Designing and Developing a Serious Game to Teach Digital Wellbeing

Abstract

The use of technology in a person's everyday life has become a norm, as most people interact with smartphones, personal computers and the Internet. While the use of these technologies is undoubtedly helpful, if not crucial, to our everyday activities, when interacted with incorrectly it can have detrimental effects. For this reason, research into and campaigns regarding the concept of digital wellbeing have been initiated. This concept deals with ensuring people are engaging with technology in a healthy manner. This study is focused on designing and developing a serious game to educate people on the topic of digital wellbeing. In order to achieve this, a literature study is conducted into the fields of ludology, gamification, pedagogy and human computer interaction as each contributes vitally to ensuring that the serious game is fit for its purpose. Additionally, several other serious games are studied to determine what common design principles are being used, and alongside the other research, a set of design principles is set for the development of this serious game. Furthermore, this study resulted in a serious game which is a digital computer game with education as the aim in this case. The serious game was developed using the Godot game engine and GDscript as the main development tools. The serious game takes the player through three distinct scenarios related to digital wellbeing in which the player collects information and answers a quiz, based on that information. Additionally, an expert review to judge the effectiveness of the serious game was conducted. Experts were instructed to play the game and then answer a questionnaire which included questions distilled from heuristic evaluation models. The feedback from this is mostly positive and overall, the serious game is deemed sufficiently successful; however, there are some issues that can be addressed.