A generative game design framework for teaching architectural aesthetics through embodied cognition and rasa theory

Aesthetic understanding of built form — the trained reading of proportion, scale, materiality, and atmosphere — is foundational to architectural competence, yet it is structurally under-taught: instruction is ocularcentric, embodied spatial learning is valued but rarely made explicit, and socio-cultural reasoning is left to studio osmosis. Game-based learning is a promising medium for repairing this, but the field has lacked a design framework fit for the specific cognitive demands of architectural-aesthetic learning. This paper develops one. We first audit twenty serious-games design frameworks in a deliberately non-circular two-step protocol — generic pedagogical adequacy against Bloom’s revised taxonomy, then architectural-aesthetic coverage across three dimensions (visual-perceptual, embodied-spatial, socio-cultural) — and read the audit against a PRISMA-compliant review of 114 game-based-learning studies in architecture (2014–2024). The audit exposes four structural absences: no framework integrates all three dimensions, none is architecturally native, none treats embodiment as a first-order concern, and none engages a non-Western aesthetic theory as a design resource. Using Design Science Research, and triangulating the review, the audit, and four classroom pilots, we derive six design requirements and develop the Architectural Pedagogy Game Framework (APGF): a five-step design methodology (learner analysis → aesthetic-goal definition → mechanic selection → action research → validation), an eighteen-mechanic 3E inventory (Eye, Embodiment, Everyday) grounded in rasa theory and embodied cognition, and a set of dimension-aligned assessment instruments. The framework satisfies internal-coherence and instantiability criteria. Rather than a single artefact, however, it defines a generative space: any combination of target dimension, complexity tier, and platform yields a principled game design. We illustrate this space with a catalogue of twelve worked games spanning the B.Arch. curriculum from first year to thesis — from a card game for stylistic vocabulary to a semester-long studio commission, realised across cards, tactile kits, augmented reality, board games, and virtual reality, and reaching beyond Hindu-temple architecture to Indo-Islamic, colonial, vernacular, Modernist, and urban typologies — and supply a five-template workshop pathway through which an educator generates and tests their own. The APGF thereby offers architectural educators not a fixed intervention but a transferable, platform-agnostic, theoretically grounded generative method, and contributes a decolonial pathway in which Indian aesthetic theory functions as a structural component of pedagogical design rather than as cultural ornament.