FunTain: Design Implications for Edutainment Games

This paper is a report on the initial findings of a study conducted in the project FunTain with the main purpose to find general guidelines for edutainment games. This to guide designers of such games, as they often lack in design guidelines. Usability evaluations were conducted on the edutainment game in order to find usability problems. These findings were then analyzed and used as input in focus group meetings, held with joint teams with game designers and HCI experts. The result was a proposal of a list of ten general design guidelines. Findings indicate that users had problems in understanding the underlying model for the game as well as finding the knowledge related content. Experts, further, gave comments about feedback problems and different types of consistencies. Some of the implications from the findings, as discussed in focus group, are guidelines for earning and loosing points, scoring and performance feedback and game object characteristics.