MeWare for Sale: Developer’s Approaches to Serious Mobile Music Games

---

Pierce Charlotte Woodward Clinton J. Bartel Anthony
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

Music students face a highly complex task with a significant cognitive load. Serious games are one teaching tool used to manage this complexity, as they have been found to increase student’s engagement and foster self-regulated, independent learning behaviours. In this paper we examine serious music games on the mobile iOS platform. We particularly focus on how developers approach the creation and publication of these games. To this end, we look at the design and development of serious music games, including their development histories, revenue models, user management models, and data management models. We then frame these characteristics in terms of the type of software the games represent, which indicates how and if users were considered during development. Our findings provide valuable insight into the field of serious music games, in understanding how the current state of the field came to be and how it might evolve in the future.

 

There’s an App For That?: Are Mobile Music Games Serious Educational Tools

---

Pierce Charlotte Woodward Clinton J. Bartel Anthony
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

Music students face a significant cognitive load, which often causes them to abandon musical studies. Serious games offer a solution to this problem: present educational content in a fun package to increase student engagement and foster self-regulated, independent learning. In this paper we examine serious music games, specifically on the iOS platform. We address three questions: whether these games exhibit the benefits that serious games are considered to have; whether they provide educational value; and whether they offer any improvement over traditional teaching tools. We found that although they can offer the benefit of immediate, automated feedback, the currently available games cover only a small amount of musical knowledge. They also tend to support rote-learning style tasks, resulting in low-level learning outcomes, and do not tailor content to players. Despite these drawbacks the games offer some educational value. However, there is significant scope for continued development in the future.