Designing for learning or designing for fun? Setting usability guidelines for mobile educational games

While this paper looks at the definitions of heuristics and usability as they apply to digital games, its primary focus is expanding the usability dialog into the arena of mobile educational games. Recent discussions of game heuristics have made some useful connections between work completed in the area of heuristics and game design theory. This paper expands the usability dialogue, beginning where these discussions have left off, and draws on interviews with educational game developers, game design theory, and game analyses to put forward design principles intended to be useful for the development and evaluation of mobile educational games.