Creating Serious Games at Third Level: Evaluating the Implications of an In-house Approach

Due to the inherently interdisciplinary nature of serious games their developmentnecessitates the effective collaboration of team members spanning multiple disciplines and skill sets (Adams 2010). In their attempts to harness these skills, most higher education projects have formed teams through academic/commercial partnerships, whereby academics and commercial developers combine their respective expertises in subject matter/pedagogy and game design/development. However considering the expertise in most higher education institutions and the recent surge in serious games courses at third level, one might reasonably conclude that higher education holds huge potential for developing serious games in-house. Yet surprisingly, such ventures are relatively few. Thus, while cross-faculty higher education collaborations may hold potential for developing serious games, the implications of such an approach are largely unexplored to date.This paper aims to remediate this gap in the literature by presenting a phenomenological,naturalistic case study of an innovative project based in one higher education institution whichinvolved multiple disciplines in the design and development of a serious game. Using a theoreticalframework for game design comprising the elements of play, pedagogy and fidelity, this paperexamines the impact of an interdisciplinary in-house approach on the design of this serious game, paying particular attention to the balancing of design elements and the impact of disciplinaryperspectives in this regard. As such this study adds a new dimension to established difficultiesinvolved in serious game design by illustrating the significant impact which interdisciplinary team workpractices, and associated disciplinary perspectives, can have on the design process and product