Ravi Purushotma, Steven L. Thorne, and Julian Wheatly had published a white paper, “10 Key Principles for Designing Video Games for Foreign Language Learning“.  Although it’s written with game design in mind, the same principles could easily apply to selecting games for education as well.  Among the key points that are particularly relevant for evaluating games:

• Multiplayer games should allow players to have distinct roles.
• Games should provide some form of tracking for assessment and feedback
• Games should allow player to spend more time in areas of interest
• New concepts should be interspersed with other content and introducted gradually
• Learning content should be task based

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