Experience, Experiment, Evaluate: A Framework for Assessing Experiential Games

Abstract

The design of effective educational games has proven itself difficult for many years, leading to sparse and somewhat inconsistent insight into the principles governing such systems. While attempts at constructing frameworks for educational games certainly exist, their nature is often quite general (limiting the practical utility) or noticeably specific (limiting the scope of projects to which that framework might be applied). We present a design framework for a broad, but well-defined genre known as experiential games. We have named our framework the Experience, Experiment, Evaluate (EEE) framework and believe it to be an adequate lens under which to analyze such games. This article presents the EEE framework in detail and provides example analyses of three games (a U.S. Civil War history game, a medical diagnosis game, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time). We present empirical results for two of these games showcasing evidence that presumed adherence to EEE provides benefits in the classroom. In particular, the medical diagnosis game, Rashi, is shown to elicit higher quantity and quality of student responses when features were added that more tightly bound the game to our framework. Additionally, we provide evidence that activities within our U.S. Civil War game, ‘A Nation Divided’, are more successful in providing learning gains to students when those activities more carefully apply the ideas within our framework. We do not present any empirical results regarding Ocarina of Time, but include it as an anecdotal example of how commercial games have applied these principles successfully in order to teach the mechanics of the game to players, and argue that this is, in many ways, an exercise in pedagogy. We end by offering suggestions for strategically incorporating elements of our framework in the development and design of future systems.