Usability testing is a key step in the successful design of new technologies and tools, ensuring that heterogeneous populations will be able to interact easily with innovative applications. While usability testing methods of productivity tools (e.g., text editors, spreadsheets, or management tools) are varied, widely available, and valuable, analyzing the usability of games, especially educational “serious” games, presents unique usability challenges. Because games are fundamentally different than general productivity tools, “traditional” usability instruments valid for productivity applications may fall short when used for serious games. In this work we present a methodology especially designed to facilitate usability testing for serious games, taking into account the specific needs of such applications and resulting in a systematically produced list of suggested improvements from large amounts of recorded gameplay data. This methodology was applied to a case study for a medical educational game, MasterMed, intended to improve patients’ medication knowledge. We present the results from this methodology applied to MasterMed and a summary of the central lessons learned that are likely useful for researchers who aim to tune and improve their own serious games before releasing them for the general public.

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In the era of digital gaming, there is a pressing need to better understand how people's gaming preferences and habits affect behavior and can inform educational game design. However, instruments available for such endeavor are rather informal and limited, lack proper evaluation, and often yield results that are hard to interpret. In this paper we present the design and preliminary validation (involving N ¼ 754 Spanish secondary school students) of a simple instrument that, based on a 10-item Game Preferences Questionnaire (GPQ), classifies participants into four 'clusters' or types of gamers, allowing for easy interpretation of the results. These clusters are: (1) Full gamers, covering individuals that play all kinds of games with a high frequency; (2) Hardcore gamers, playing mostly first-person shooters and sport games; (3) Casual gamers, playing moderately musical, social and thinking games; and (4) Nongamers, who do not usually play games of any kind. The instrument may have uses in psychology and behavioral sciences, as there is evidence suggesting that attitudes towards gaming affects personal attitudes and behavior. Besides, we propose applying the instrument to help designers of educational games to get better tailored their games to their target audiences.

Abstract-Within the last years educational games have attracted some attention from the academic community. Multiple enhancements of the learning experience are usually attributed to educational games, although the most cited is their potential to improve students' motivation. In spite of these expected advantages, how to introduce video games in the learning process is an issue that is not completely clear yet, which reduces the potential impact of educational video games. Our goal at the research group is to identify the barriers that are limiting the integration of games in the learning process and propose approaches to tackle them. The result of this work is the platform, an educational game authoring tool that aims to make of video games just another educational tool at the disposal of the instructors. In this paper we describe how contributes to the integration of games in the learning process through three main focuses: reduction of the high development costs of educational games, involvement of instructors in the development process to enhance the educational value, and the production of the games using a whitebox model. In addition we describe the current research that we are conducting using the platform as a test-bed.