There is a consensus that serious games have a significant potential as a tool for instruction. However, their effectiveness in terms of learning outcomes is still understudied mainly due to the complexity involved in assessing intangible measures. A systematic approach—based on established principles and guidelines—is necessary to enhance the design of serious games, and many studies lack a rigorous assessment. An important aspect in the evaluation of serious games, like other educational tools, is user performance assessment. This is an important area of exploration because serious games are intended to evaluate the learning progress as well as the outcomes. This also emphasizes the importance of providing appropriate feedback to the player. Moreover, performance assessment enables adaptivity and personalization to meet individual needs in various aspects, such as learning styles, information provision rates, feedback, and so forth. This paper first reviews related literature regarding the educational effectiveness of serious games. It then discusses how to assess the learning impact of serious games and methods for competence and skill assessment. Finally, it suggests two major directions for future research: characterization of the player’s activity and better integration of assessment in games.

Usability testing is a key step in the successful design of new technologies and tools, ensuring that heterogeneous populations will be able to interact easily with innovative applications. While usability testing methods of productivity tools (e.g., text editors, spreadsheets, or management tools) are varied, widely available, and valuable, analyzing the usability of games, especially educational “serious” games, presents unique usability challenges. Because games are fundamentally different than general productivity tools, “traditional” usability instruments valid for productivity applications may fall short when used for serious games. In this work we present a methodology especially designed to facilitate usability testing for serious games, taking into account the specific needs of such applications and resulting in a systematically produced list of suggested improvements from large amounts of recorded gameplay data. This methodology was applied to a case study for a medical educational game, MasterMed, intended to improve patients’ medication knowledge. We present the results from this methodology applied to MasterMed and a summary of the central lessons learned that are likely useful for researchers who aim to tune and improve their own serious games before releasing them for the general public.

Within the last years educational games have attracted some attention from the academic community. Multiple enhancements of the learning experience are usually attributed to educational games, although the most cited is their potential to improve students' motivation. In spite of these expected advantages, how to introduce video games in the learning process is an issue that is not completely clear yet, which reduces the potential impact of educational video games. Our goal at the <;e-UCM> research group is to identify the barriers that are limiting the integration of games in the learning process and propose approaches to tackle them. The result of this work is the <;e-Adventure> platform, an educational game authoring tool that aims to make of video games just another educational tool at the disposal of the instructors. In this paper we describe how <;e-Adventure> contributes to the integration of games in the learning process through three main focuses: reduction of the high development costs of educational games, involvement of instructors in the development process to enhance the educational value, and the production of the games using a white-box model. In addition we describe the current research that we are conducting using the platform as a test-bed.