TechTrends has a good piece on virtual gaming and instructional design (Atusi Hirumi, Bob Appelman, Lloyd Rieber, and Richard Van Eck). It’s a great and timely article, but one of the more interesting sections is when they get to the design section. With the ADDIE model as their general framework, they bifurcate the design phase where the game designers work on things like side quests, obstacles, challenges, and puzzles and the instructional designers focus on developing Learning Task Maps that specify enabling and prerequisite skills needed to achieve the overall goal.
They move on to discuss how the relationship between goals and objectives can be more fluid than with many traditional design projects because game designers may want to develop a challenge that is directly related to the goal.