organizational and technological barriers for implementing games in educational contexts. While the merit of these factors is still under study, there’s no question that developers of learning games are faced with many obstacles, some of which that aren’t encountered in ‘traditional’ video game development, and we currently lack a firm understanding of the specifics of these obstacles and how they can be traversed. The PhD project presented in this paper approaches this issue by identifying the inherent challenges of, and proposing new methods and models for, learning game development.