Serious games research shows that games can increase engagement and improve learning outcomes over traditional instruction, but the impact of specific elements of serious games has yet to be fully explored across many contexts. Additionally, many existing intervention studies omit the details of the game design and development theory that informed the creation of the games used in the study. This abandons an important level of context surrounding why the games were successful and does a disservice to the field by not propagating useful design theory.Two issues with existing game design theories are that they do not build fully on top of each other and that they leave out practical guidelines for their use in the design and development processes. This leads to further limiting the spread of useful design theory and limiting its impacts in industry and academia. The work in this thesis carefully outlines the influence of existing game design theory on the design and development of a game project built to study the impact of the narrative element of serious games. Additionally, this thesis builds a new framework aimed at being more comprehensive, easily built on top of, and with clear practical guidelines for its use. The main study in this thesis studies the engagement of students playing a single serious game with a cohesive narrative compared against multiple games without a narrative tying those games together. These two cases covered the same set of learning content and differ only in their narratives. The results suggest that either approach is likely to have the same results on engagement but that there is merit to explore learning outcomes further.This study’s research is supported by design research explaining the design theory behind the games developed for and used in the experiment as well as more specific details of the games’ production. This allows the results to be understood within a larger serious game design and development context that will help inform future work.Additionally, this thesis expands on the lessons learned from the design research and criticisms of existing frameworks to produce the Iterative Game Design and Development framework (IGDD). IGDD provides a broader framework for game design and development with guidelines for its application in practice. The IGDD framework also provides an explanation for how it should be modified and built off of to both allow it to be used across many contexts and to allow future theory building to build collaboratively on top of previous works rather than adjacent to and in assumed competition with other design theory.
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