Abstract:

Serious Games are developed for the purpose of enhancing aspect of educational, political, social, or workplace interaction. Serious Games or “games with a useful purpose” have as their main objective to teach, inform, train, and allow one to experiment, all while playing. They can serve to deepen the player´s understanding of some dimensions of the human experience, often providing the capability to experiment with and explore in depth different aspects of social and interpersonal interaction.

In this paper we discuss five success stories of serious games used in companies and analyse their characteristics as well as their similarities to derive a universal design concept for serious games based on these success stories. Additionally, we investigate how serious games can be tested for their reliability in teaching. To do this we adapt the existing Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) using already identified attributes from behavioural, cognitive and psychological theories and analyse the connections to the external variables.

Keywords:

Serious games, technology acceptance model, success story, design, concept.