Serious gaming is gaining momentum as a legitimate tool in education, occupational training, physical fitness, military simulations, and many other domains. However, little work has been done to generalize the structure and development of serious gaming applications.
This thesis describes the establishment of object and runtime models that can be used to enable goal-driven collaboration. This idea is explored through simple and rapid conceptualization of serious gaming applications. It begins with a background in serious gaming that includes examples and studies of their effectiveness. Then a description of GeoGame, a GIS-based multiplayer game that is used as a pilot serious gaming application, is provided. Next, the object model and runtime models are described along with the course of their development. Disparate scenarios are specified in terms of these models in order to validate them. An accompanying architecture is described that can be used to implement the models. Next the process of converting GeoGame to adhere to these models is laid out. An analysis of the model-based version of GeoGame describes how it compares to the original purpose-built application in terms of performance and other factors. The broader applications of a serious gaming framework are also explored, along with other future work.