Game Designers' Perspectives: Interception Between Games and Educational Games Design

Mifrah Ahmad's qualitative study examines how game designers distinguish between games and educational games (EGs), a question the author argues has been largely neglected in gaming research despite the persistent difficulty of balancing playability, fun, and learning outcomes. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, NVivo-based thematic analysis, and Dewey's theory of experience within an interpretivist framework, the research centers on the beliefs, decision-making, and lived experiences of designers rather than on the end products of their work.

The study's sample consists of seventeen Australian game designers. Notably, most participants (fourteen of seventeen) did not reference formal game-design definitions or frameworks. Instead, they described games and EGs as overlapping categories shaped by experience and intuition. Across interviews, designers consistently treated fun, challenge, immersion, and realism as essential to all games, while distinguishing EGs through their learning objectives, curriculum constraints, and attention to audience psychology. The authors identify the integration of curriculum requirements with entertainment as the most demanding challenge in EG design, and find that designers remain uncertain about how to balance educational value against fun.

The findings suggest that designers' prior play experiences and intuitive beliefs substantially shape their approach to EGs. The author concludes that EGs, as a subset of games, are more likely to succeed when they retain core game elements, and notes a notable gap between published EG design research and the practices that designers themselves advocate. This divergence points to a need for closer dialogue between academic scholarship and industry practice.

The study's scope is limited in several respects. The original target of forty participants was reduced to seventeen due to the 2020 pandemic, although thematic saturation was reached during analysis. Its geographic focus on the Australian gaming industry means that its generalizability to other markets and contexts is likely constrained.