Tactical combat casualty care: Strategic issues of a serious simulation game development

Serious game techniques permit rapid development of cost effective educational software but face two apparently conflicting objectives: efficiently teaching extremely complex subject matter (such as emergency medical care for a severely wounded, dying casualty) yet enhancing learning motivation by emphasizing game entertainment value. Our development strategy for a battlefield first aid training game for the German Federal Armed Forces resolves this contradiction by relying on separate development teams working in parallel, a pedagogical expert team concentrating on deciding how and in which form the medical principles are to be taught, and a game developer team best able to package that subject-matter in an attractive game with a motivating storyboard and an appealing graphics environment. After an overview of existing battlefield first aid training games and of the essential battlefield first aid procedures to be implemented and simulated, this paper presents concrete elements of our dual-team game development and modeling choices.