What Do Serious Games Developers Search Online? A Study of GameDev StackExchange

The interest in serious games (SG) has grown very fast in the last decade. Yet the research community rarely studies SG and the challenges SG developers are facing while creating games that should educate, train, and inform players. In this research, we use Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model to analyze a popular Q&A site (Game Dev StackExchange) in order to understand the thoughts and needs of SG developers. We analyze the most active and popular topics about SG development. Our study reveals that SG developers’ needs are very diverse, ranging widely from simple script code to simulate 3D learning environments, over best practices to design educational games for specific target groups, to features that can increase the player’s motivation and learning outcomes.

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