The research is ascribed to Personal and Social Learning & Ethics (PSLE) that advocates for the implementation of serious games (SG) in educational contexts to promote personal and social learning from an ethical perspective. The paper analyzes the educational potential of a sample of free online anti-bullying SG (N = 10)-promoted by international educational institutions-aimed at developing prosocial skills in schoolchildren. The study adopts a qualitative methodology, focused on the content analysis, to identify the strategies they adopt on: 1) psycho-ludic and interactive aspects (typology of exposed aggressions, underlying learning theory and adopted play strategies); and, 2) the

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Despite scant empirical substantiation, serious games are in widespread use. The authors review 28 studies with empirical data from a learning outcome perspective to outline the effectiveness of serious games (compared to other learning approaches and specific game features). They conclude that serious games potentially improve the acquisition of knowledge and cognitive skills. Moreover, they seem to be promising for the acquisition of fine-grid motor skills and to accomplish attitudinal change. However, not all game features increase the effectiveness of the game. To further advance game research the chapter proposes recommendations including the alignment of learning outcome(s) and game type, the alignment of the game complexity and human cognitive processes, attention for cognitive and motivational processes, research on specific mitigating factors like gender on game effectiveness and, finally, developing new ways of assessing game effectiveness.

a b s t r a c tA challenge for serious games designers is to integrate learning with entertainment. For this purpose, the generation of curiosity using the foreshadowing/back story technique is promising. To implement this technique we propose the Game Discourse Analysis (GDA) which discerns between information flow (i.e. the sequence of information elements in a chronological order) and game discourse (i.e. the manipulation of the information flow to make the game more engaging and effective). We elaborate on the GDA and describe how two of the authors applied it in order to implement foreshadowing/back story in the game ReMission. The GDA was found to have potential as a communication tool for multidisciplinary design teams. Also, two problems were signaled: (1) creating an information flow is laborious and designers may benefit from automating parts of the GDA; (2) substantial deviations from the optimal information flow by players' actions may interfere with the intention of the game discourse. Additionally, in an experiment we tested the impact of this GDA supported manipulation on engagement (curiosity) and learning. We found that the GDA-supported foreshadowing/back story yielded more curiosity, but that it did not yield learning.

As games are continuously assessing the player, this assessment can be used to adapt the complexity of a game to the proficiency of the player in real time. We performed an experiment to examine the role of dynamic adaptation. In one condition, participants played a version of our serious game for triage training that automatically adapted the complexity level of the presented cases to how well the participant scored previously. Participants in the control condition played a version of the game with no adaptation. The adapted version was significantly more efficient and resulted in higher learning gains per instructional case, but did not lead to a difference in engagement. Adapting games to the proficiency of the player could make serious games more efficient learning tools.

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Abstract-Serious games have a great potential for training and educating people in novel and engaging ways. However, little empirical research has been done on the effectiveness of serious games and, although early findings do point in a moderately positive direction, even less is known about why some games succeed in effectively educating while others don't. We therefore propose a serious game, Code Red: Triage, which is designed to empirically test a number of cognition-based design guidelines in the context of crisis management training. Our purpose is to come to a set of design guidelines through empirical experiments that enhance the instructional design of serious games and can be used in the development of future games.

The effectiveness of serious games is often measured with verbal assessment. As an alternative we propose Pathfinder structural assessment (defined as measuring the learners' knowledge organization and compare this with a referent structure) which comprises three steps: knowledge elicitation, knowledge representation and knowledge evaluation. We discuss practical and theoretical considerations for the use of structural assessment and showcase its application with the game Code Red: Triage. Results suggest that structural assessment measures an individual's understanding of a domain at least differently from verbal assessment. While verbal assessment may provide a more nuanced picture regarding declarative and procedural knowledge, structural assessment may add an in-depth understanding of the concepts that are regarded important in a domain. In the Discussion we propose four guidelines to effectively use structural assessment in serious games: (1) Determine the appropriateness of the domain for structural assessment, (2) select an appropriate referent for the target group(s), (3) select the number of concepts needed for structural assessment, and (4) consider the analysis of the graphical knowledge representations to obtain in-depth information about the quality of the knowledge structures.