Virtual university as a role playing game

Research and development in design of games for education focus on understanding better what features of games can be inherited to further motivate students and simultaneously improve learning outcomes. Since, a common design standard is not available for educational games solutions are usually carried out by an ad hoc process. In this paper, a novel approach to design this kind of games is presented taking into consideration key features of the most successful massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG). The proposed design incorporates fun and learning through the key ingredients of MMORPGs that make them `addictive´ keeping the players constantly motivated. Our main contribution is to suggest design issues that should be taken into consideration when designing educational games.