Beats and units framework: a story-game integration framework for the ideation stage of narrative design of serious games

Abstract

There are no recipes or rules to develop games, any more than there are to develop stories. Our aim was to develop a serious game with the goal of promoting discussion and awareness among children around nutrition: FlavourGame. For this purpose, we needed not only to design game mechanics, but also to create a narrative that provided meaning to the game experience, in order to ensure substrate to the context of nutrition. In this paper, we present a framework that serves as a narrative design tool used in the development of this game and which can be employed in the creation of serious story-based games.