Building blocks for creating enjoyable games—A systematic literature review

Abstract

Designing serious games that engage lots of players is still a challenge, especially for domains that introduce complex, specialised, and tedious tasks that are difficult to represent in a game in terms of entertainment. Therefore, researchers have investigated ways to motivate players, including enjoyment. Enjoyment is tied to emotional experience and is associated with positive player reactions throughout a gameplay session. However, an inventory with concrete elements (including descriptions and empirical proofs) producing that experience is missing. While researchers have investigated enjoyment and its relationship with game design elements (GDE), the efforts remain dispersed and isolated across different areas. Besides, there is no guideline describing this relationship that assists designers in their creation process. Therefore, this paper presents a systematic literature review to provide a detailed understanding of GDE, player enjoyment, and instruments for evaluation. Additionally, an analysis of two successful cases of Games With a Purpose (GWAP, a subset of serious games) for linguistics is presented to highlight the impact of the GDE and providing relationships with the GDE mentioned in this literature review. We found 33 GDE, from which 28 positively affect player enjoyment, and they can be used as building blocks to design enjoyable GWAP (or other serious games). Further, we create a list of instruments that provide an ample understanding of the constructs of player enjoyment, namely enjoyment, immersion, flow, positive affect, and presence. The listed instruments can give researchers higher confidence as they will allow replication and comparison of studies. These two components are critical in the process of design and evaluation of games. Furthermore, the GWAP analysis shows that effectively the GDE are used in GWAP to enhance interaction and player enjoyment. Finally, conclusions and practical suggestions for future work are given.