Purposeful by design?

The lack of assessment tools to analyze serious games and insufficient knowledge on their impact on players is a recurring critique in the field of game and media studies, education science and psychology. Although initial empirical studies on serious games usage deliver discussable results, numerous questions remain unacknowledged. In particular, questions regarding the quality of their formal conceptual design in relation to their purpose mostly stay uncharted. In the majority of cases the designers' good intentions justify incoherence and insufficiencies in their design. In addition, serious games are mainly assessed in terms of the quality of their content, not in terms of their intention-based design. This paper argues that analyzing a game's formal conceptual design, its elements, and their relation to each other based on the game's purpose is a constructive first step in assessing serious games. By outlining the background of the Serious Game Design Assessment Framework and exemplifying its use, a constructive structure to examine purpose-based games is introduced. To demonstrate how to assess the formal conceptual design of serious games we applied the SGDA Framework to the online games "Sweatshop" (2011) and "ICED" (2008).