Abstract
This paper presents a case study of the key decisions made in the design of Orbit, a child sexual abuse prevention computer game targeted at school students between 8 and 10 years of age. Key decisions include providing supported delivery for the target age group, featuring adults in the program, not over-sanitizing game content, having a focus on building healthy self-concept of players, making the game engaging and relatable for all players and evaluating the program. This case study has implications for the design of Serious Games more generally, including that research should underpin game design decisions, game designers should consider ways of bridging the game to real life, the learning that arises from the game should go beyond rote-learning, designers should consider how the player can make the game-world their own and comprehensive evaluations of Serious Games should be undertaken.
Highlights
This paper presents key decisions in the development of a Serious Game for child sexual abuse prevention
This paper presents a case study of the key decisions made in the design of Orbit, a child sexual abuse prevention computer game targeted at school students between 8 and 10 years of age
Any creative project is the result of many decisions made during the design and development process. This results section describes some of the key game design decisions and justifies them with research evidence. These key decisions have been grouped into seven sections: Key decision 1: delivery of program to be supported by classroom activities, Key decision 2: longer duration program, Key decision 3: feature adults in the program, Key decision 4: not over-sanitizing content, Key decision 5: focusing on building healthy self-concept, Key decision 6: making the game engaging and relatable for all players, and Key decision 7: evaluate the program
Summary
This paper presents key decisions in the development of a Serious Game for child sexual abuse prevention. Serious Games is an umbrella term used to encompass digital games designed for a purpose beyond entertainment. Serious Game designers aim to use qualities of digital game-play such as immersion, interaction, and engagement, to change people’s thoughts or behaviors or help them learn something. Within the Serious Games field, there are a large number of overlapping game sub-groupings that have emerged organically over time (Sawyer and Smith, 2008). Those most relevant to this paper are Games for Health (“Games for Health,” 2013), Games for (social) Change (“Games for Change,” 2005) and learning games. Aside to the Serious Games movement, there is a movement around games-based learning which involves using games, either entertainment games or Serious Games, to aid the learning process in formal learning environments such as schools and universities
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