How to link educational purposes and immersive video games development? An ontological approach proposal
Abstract
Video games offer a interesting approach for enhancing
educational experiences across various domains. Whether
repurposing existing games, such as Sim City for teaching budget
management, or developing dedicated serious games, they enrich
the spectrum of educational resources available.
Nevertheless, creating immersive gaming and learning
environments presents challenges. The absence of consensus on
comprehensive tools or models poses an initial hurdle.
Furthermore, designing such experiences entails intricate
considerations, including multidisciplinary collaboration and the
inherent complexity of open nature of learning experiences.
Our proposed ontology addresses these challenges by integrating
concepts from education, immersive game design, and virtual
environments. This integration facilitates the alignment of
learning objectives with game-design elements, leveraging the
multi-agent systems paradigm for coherence.
Serving as a semantic hub, our ontology enhances
communication among interdisciplinary teams by employing
clearly defined terms. Additionally, it provides a robust
conceptual framework to navigate the complexity inherent in
educational game development.
We assess the efficacy of our ontology by instantiating it with
several existing games or game engine. This instantiation
validates its expressiveness and completeness, while logical
consistency is confirmed through inference engine verification.
Through these efforts, our ontology emerges as a valuable tool
for advancing the design and development of educational video
games.