Pervasive Serious Game for Exam Preparation: Exploring the Motivational Effects of Game Narratives

German students have a high level of stress due to exam anxiety and performance requirements. Serious games can help improve students’ well-being and performance. The principle of pervasive games also brings many opportunities. Regarding the design of such games, there is still no consensus on which game design elements bring positive effects in which contexts. In this paper, we present a new pervasive serious game for exam preparation. The game design was adapted to investigate the relationship between motivation and game narrative. A pilot study’s results show that the presence of a game narrative did not affect the subjects’ motivation. However, the thematic relationship between the game narrative and learning content seemed to be important for the subjects’ motivation. Overall, most of the subjects enjoyed the game and could imagine preparing for exams with such games in the future.