study of this kind concerning full fledged, serious games case studies report that a particular game is engaging but without tests of actual knowledge. The field is immature; the research methodologies of longitudinal studies and of assessing advance of key skills developed DGBL are missing and full fledged games that could be subject to these tests, that is, that have been accepted by majority of the class, are scarce(as opposed to general edutainment software) Instead, we attempted to isolate several key features we thought contributed most to the successful acceptance of Europe 2045, to abstract them and to organise them in a theoretical framework that we call the augmented learning environment (ALE). Thus, the second goal of this paper is to present this ALE. Our motivation was twofold: first, we aimed atverbalising one possible way how to design educational games similar to Europe 2045 so that they can be successfully integrated into formal schooling systems and accepted by both by teachers and students. Second, we aimed at developing a scientific hypothesis that can be challenged in future studies on real knowledge acquisition via DGBL