Playing Design: A Case Study on Applying Gamification to Construct a Serious Game with Youngsters at Social Risk

Playing Design: A Case Study on Applying Gamification to Construct a Serious Game with Youngsters at Social Risk

Playing Design: A Case Study on Applying Gamification to Construct a Serious Game with Youngsters at Social Risk

Alejandro Benito-Santos, Amelie Dorn, Antonio G. Losada Gómez, Thomas Palfinger, Roberto Therón Sánchez, Eveline Wandl-Vogt

Abstract

"This article reports on the experience of co-designing an educational video game aimed at promoting good dietary habits in youngsters and fostering Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), such as SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being), SDG 10 (Reduced Inequalities), and SDG 17 (Partnerships for the Goals). To ensure the quality of the results, we developed a methodology under a social innovation paradigm that enabled the co-creation of the game. The methodology was driven by a series of three workshops, during which we adopted several different gamification strategies to support a Participatory Design (PD) process with the stakeholders, a group of local pre-teen and teen girls at social risk (N = 22). Captured requirements materialized into intermediate prototype evaluations that motivated a progressive refinement of the game."

Reference

Benito-Santos, A., Dorn, A., Gómez, A. G. L., Palfinger, T., Sánchez, R. T., & Wandl-Vogt, E. (2021). Playing design: A case study on applying gamification to construct a serious game with youngsters at social risk. Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH), 14(2), 1-19. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3427380

Keywords

gamification, social innovation, citizen science, digital humanities, educational video games, participatory design