Towards ontology of gameplay: application to game based learning systems

Game Based Learning Systems (GBLSs) constitute an important resource for entertainment and education, they present an efficient technology that uses game principles to engage learners into learning activities. However, several barriers are in the way of the general adoption of learning approaches based on GBLSs, since their design process requires strict and precise specification models to define and communicate gameplay. For instance, until very recently, gameplay is usually specified via natural language rules introducing and generating thus many ambiguous human interpretations and a lack of machine understandable formats. In this paper, we present a formal as well as a semantic formalism based on domain ontology for gameplay specification that offers to game designers a precise model to describe, analyze and communicate gameplay from early stages of development. Moreover this semantic formalism is more machine understandable which could allow more automatic processing and reasoning over the specified gameplay.