Serious Games as Creative Tools to Approach Design

The article aims to reflect on the potential of the games in the edu- cational context of university students attending History and Design Criticism courses. The central topic is the Serious Game, understood as digital tools for creative learning: their recent emergence as a branch of video games and a promising educational frontier, has introduced the concept of games designed for a serious purpose other than pure entertainment. The Serious Games are inter- active digital activities that through simulation allow players to make a precise and accurate (even complex) experience. The article encourages the use of the Serious games as a participatory and engaging learning process to implement the active knowledge achieved through simulated experience of the game. Indeed, when used together or combined with conventional training and educational approaches, the Serious games could provide a more powerful means of knowledge transfer in almost all application domains. For this reason, the second objective of the article is to highlight the type of enrichment offered to the student- player by a Serious game: through the sensory gratification and iteration, he can know a topic through a critical action because the use of games stimulates ideas, improves individual sensitivity and collective work, and enhances knowledge skills. Finally, the article proposes some basic elements for the narrative structure of a Serious game dedicated to design, highlighting how the agreement between the invention, understood as “creativity with constraints” and the technical competence, are essential to obtain the experiential potential of the game.