Standard video games are applications whose development process often follows a traditional software methodology. Serious Games (SGs) are a tool with an immensely positive impact and great success. SGs enable learning and provide entertainment and self-empowerment, which motivates students. The development of an SG consists of complex processes requiring multi-disciplinary knowledge in multiple domains, including knowing the learning domain and adding the appropriate game mechanics to foster high intrinsic motivation and positive player experience that makes the players feel like they are having fun while learning. Otherwise, the game is viewed as boring and not as a fun and engaging activity. Nevertheless, despite their potential, the application of SGs in education has been limited in terms of pedagogy. Several authors assert that this lack is because SG standards and guidelines have not been developed. There is an imbalance between experts’ contributions to education and game design specialists for the SG development. Not all the SGs that have been developed have applied appropriate design methodologies that incorporate both the entertainment mechanics and the serious component. To ensure that an SG meets the user’s expectations, it must be designed using an appropriate method. This work aims to present iPlus, a methodology for designing SGs based on a participatory, flexible, and user-centered approach. Additionally, this paper analyses several case studies with the iPlus methodology.

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A systematic literature review is a synthesis of the available evidence, in which a review of quantitative and qualitative aspects of primary studies is carried out, to summarize the existing information regarding a particular topic. The researchers extract key criteria from papers collected about their study area, answering research questions and conducting document analysis. Nonetheless, in some cases, these criteria are improperly justified, unknowing their true level of importance in the study subject. Hence, an additional study is necessary to explain the criteria relevance in the papers studied using qualitative and quantitative premises. The correct identification of these key criteria is a critical factor in prioritizing and achieving appropriate results in any scientific research work. In our paper, a new method to determine key criteria from a literature review is proposed, composed of three components: input-process-output. First, the inputs are a set of criteria to evaluate and a set of documents to analyze. Next, the process component examines the document set to indicate whether the criteria to be analyzed are found. The process component produces a Boolean matrix, which is the input of the mathematical logic process that will get the key criteria considered necessary and sufficient as the output component. The iKeyCriteria method has been applied in different computing domains, particularly for serious games design and virtual organizations, giving positive results in each context. Finally, we developed an online tool that provides global support to the execution of our method.