What do learning games consist of? How to design learning games and what to keep in mind? How to balance educational objectives with good gameplay? What to do if you are a game designer and you want to use e-learning standards for your game? And what to do if you are an instructional designer and you are in desperate need to gamify your content?This publication aims at illuminating these questions, presenting results from a 4 year long PhD project run at CELSTEC, the Center of Learning Sciences and Technologies at the Open University of The Netherlands.Sebastian Kelle is a multidisciplinary researcher, currently building up a new center for higher education didactics at Stuttgart Media University.