About This Guide

This guide is designed to serve two purposes:

1. Provide a conceptual framework to guide game design within multidisciplinary teams in higher education.
2. Share resources and an approach to facilitating a participatory workshop focused on the pre-production phase of the game development process.

The guide consists of two key sections:

1. Introduction to the conceptual framework.
2. Planning, facilitation and resources for a participatory game design workshop.

The materials within this guide are intended to support multidisciplinary teams in or during the pre-production phase of serious game design as they collaborate in a facilitated workshop. It is critical that the workshop facilitators are familiar with the conceptual framework and proposed methodology in order to better support participants as they collaborate in the game design brainstorming and protoyping steps.

You can choose to use the workshop to familiarize your team with the game design process. In this case, a generic game topic is selected prior to the workshop by the facilitators in order to allow non-expert input from participants. Alternatively, you can use the workshop to ideate and brainstorm a topic assigned to the game design team.

The brainstorming demonstration video below, The Art of Serious Game Design, provides an overview of the methodology used in this guide.

Video: The Art of Serious Game Design

© G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education, Ryerson University.
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