Situated Psychological Agents: A Methodology for Educational Games

Featured Application The present paper introduces a methodology based on situated psychological agents that can be fruitfully applied to design and implement educational games, as it permits to represent the flows inside the game on the educational, psychological, and pedagogical level while detailing agents' features at a psychological level. Abstract In recent years, the ever-increasing need for valid and effective training to acquire competences in multiform contexts has led to a wide diffusion of educational games (EG). In spite of their diffusion, there is still a need to reflect on the design process that should embed the games' pedagogical potential and the instructional process in the entertainment scope. Moreover, as building EG, especially in digital environments, is an enterprise that involves specialists with different expertise, it can be useful to have a shared methodology that is easily understandable and usable by many users. In this paper, we propose to use situated psychological agents (SPA) as a methodology to design and build effective EG and show how to represent games in terms of SPA and their interactions by diagrams and describe different examples of how this approach has been applied.