Understanding relationships between learners and game environment of educational games: Hermeneutic approach

Educational games (EG) have highly influenced the 21st century as a positive learning tool in education industry. This requires a projecting need of understanding the relationships which can enhance the learning objectives for learners and enhance the interactivity of game environment. Although, relationships are vaguely dispersed in literature; understanding the need to interrelate other concepts of game environment with learner's expectations, and how the interaction through the game play is crucial. Therefore, this article briefly highlights the proposed multi-domain framework for game developers to effectively model out the game elements while extracting implicit vaguely supported relationships based on game environment domain and learner's concepts through a systematic literature review. This paper explains on twelve (12) implicit relationships in perspective of game environment domain and learners. They are validated through qualitative interviews with eight (8) game-based learning experts. Subsequently, the results are interpreted in relevancy with all domains of proposed framework by applying interpretive hermeneutic approach. The findings conclude twelve (12) explicit relationships between game environment domain and the learner's relationships; for game developers to guide them through the development phase of EG. © 2017 IEEE.