Adventure Games Design: Insight and Sense-making

Clara Fernandez Vara and Scot Osterweil

Abstract

This paper aims at understanding how adventure games can support educational goals by understanding the foundations of their design, and what how inherent properties lend themselves to specific types of learning. The potential of adventure games as educational tools has been repeatedly discussed from the standpoint of education (Cavallari et al., 1992), usually focusing on the narrative framing that adventure games provide (Dickey, 2006), but not on their specific design conventions. Understanding adventure games entails understanding how their design helps the player learn.