Serious Games Reloaded

Abstract

Game design is not emotion engineering. The French structuralism's methodology, story-oriented, allows the creation of a minimal structure, fractal, to be developed as IF or a game. Here, in detail, is the making-of two serious game projects. In “Instory,” the narrative is created bottom-up, ruled by the space, an epitome for other cultural heritage works; “PlatoMundi” was prepared top-down, departing from the “Myth of Er,” taking the users through a virtual quest for Justice. At the centre of this structure lies the bifurcation – a place able to support choice or decision proposals. 2D evolves into 3D space-time worlds, and new geographies already invading games. Immersion is fuelled by gadgets and AI to trick the 5 senses. New brain maps alter the relationships between body and mind, and haptic props mismatch AR, MR, and VR places and shapes. DGBL merges with CBTS, useful, but still unreliable. Games cataloguing become sophisticated taxonomies, still without gold standards to tell a good game, or a good story, from a bad one.