Design Guidelines for Learning Games: the Living Forest Game Design Case

Games have long been known for their potential in learning but, on the other hand, design challenges and issues in their use in real contexts have been recognized as well. In this paper we report on a design case for a learning game, “Living Forest”, targeted at exploring sociotechnical aspects of the relationship between Human settlements and forests. The player is presented with a management exercise where she can promote development while balancing social, economic and ecological aspects in forest space. As part of an ethnographic analysis of our development praxis we synthesized a set of guidelines for the design of serious games, i.e. games with learning purposes, that have requirements of fidelity to the Body-of-Knowledge about the phenomena being modelled and learned. Author Keywords