How to link educational purposes and immersive video games development?An ontological approach proposal

Résumé En

Video games offer a interesting approach for enhancingeducational experiences across various domains. Whetherrepurposing existing games, such as Sim City for teaching budgetmanagement, or developing dedicated serious games, they enrichthe spectrum of educational resources available.Nevertheless, creating immersive gaming and learningenvironments presents challenges. The absence of consensus oncomprehensive tools or models poses an initial hurdle.Furthermore, designing such experiences entails intricateconsiderations, including multidisciplinary collaboration and theinherent complexity of open nature of learning experiences.Our proposed ontology addresses these challenges by integratingconcepts from education, immersive game design, and virtualenvironments. This integration facilitates the alignment oflearning objectives with game-design elements, leveraging themulti-agent systems paradigm for coherence.Serving as a semantic hub, our ontology enhancescommunication among interdisciplinary teams by employingclearly defined terms. Additionally, it provides a robustconceptual framework to navigate the complexity inherent ineducational game development.We assess the efficacy of our ontology by instantiating it withseveral existing games or game engine. This instantiationvalidates its expressiveness and completeness, while logicalconsistency is confirmed through inference engine verification.Through these efforts, our ontology emerges as a valuable toolfor advancing the design and development of educational videogames.