# Situated Psychological Agents: A Methodology for Educational Games
## 2 Educational and Serious Games: The Design Process  
Serious games are games that educate, train, and inform, to use the title of the highly cited paper by [PERSON] and [PERSON] [5]. Since the first book by [PERSON] [11], which referred to card and board games, serious games have become digital and have strongly affirmed their educational potentials [12; 13]. This fact forces to critically reflect on this kind of games, as they intervene in the learning process in a way that has not been faced yet in traditional learning theory and typical game theory as well. Many remarkable theoretical frameworks have been proposed, also recently, to satisfy this need. Among these, it is useful to cite the learning mechanics-game mechanics model [14], which draws a set of pre-defined game mechanics and pedagogical elements abstracted from the literature and connects them to identify the main pedagogical and entertainment features of a game. This work highlights the fundamental game mechanics and how they are translated into learning mechanics. Also noteworthy is the activity theory-based model of serious games [15] that provides a useful representation of EG, with game elements, their connections and their contribution to pedagogical goals achievement. These works have the value of trying to answer the question of how the concrete components of the game should be structured to support learning and which elements are crucial to address the design process.  
The design process, indeed, is extremely important in determining EG success.  
The starting point of each designing enterprise is to clarify what is the goal to be reached. In the case of games, the questions are \"What is the goal of the game? What the player can do?\". In the case of entertainment games, some typical objectives are:  
**Erase**: The player must \"eliminate\" the opponent, such as chess and checkers game;  
**Solve**: The player must find a solution to a puzzle or answer a question: Examples are Cluedo or Trivial Pursuit;  
**Chase**: The player runs towards or away from someone or something. One famous example is the video game Super Mario Bros;  
**Build:** The player has to build something: A house, a city, an empire, as in The Sims, Civilization, and Age of Empires.  
On the other hand, if our goal is to build EG, where the educational aspect is crucial, the designers have to specify also \"What is the learning goal of the game? How it can be achieved by actively involving the player?\" In this case, help can come from learning theory. For example, [PERSON]'s updated taxonomy [16; 17], which is commonly used to describe learning goals and includes remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating, can help focalize what the EG aims at leading the player to. After the learning and game objectives are defined, the design must define three fundamental and interconnected levels: The shell level, the core level, and the educational level. It represents a multi-level approach for design, where there are two concentric levels, the shell, and core level and a ubiquitous one, the educational level, also named evaluation and tutoring level [2]. The level interconnections are represented in Figure 1.