Experimenting with Endogenous Design for Digital Therapy Games

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Agrawal Vasundhara Athavale Sandeep Mohan Akash Thanawala Rajiv
2022 DiGRA ’22 – Proceedings of the 2022 DiGRA International Conference: Bringing Worlds Together

Digital Therapeutic (DTx) Games promise to engage users in physical and mental health therapy and thereby provide effective treatment over a period. Games for different kinds of therapies are emerging in recent milieu. However, the promise of engagement and effectiveness of these games can be realized only when there is a balance between the joy and purpose of participating in therapies. Designers today lack specific guidance on designing purposeful games that achieve seamless integration between these two. We propose the use of an endogenous design approach to address this problem. In this paper we describe the approach and demonstrate its application through three case studies.

 

Endogen: Framework for Designing Endogenous Educational Games

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Athavale Sandeep Dalvi Girish
2020 DiGRA ’20 – Proceedings of the 2020 DiGRA International Conference: Play Everywhere

Cohesion between content and gameplay can lead to games that are educational and enjoyable at the same time, making them effective. Endogenous designs, wherein the game elements emerge from the content, lead to such cohesion. However, endogenous design is not commonly observed in practice. Lack of guidance on conceptualizing endogenous design is an important factor hampering production of effective educational games. In this paper, we present ‘Endogen’ framework for designing endogenous educational games. The framework synthesized using the ‘function-behavior-structure’ approach is composed of a set of design strategies that we discovered in our recent work. It is validated using a multi-method approach wherein designers use the framework to design games and then rate it on various parameters. Results indicate that Endogen achieves the stated objective of creating endogenous design, therefore offering exciting content integration possibilities for game designers.

 

Strategies for Endogenous Design of Educational Games

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Athavale Sandeep Dalvi Girish
2019 DiGRA '19 - Proceedings of the 2019 DiGRA International Conference: Game, Play and the Emerging Ludo-Mix

Educational game designers strive to fulfill the promise of making learning fun. Games with endogenous design can fulfill this promise. In endogenous design, the gameplay emerges from the content, thus seamlessly integrating the act of playing with learning. However, a review of literature informs us of the lack of guidance on the endogenous design of educational games. There is a need to develop a framework which can aid designers achieve endogenous design. In this paper, we propose strategies for the endogenous design of educational games. We conduct in-situ studies using think-aloud protocol analysis to extract the tacit knowledge that designers discreetly use in practice. We synthesize the extracted knowledge into concise design strategies. The identification of these design strategies is a significant step towards building a framework for endogenous design of educational games.