Creating the Roadmap

While many consider the Game Design Document (GDD) to be an essential element of the development, there are some that feel it is not necessary. As you move into the creation of the GDD for your proposed learning game, what aspects of it do you see are relevant, and which do you feel may not be? Also, in what ways would you modify the GDD to improve its effectiveness within an evolving educational sphere?

Provide more than just opinion. Back up your reasoning and perceptions with examples and works.

During the Game Design Documentation (GDD) phase, I came to the realization that this outline we were given is a template. Several parts of the GDD template could have been removed from the final version of my GDD. The programming and logistics sections (specifically the human resources section) were mostly not needed for the GDD of the Scratch project. Since the project required the use of Scratch, the special technical requirements, game engine, rendering, artificial intelligence, physics, and gameplay code were all handled by Scratch or not even viable in Scratch. Since this was an individual project, no human resource requirements (aside from me being the one-man show) were required.

That doesn’t mean that I believe the GDD is useless. It is a wonderful tool to help expand an idea in a very specific direction. In its simplest form, the GDD can be used as a checklist of what needs to be thought through and organized.

I also would have likely added a couple of additional section to the template: pedagogy and research. The learning objectives helped to flesh out the game with a focus on learning. However, proper research into the tangible content and hos can be tied to proper pedagogy is paramount to the success of an instructional game. Warren and Jones (2017), during their discussion of the approaches to designing instructional games, warn that off-the-shelf games can limit the effectiveness of properly synthesizing the “pedagogy, content, learning objectives, and gameplay.” They (Warren & Jones, 2017) make it clear that the role of the learning game designer is to construct a learning experience where everything is transferrable while being highly motivating to the learner. In other words:

A truly educational game has elements of both game and instruction. Balancing these has to be done without letting the game overtake the learning aspects to the point where players do not understand how what they are doing transfers to the real world. (p. 2550-2552).

The benefit of a research section holds the author accountable to the proven standards that have been developed over the last millennium.

References

• Warren, S. J., & Jones, G. (2017). Learning Games: The Science and Art of Development. Springer. ISBN-13: 978-3319468273