The Challenges of Designing Learning Games: Interviewing Professional Learning Game Designers

This study examines how professional designers of K-12 learning games manage knowledge across three domains: pedagogical, disciplinary, and game design. Drawing on a 2021 interview study of five experienced designers working at European and US companies, the authors argue that producing effective learning games depends on collaboration among game designers, subject matter experts, and educators. Such collaboration is difficult in practice, since subject experts may struggle to translate their knowledge into a playable format, and teams often disagree about which content to retain and which to discard.

The central findings concern how these domains should be integrated from the outset. Interviewees consistently stressed that actors from all three domains must be involved early and throughout development, a model one participant described as the "trinity of learning games." Learning objectives, they emphasized, must be tightly connected to game mechanics rather than appended afterward, and the school context and teacher's role should be considered from the beginning, with one informant estimating that context accounts for 60% of a serious game's success. From these accounts the authors derive three design principles: a shared language across domains, meaningful links between educational aims and game elements, and deliberate attention to the educational setting.

The study's scope is limited to a small sample of five designers, with interviews conducted during the COVID-19 lockdown and within a European and US industry context. The authors acknowledge that the findings may be shaped by the interviewer's dual role as both researcher and participant in the field, which may bear on how the conclusions should be generalized. The work is grounded in established literature on serious games, game-based learning, and thematic qualitative analysis.