Despite a growing interest in player-centred methods for serious games, little is known on how to achieve this goal in practice when prospective users are children. Foundational questions remain unanswered, such as to which design dimensions children should contribute, and how and when they should be engaged. This paper presents the methods and results of two studies that inspired Skies of Manawak, a game for developmental dyslexia remediation. The first study engaged 60 children (age 8–13) in 15 ideation workshops to highlight the story and aesthetics of the game. The second study engaged 258 children (age 8–11) in the comparative evaluation of the game demo with a commercial cognitive training system. The results proved the importance and complexity of the early involvement of children in design. Children strongly appreciated the demo, particularly the story their peers contributed to shaping. However, this story deviated from their desires in several critical dimensions. It had to reconcile gender stereotypes and the violence embedded in their narratives with the game’s purpose. An apparent conflict between designers and children’s values emerged, supporting the idea that children’s engagement in serious game design requires effective mediation to avoid compromising the purposes they intend to achieve.

Serious games are pedagogical tools used in many domains and considered a viable solution to professional training. Core elements for the construction of effective serious games are the Non-Player Characters (NPCs) which, depending on the quality of the Artificial Intelligence (AI), can make the training scenarios more realistic and engaging. One of the main issues with existing games concerns the limited possibility to edit their content. These tools are usually delivered as closed products with no, or minimal, customization features. The modification of the virtual environment is strongly constrained and the behavior of NPCs is fixed to a predefined set of actions. Therefore it becomes hard for trainers to adapt the training according to different requirements. In this paper we propose a solution for the customization of AIs, aimed at allow non-technical users to edit complex behavioral models through a new high-level approach. The Actors' Programming Environment (APE) has been developed on the base of a user-centered design and a preliminary evaluation was conducted with eight experts in computer science and interaction design, serving as evaluators. The results suggest that the approach is suitable for this context and might prove to be a good basis for future developments.