MeWare for Sale: Developer’s Approaches to Serious Mobile Music Games

Abstract

Music students face a highly complex task with a significant cognitive load. Serious games are one teaching tool used to manage this complexity, as they have been found to increase student’s engagement and foster self-regulated, independent learning behaviours. In this paper we examine serious music games on the mobile iOS platform. We particularly focus on how developers approach the creation and publication of these games. To this end, we look at the design and development of serious music games, including their development histories, revenue models, user management models, and data management models. We then frame these characteristics in terms of the type of software the games represent, which indicates how and if users were considered during development. Our findings provide valuable insight into the field of serious music games, in understanding how the current state of the field came to be and how it might evolve in the future.