Towards effective serious games

In our current society, with plenty of distractions, traditional methods for learning or performing tasks are losing in effectiveness. Serious games have great potential to replace or complement these traditional methods, because they can take benefit of the intrinsic motivation of people to play and have fun. However, creating serious games that effectively achieve their serious purpose is not obvious. The paper discusses some key aspects required to take into consideration in order to come to more effective serious games. First, we identify and justify requirements for the development process, being tools to assist the multidisciplinary teams in the development, as well as dedicated methods, guidelines and knowledge, where it is a requirement that the methods and guidelines should explicitly deal with the interdisciplinary character of serious games. Next, we argue for two important aspects for the games themselves: the use of some form of personalization or adaptation to the target audience, and the incorporation of an explicit debriefing phase.