Experience, Experiment, Evaluate: A Framework For Assessing Experiential Games

The design of effective educational games has proven to be challenging for many years, leading to sparse and somewhat inconsistent insight into the principles governing such systems. While attempts at constructing frameworks for educational games certainly exist, their nature is often quite general (limiting the practical utility) or noticeably specific (limiting the scope of projects to which that framework might be applied). We present a design framework for a broad, but well-defined genre known as experiential games. We have named our framework the Experience, Experiment, Evaluate (EEE) framework and believe it to be an adequate lens to analyze such games. This article presents the EEE framework in detail and provides example analyses of three games (a U. S. Civil War history game, a medical diagnosis game, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of TimeTM). We present results from one game that predicted pedagogical success through learning gains by adhering to the framework, and are able to use the framework to explain an increased effectiveness in a design change of the other game. In particular, the medical diagnosis game, Rashi, is shown to elicit higher quantity and quality of student responses when features were added that more tightly bound the game to our framework. Additionally, we provide evidence that activities within our U. S. Civil War game, 'A Nation Divided', are more successful in providing learning gains to students when those activities more carefully apply the ideas within our framework. We do not present any empirical results regarding Ocarina of TimeTM, but include it as an anecdotal example of how commercial games have applied these principles successfully to teach mechanics of games to players, and argue that this is, in many ways, an exercise in pedagogy. We conclude by offering suggestions for strategically incorporating elements of our framework in the development and design of future systems and express the applicability of our framework to both experiential and nonexperiential games.