The Principal Characteristics of a Serious Game to Ensure Its Effective Design

This study addresses a persistent gap in serious game research: the absence of consensus on which characteristics are essential to a serious game (SG) across education, health, and business. Its central contribution is a consolidated set of 12 generic Common Serious Game Characteristics (CSGCs) intended to function as a shared vocabulary and as criteria for specifying, classifying, and evaluating serious games regardless of domain. The authors derive these from a structured literature review covering 2010 to 2019, drawing on ten databases and a three-stage pre-selection process that narrowed 64 papers to 14 studies examining 286 characteristics.

The review revealed substantial redundancy and inconsistency across prior work, with no agreement on either the number of characteristics or their categories. Synthesizing these findings, the authors identify 12 CSGCs: Adaptability, Assessment, Enjoyment, Gameplay, Activity, Environment, Interactivity, Collaboration, Game purpose, Application area, Target audience, and Technical features. Together these categories encompass 170 of the 286 surveyed characteristics. The list is validated against earlier classification studies, including research reporting high prevalence of adaptability and progress monitoring in health-oriented serious games.

The scope is deliberately broad, spanning three application domains over a single decade, though the authors acknowledge limitations arising from search terms, journal selection, and the chosen time period. A notable limitation is conceptual overlap: features such as Adaptation, Challenge, and Game complexity are closely interrelated and proved difficult to separate cleanly. The authors position the CSGC framework as a foundation for designers, domain experts, and developers, and call for future empirical work testing its utility within the actual game design process.