Activity Theory-based Model of Serious Games (ATMSG)
What is this ATMSG model about?
The main idea of the ATMSG model is to support a systematic and detailed representation of educational serious games, depicting how the combination of serious games elements supports pedagogical goals.
As the name indicates, the model uses activity theory as underlying theoretical framework. Activity theory is a line of research initiated in the 1920s and 1930s by a group of Russian psychologists. It studies different forms of human practices and development processes, providing a model of humans in their social and organizational context 1.
Activity theory provides us with a way to reason about the relationships between serious games components and the educational goals of the game, considering the game as part of a complex system that involves at least three activities: the gaming activity, the learning activity and the instructional activity.
The figure below illustrates the model.
The hierarchical structure of the activity also gives us the ability to change the focus of the analysis to different levels of detail. In ATMSG, each activity is broken down into a sequence of actions mediated by tools with specific goals. Each of these items is called “serious games components”, that is, the “concrete” pieces of a serious game that compose the game play over time, e.g. characters, tokens, tips, help messages, etc.
A unified taxonomy of serious games components
We used the ATMSG model described above to reorganize existing taxonomies of learning, instruction, games and serious games (such as the game Ontology Project, Learning mechanics — Game Mechanics (LM-GM), GOM II, Bloom’s taxonomy, Gagné’s Nine Events of Instruction, ARCS Model of Motivational Design), into a unified vocabulary. The taxonomy is organized in a tree structure in which items are classified according to the activity to which they belong, and, within the activity, categorized as actions, tools or goals. It aims to aid in the identification and classification of components according to their characteristics and roles in the game.
You can check the full taxonomy in the original article (or in the author’s version of the article).
Source [1]
