Design Guidelines for Learning Games: The Living Forest Game Design Case

The "Living Forest" design case presents a set of guidelines for building purpose-specific learning games, using a sustainable forest management game developed for a science museum as its worked example. The central argument is that serious games used in formal learning should not rely on commercial off-the-shelf titles but should be engineered around explicit learning goals, faithful representation of real phenomena, and alignment with curriculum competencies in the Physical and Natural Sciences. The game asks players to balance economic, social, and ecological concerns across simulated ten-year cycles spanning generations, a design grounded in Portuguese National Forest Inventory data, expert forestry consultation, and established forest growth models.

The design makes a notable trade-off between temporal compression and fidelity. Decades of forest management are condensed into sessions of fifteen minutes to an hour, with each three-minute day and fifteen-second night representing a decade of simulated time. Playtesting with thirty eighth-grade students found that players with prior gaming literacy quickly grasped goals and cause-and-effect relationships, whereas less experienced players tended to remain at the level of surface exploration within the available time. This finding highlights how player background shapes learning outcomes and how session length must be reconciled with the depth of understanding a game aims to produce.

The authors articulate guidelines emphasizing consistency among a game's underlying model, its representations, its feedback, and the actions available to players, since players construct mental models from play and misleading visualizations lead to incorrect conclusions. They recommend calibrating model complexity to the target audience and usage scenario, delivering feedback at meaningful junctures such as round-based summaries, and embedding learning goals within performance objectives so that success depends on the knowledge being taught. The authors acknowledge, however, that further research is needed to establish how effectively these guidelines translate into measurable learning outcomes.