Design guidelines for serious games targeted to people with autism

Abstract

Serious games (SG) have been successfully included in special education to enhance existing teaching methods. In particular, researchers have developed serious games to enhance the acquisition and improvement of social, emotional, practical, and cognitive skills for young children, students, and adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In order to develop successful serious games, it is important to thoroughly plan the design process. Therefore, design decisions and principles need to be determined to fit the requirements of the game solution. In this paper, design guidelines and principles are extracted from existing serious games for people with ASD. These design guidelines and principles are also analyzed in the context of common SG design frameworks. The outcome of the analysis can be used both for informing existing SG design frameworks and as a foundation of a new design framework for SG targeted to people with ASD.