Designing Limes Text: Adapting an Educational Video Game into a Text-Based Format for Controlled Experimental Comparisons

The paper addresses a methodological problem in game-based learning research: passive text control conditions, such as PDFs, lack the interactivity and behavioral tracking of educational games, which has weakened the validity of prior comparisons between games and text. To remedy this, the authors develop the Limes Text-app, a Unity-based text version of the educational video game Limes. The application replicates the game's main storyline, optional secondary missions, Codex entries, five-star rating system, and automated tracking of time-on-section, Codex clicks, star achievements, and mission completion, so that text and game conditions are structurally aligned and differ primarily in medium.

The central contribution is a transferable game-to-text adaptation framework that segments educational content into storyline, secondary missions, and Codex entries, each instrumented for behavioral data. Expert testing prompted refinements to linguistic content and scrolling and navigation, and confirmed that interaction data is recorded reliably in MongoDB, although the two applications use differently structured databases that must be reconciled for analysis. The authors are explicit that the paper reports no empirical outcome data on learning, motivation, or the app's effectiveness.

The work is grounded in the literature on serious games, drawing on meta-analyses of cognitive and motivational effects (Wouters et al., 2013; Riopel et al., 2019) and on motivation and gamification theory (Ryan and Deci, 2000; Sailer et al., 2017). Its scope is methodological and design-oriented, centered on the single Limes game and its prior development (Viccari et al., 2024). Consequently, its value lies in providing a validated instrument and procedure for future controlled experiments, with empirical evaluation of the framework explicitly deferred to subsequent research.