Education has become a crucial issue worldwide, and techniques and technologies are constantly proposed for its expansion and promotion. Gamification and serious games are gaining acclaim as viable solutions for enhancing educational processes. Gamification refers to the use of game design elements in non-game contexts, such as teaching enterprise processes. Serious games are interactive computer applications that use a challenging and amusing context to transfer a practical skill, knowledge or attitude to its users. Using gamification and serious games in a business process context has many potential applications, as it helps understand and analyze business processes in order to facilitate daily organizational activities, or to improve and reengineer the processes involved.
Existing methods for developing ordinary games are not effective enough for developing serious games, as the main challenge in designing and developing serious games is achieving the right balance between game design and educational design in the given context. Inappropriate educational design, or insufficient attention to the specific considerations of the target context, can result in project failure. Serious game development is a relatively young discipline, and its supporting tools (methodologies, frameworks, and development engines) are not mature enough. The Model-Driven Development (MDD) approach has recently been suggested for serious game development, especially since it raises the degree of automation. However, existing model-driven game development methodologies fail to meet the minimum requirements; to name just one important shortcoming, existing methodologies are deficient as to proper definition of modeling levels and their associated model transformation rules. Furthermore, there is no model-driven methodology for serious game development in the context of business processes.
The goal of this project is to propose a model-driven methodology for serious game development in the context of business processes; the methodology should provide precise definitions for the modeling levels and their corresponding model transformation rules. To this aim, existing methodologies for developing ordinary and serious games will be investigated and evaluated. Next, the target model-driven methodology will be defined so as to address the shortcomings of existing methodologies. The proposed methodology will then be evaluated according to specific methodology-evaluation criteria; in addition, in order to empirically validate the proposed methodology, it will be applied to a small-scale serious game development project in a real organization.