The big picture
Accounting for Values in Serious Game Design
Serious games are not neutral technical tools. They are social and ethical products — often compulsory for the learner — that shape outcomes, opportunities and wellbeing. This framework integrates three bodies of work into one practical approach for making the values in your game explicit and accountable.
Three parts, one question
The overarching question is: How do we account for the values embodied in serious games? Each part of the framework answers a different piece of it.
When & where
The Values at Play heuristic
Flanagan & Nissenbaum's three-phase process — Discovery, Implementation and Verification — locates values work at every stage of the development cycle, iteratively rather than once.
What
The fifteen Game Elements
The “Language of Values”: narrative, characters, actions, choice, interaction rules, point of view, hardware, interface, engine, context of play, rewards, strategies, maps and aesthetics — the game's semantic architecture, where values actually take form.
Why
The Six Worlds of Worth
Boltanski & Thévenot's sociology of justification explains why stakeholders value different things, how disputes arise, and how compromises get made — the reflective lens over the whole process.
The journey through the framework
- Open →
Discovery
Locate the values relevant to your project and define them in the game's context.
- Open →
Implementation
Translate values into the fifteen game elements — the heart of design.
- Open →
Verification
Establish the validity of your effort to discover and implement values.
- Open →
Reflection
Step back and ask why: which worlds of worth are driving your decisions?
Why serious games are different
The Values at Play heuristic was written for digital games in general. The research behind this site adapted it for serious games, where four conditions change everything:
- Compulsory use. Learners, trainees and patients often cannot opt out — raising the stakes for fairness, dignity and psychological safety.
- Institutional influence. Curricula, regulators, clients and clinical standards shape value discovery far more than in entertainment games.
- Expectations of evidence. Stakeholders demand proof that games work — while budgets rarely fund it, and incumbent training methods escape the same scrutiny.
- Real-world consequences. These games train medics, drivers and fire wardens; their values have material effects on real people.
The worlds of worth then explain the negotiations all of this produces: