Mapping between Pedagogical Design Strategies and Serious Game Narratives

Successful serious games include a compelling narrative context and empirically validated pedagogical intervention methods. In order to create such games, design teams must consist of a multidisciplinary group of technical and pedagogical experts. In this paper, the authors show how the domain specific modeling language ATTAC-L facilitates communication between designers with different expertise, thus enabling and stimulating multidisciplinary collaboration. As a serious game design tool, ATTAC-L creates a link between the processes of pedagogical design and narrative modeling through its elaborate annotation system. As such, this modeling language enables designers to concentrate on aspects related to their field of expertise without losing oversight of the serious game as a whole. To support these tentative claims, the author present illustrations of how ATTAC-L is used in combination with a specific pedagogical design strategy (i.e. the Intervention Mapping Protocol) for the development of a serious game against cyber-bullying.