The premise of this paper is that serious games (video games that are developed specifically for educational purposes) can be used for collaborative learning. This seems like a fairly obvious assertion that needs further exploration, since many video games involve multiple players collaborating to satisfy quests or achieve goals. Unfortunately, the paper is a cobbled together collection of loosely related ideas that leaves the reader unsure what, if anything, it contributes to the discussion.

The authors lay out the purpose of the paper in the introduction: “In this paper, we describe an approach for collaborative multiplayer serious games, which enable game-based collaborative learning.” The paper documents the design and development of a 3D game in which users engage in collaborative tasks and are scored on their successes. This achievement is interesting and worthy of note, but it is software design and development as opposed to research. The problem comes when trying to frame this endeavor as research. A solid literature review would have provided some conceptual motivation, and some sort of measurement would enable the reader to assess the results. This is where the paper gets wobbly. The literature review feels gratuitous. It is unclear how the various references informed the design of the game. It feels, from the paper, like the game was designed and then the literature review was compiled as an afterthought. The measurement at the end feels like a misfit as well. The players were given surveys to fill out describing their reactions to the user interface and the game design. It is unclear in both cases how this information relates to questions of collaborative learning. In addition, while these other distractions were explored, little was said about the mechanics of the task and game design, which really was the central issue of the paper.

The paper may still be of interest to those who are doing research in the area of using serious games to study collaborative learning, or other researchers of serious games. However, due to the awkward conceptual construction, the range of potential readers will be limited.