iPlus una metodología centrada en el usuario para el diseño de juegos serios.

Abstract

Following the popularization of personal information technologies, users spend more and more time with entertainment-oriented technologies, such as video games or digital entertainment services. The key to the efficiency, effectiveness and relevance of a Serious Game lies in its ability to respond to user needs. Frequent problems related to the design of Serious Games lie in the distance between the user and the developer, resulting in boring games that do not manage to coherently articulate the pedagogical content with the playful component, or are unproductive because they do not reach the objective. of teaching for which "theoretically" they were created. The systematic review of the literature shows that there are few and incomplete methodologies that guide the design of serious games. Based on the characteristics identified as preeminent, experimental protocols and theoretical developments were formulated until a consensus was reached between experts and users who participated in the creation of more than a dozen Serious Games, used in real educational environments covering a wide spectrum of age groups, people with and without disabilities, interculturality, modalities and educational levels. This application allowed to iterate on the process achieving a validated methodology. As a result, we obtained the iPlus methodology that assigns the importance that each edge deserves in the Serious Games design process. iPlus offers a participatory and flexible approach, centered on the user, through cooperative and collaborative, interdisciplinary and multidimensional work. It is structured in five phases that provide feedback: identification of requirements; pedagogical objectives; playful script of the game; gameplay; and refinement. It is an equipped methodology that guides each phase step by step with the tools, processes, actors, techniques, resources, and artifacts that each one requires for its implementation. It enables integration with other approaches to provide contextualized, pertinent, and assertive responses to user needs, being complementary to any software development methodology that takes user stories as input.