"… if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language." Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Designing serious games for learning is undoubtedly the most complex, multi-disciplined technology-based challenge existing in our training world and is increasingly popular for military training. Somewhat of a rift has developed between game designers (including developers, graphic artists, and designers) and instructional designers. Some assert that instructional designers take all of the fun out of a game (Aldrich, 2005) and some accuse game designers of creating only "eye candy" (Squire, 2008). As part of a larger study for the Office of Naval Research, Capable Manpower Future Naval Capability Program, we are examining learning game design. In particular, we are studying how the various disciplines conceptualize serious game design and how to facilitate communication among the disciplines. This will lead to a model for learning game design that accommodates the needs of all learning game design disciplines. This paper describes our efforts to understand the perspectives of different design disciplines and the impact on a communication framework for instructional game design.
A Communication Framework: A Babel Fish for Instructional Game Designers
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