Moirai: A No-Code Virtual Serious Game Authoring Platform

Abstract

Serious games, that is, games whose primary purpose is education and training, are gaining widespread popularity in higher education contexts and have been associated with increased learner memory retention, engagement, and motivation even among learners with special needs. Despite these benefits, serious games have fixed scenarios that cannot be easily modified, leading to predictable and dull experiences that can reduce user engagement. Therefore, there is a demand for tools that allow educators to create new modifications and customize serious game scenarios, and avoid the fixed-scenario problem and a one-size-fits-all approach. Here, we present and detail our novel virtual serious games authoring platform called Moirai, which uses a no-code approach to allow educators who may have limited (or no) prior programming experience to use a diagram-based interface to author and customize serious games focused on decision and communication skills development. We describe two case studies, each of which involved creating serious games for nursing education (one for mental health education and the other for internationally educated nurses). The usability of both games was qualitatively evaluated using the system usability scale (SUS) questionnaire and achieved above-average usability scores.

Design of a Cultural Heritage Gesture-Based Puzzle Game and Evaluation of User Experience

“…The positive and negative terms were listed in random order [21]. The validity and reliability of the questionnaire was established after many surveys [22] and in recent years it has been used to measure UX in many studies involving serious games [23][24][25][26][27][28]. In some cases of serious games assessed with UEQ, the game controller was the leap motion device [29][30][31].…”

“…Each scale included 4 items except for Attractiveness, which included 6 items (Figure 3a). The order of positive and negative items occurred randomly and half of them started with a positive term while the others started with a negative term [27].…”