Games should encourage repeated play by users, consistent with the adult learning theory of deliberate practice. Game design experience indicates that a consistent, relevant, and fresh narrative is critical to player engagement. A challenge for serious game design is inexpensively adapting the narrative to be both relevant and fresh for multiple player sessions while the learning objectives remain the same.

This paper shows how two standards (ISO/IEC 19778 and ISO/IEC 24763) can describe variable narratives for team training that are internally consistent and relevant to the learning objectives. We have enhanced the semantics of ISO/IEC 19778, a standard for collaborative workgroups, to capture the three "R's" of collaboration: Roles, Rights, and Responsibilities. ISO/IEC Technical Report 24763 describes a conceptual reference model for competencies that can formalize learning objectives for serious games in terms of required actions, actors, and outcomes. When used in combination, these standards can help to (1) maximize the reuse of narrative elements, (2) link the learning objectives to aspects of the narrative, and (3) specify elements of the game design that are accessible to the different game design disciplines.

We show how these standards could specify a game and discuss how different elements of the standard would change to (1) vary the scenario for repeated deliberate practice with constant learning objectives, (2) adapt skills for different situations, and (3) make the training more relevant to a particular learner.

Game development is an interdisciplinary effort that requires tradeoffs across disciplines to get the most "bang for the buck." The use of standards to describe the narrative aspects of game designs can assist tradeoffs and allow broader sharing of games for training, providing designers a way of comparing games to see what would have to be modified so that the game could serve a different purpose.