Integrating Cognitive Tasks in Game Acitivities

In this paper we describe an approach to model activities for educational role playing games based on a cognitive task analysis. After developing an architecture for educational role playing games, including patterns of communication, we analyzed several games to find out, why it is so difficult to seamlessly integrate gaming and learning. Our analysis of activities in commercial RPGs showed us that activities like crafting are underdeveloped and play a minor role in game design (in contrast for example to combat). We have been able to show that crafting can be mapped to inquiry learning, so this might be a point of integrating learning and gaming. On this basis of results, we used cognitive task analysis to analyze the tasks to perform in classical crafting activities. We describe our approach with one example, the preparation of a recipe, in this paper.