An Early Evaluation Method for Social Presence in Serious Game

In recent years, there has been increasing interest, both in the potential of computer games as learning and teaching tools, and in research into their use. However, most frameworks for serious games evaluation do not explicitly consider social aspects. On the contrary, we believe that social aspects have to be considered as an essential component of the 'virtual' life of most current users. For this reason, in this paper we propose a framework able to analyze serious games social aspects and give an early evaluation of the designed application. The evaluation framework is based on four elements: identity, space, persistence and actions. These elements (and the behaviors they let to emerge) can be used as markers in order to evaluate if or not our systems is able to facilitate the feeling of social presence and then social learning. The result of such an evaluation can be useful to designers in order to understand if the systems lack of functionalities before starting the implementation and thus return on the phase of design to add missing elements.

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