Developing and validating interoperable ontology-driven game-based assessments

Video games have assumed an important place in our daily lives. This has led to an increasing interest on the use of games for non -entertainment purposes, introducing the concept of Serious Games (SGs). In particular, SGs are being explored because of their potential to provide reliable assessments, but also because they can measure competences that would be difficult to measure using traditional forms of assessment. However, one of the key issues is that assessment machinery has to be designed specifically for each game, increasing the time and effort when designing and implementing Game -Based Assessments (GBAs). In this research, we introduce a novel approach to develop interoperable GBAs by: (1) designing and creating an ontology that can standardize the GBA area; (2) conducting a validation study on literature metrics to replicate them and designing novel metrics using data from different SGs; (3) conducting a case study that illustrates how our approach can be used in a real life scenario with real data. Our results confirm that the designed ontology can be used to effectively perform GBAs, along with the metrics replicated and designed in the system. We expect our work to solve the current limitations regarding GBA interoperability, thus allowing the deployment of Game -Based Assessments as a Service (GBAaaS).