Serious games: a new paradigm for education?

This chapter explores the context for the new paradigm of learning emerging in education, in relation to key critical concepts that centre around gamification, immersion, interface and social interactivity. The chapter provides an extensive literature review as part of the context for the paradigm shift, including considering serious games and gamification, and social learning as key constructs for considering the changes to educational practices and infrastructure faced by educationalists and instructors over the coming years. The chapter also provides an historical background section and highlights some of the conceptual work that has been done already to frame the changes, firstly in relation to the notion of ‘gamification’ through the lens of an historical overview of serious games and secondly in a section exploring the need for an overall model for serious game design based upon four models and frameworks developed in past research work including the four dimensional framework, exploratory learning model, multimodal interface architecture model and the game-based learning framework. The chapter aims to set out the key conceptual territory for serious game design and bring together the main theoretical areas under consideration for future development of effective serious game content.