Group items tagged

"This article concerns the design of self-contained digital games for the life-long learning context. Although the potential of games for teaching and learning is undisputed, two main barriers hamper its wide introduction. First, the design of such games tends to be complex, laborious and costly. Second, the requirements for a sensible game do not necessarily coincide with the requirements for effective learning. To solve this problem, we propose a methodology to the design of learning games by using game design patterns and matching these with corresponding learning functions, which is expected to reduce design effort and help determining the right balance between game elements and learning. First empirical results indicate that such a methodology actually can work."

Abstract: "Despite the continuous and abundant growth of the game market the uptake of games in education has been hampered by the general impression that games require complex technologies and that games are difficult to organise and to embed in education curriculums. This paper explores to what extent a simple serious game scenario that can be easily adopted and adapted by individual teachers and that only uses a common, relatively simple technology can leverage the adoption of serious games. It discusses the design of such a game, Argument, based on a Wiki and its use in a 6 weeks trial by students of a Master of Learning Sciences Programme. The results indicate that, even though a Wiki has clear limitations, it is a useful instrument to build game alike educational activities, to gain experience with and as a first step to use (more) complex serious games."

"we implemented eight tutorial designs in three video games of varying complexity and evaluated their effects on player engagement and retention. The results of our multivariate study of over 45,000 players show that the usefulness of tutorials depends greatly on game complexity. Although tutorials increased play time by as much as 29% in the most complex game, they did not significantly improve player engagement in the two simpler games. Our results suggest that investment in tutorials may not be justified for games with mechanics that can be discovered through experimentation."

Abstract: "The rich interaction space of man y educational games presents a challenge for designers and researchers who strive to help players achieve specific learning outcomes. Giving players a large amount of freedom over how they perform a complex game task makes it difficult to anticipate what t hey will do. In order to ad dress this issue designers must ask : what are students do ing in my game? And does it embody what I intended them to learn? To answer these questions, designers need methods to expose the details of student play. We describe our a pproach for automatic extract ion of conceptu al features from logs of student play sessions within an open educational game utilizing a two - dimensional context - free grammar. We demonstrate how these features can be used to clu s- ter student solutions in the e ducational game RumbleBlocks . U s- ing these clusters , we explore the range of solutions and measure how many students use the designers' envisioned solution . Equipped with this information, designers and researchers can focus redesign efforts to areas in the game where discrepancies exist between the designer s' intention s and player experience s."

From the abstract: "This chapter will make a case that games are not necessarily the exclusive domain of game professionals. Rather than enforcing teachers to get acquainted with and use complex, technically demanding games, we will discuss approaches that teachers themselves can use to build games, make use of existing games and even one step beyond use tools or games that can be used by learners to create their own designs, e.g. games or virtual worlds."

Abstract: "When developing serious games the most complex task is the alignment of instructional teaching methods and the game itself. To address this issue, we propose a shared language modeling approach for educational instructors and game developers. The language is based on so called serious game bricks, composites and rules. Combining these pedagogical and story elements allows the domain experts to create serious game patterns. The use of those patterns supports the development of serious games that are both entertaining and present specific educational objectives"

"In this paper we present an ap- proach for serious game development, based on the model-driven game development techniques. Our approach aims at reducing the complexity of game design and implementation by separating the conceptual envi- ronment of the game and its concrete implementation.We rst dene the abstract models that characterize the structure and behavior of the game. Then, with the software architecture model and the platform-specic model, we transform the abstract models into concrete implementations. The resulting prototypes are generated completely (100%)."

"Video game design isn't just coding and random number generators. It is a complex process involving art, music, writing, programming, and caffeine, that should be approached holistically. The entire process can be intimidating to the uninitiated programmer, which is why I've written an all-inclusive guide to game design. With the creation of my own original video game, Super Fish Quest, as a model, I analyze each part of the design process, discuss the technical side of programming, and research how to raise money and publish a game as an independent game developer."

Abstract: "As computational capability continues to increase, the tools available to designers of digital games have become more robust, allowing high fidelity graphics and sound to become common, and resulting in a market saturated with kinetic-based games. However, consumers and educators are eschewing such games for more complex and immersive stories, the creation of which has proven a difficult mountain for designers to climb. A central reason is that story-immersive games rely on dialogue between the player character (PC) and nonplayer characters (NPCs), the writing and coding of which is time consuming and inefficient. This paper documents the author's experiences with complex, branching dialogue systems, and examines the possibility of system automation through natural language processing (NLP)."

Abstract: "With the advent of the increasingly participatory Internet and the growing power of the crowd, "Serious Games" have proven to be a fertile approach for gathering task-specific natural language data at very low cost. In this paper we outline a game we call Doodling, based on the sketch-andconvey metaphor used in the popular board game Pictionary ®2, with the goal of generating useful natural language data. We explore whether such a paradigm can be successfully extended for conveying more complex syntactic and semantic constructs than the words or short phrases typically used in the board game. Through a series of user experiments, we show that this is indeed the case, and that valuable parallel language data may be produced as a byproduct. In addition, we explore extensions to this paradigm along two axes - going online (vs. face-to-face) and going crosslingual. The results in each of the sets of experiments confirm the potential of Doodling game to generate data in large quantities and across languages, and thus provide a new means of developing data sets and technologies for resource- poor languages."

"ABSTRACT The art form of the video game has a very idiosyncratic reliance on the process and practice of its designers. We work with creative and computational problems that form a web of deep complexity. And yet, as I have noticed in my professional practice as a game designer, we do not use tools to support our design process. For more than a decade, designers and researchers have argued for the development and use of both conceptual and concrete tools. To this end, formal and semi-formal game design models have been proposed and, more recently, experimental software-based tools have been developed by the research community. To date, however, none of these tools or models have been adopted into mainstream practice within the game design community. In this paper I argue that it is difficult, if not methodologically flawed, to assess the work in the field of game design support without more qualitative data on how such tools fare in actual game design practice. Evaluation research would be an essential contribution towards answering the question of whether - and if so, how - these experimental formal models and tools can support and improve the game design process."

Abstract: "Scalability, fast response time, and low cost are of utmost importance in designing a successful massively multiplayer online game. The underlying architecture plays an important role in meeting these conditions. Peer-to-peer architectures, due to their distributed and collaborative nature, have low infrastructure costs and can achieve high scalability. They can also achieve fast response times by creating direct connections between players. However, these architectures face many challenges. Distributing a game among peers makes maintaining control over the game more complex. Peer-to-peer architectures also tend to be vulnerable to churn and cheating. Moreover, different genres of games have different requirements that should be met by the underlying architecture, rendering the task of designing a general purpose architecture harder. Many peer-to-peer gaming solutions have been proposed that utilize a range of techniques while using somewhat different and confusing terminologies. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of current peer-to-peer solutions for massively multiplayer games using a uniform terminology"

Abstract: "In our energy-restricted world, planners and engineers have to cope with problems of CO2 emissions and oil- and gas-shortages. Many planning activities not captured under the heading of "futures studies" share common goals like dealing with an uncertain, complex future. We focus on two novel approaches: agent-based modelling and serious games. These approaches, even though they stem from the same general systems theory roots, allow its users to experience "reality" in different ways. This has implications for when and how to use these methods in scanning future developments and how these are communicated."

Abstract: "Game design and development still needs complex technical skills that only some people master. This can be a huge barrier to game creation by end-users limiting the emergence of a participatory culture around games - similar to the one we have seen with Web 2.0. While there have been approaches to lessen that problem, such as level editors and content creation tools, we think we could go further. We propose that considering and developing design interfaces that make use of common natural skills such as drawing could be a key step to achieve that phenomenon. Therefore we describe and present the Playsketch concept, and it's current implementation, a game creation approach based on the Paper Prototyping concept which invites the users to create simple personalized games."

Abstract: "Non-player Characters (NPCs) that accompany the player en- able a single player to participate in team-based experiences, improving immersion and allowing for more complex game- play. In this context, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) teammate should make good combat decisions, supporting the player and optimizing combat resolution. Here we investigate the target selection problem, which consists of picking the op- timal enemy as a target in a modern war game. We look at how the companion's different strategies can influence the outcome of combat, and by analyzing a variety of non-trivial First Person Shooter (FPS) scenarios show that a mathemat- ically simple approach significantly improves over common strategies typically found in games, and can achieve results similar to much more expensive look-up tree approaches. This work has applications in practical game design, show- ing that simple, computationally efficient target selection can make an excellent target selection heuristic"

from the abstract: "recent studies show that in spite of this potential games are often misused and are hard to integrate in the instructional environment. Often it is not clear what a game contributes to a students learning or how it should be used because of a lack of learning objectives and outcomes. (Young et al, 2012, Marino et al, 2011). In this thesis I propose a method that provides and clearly states these learn ing objectives allowing for a better assessment of the contribution it can offer to the existing instructional environment. To do this I combine the widely used design model ADDIE with the instructional design method 10 steps to complex learning by Merriën boer (Merriënboer, 2007). This method is then applied in creating the educational game Moth as a proof - of - concept."

"The evacuation of complex buildings is a challenge under any circumstances. Fire drills are a way of training and validating evacuation plans. However, sometimes these plans are not taken seriously by their participants. It is also difficult to have the financial and time resources required. In this scenario, serious games can be used as a tool for training, planning and evaluating emergency plans. In this paper a prototype of a serious games evacuation simulator is presented. To make the environment as realistic as possible, 3D models were made using Blender and loaded onto Unity3D, a popular game engine. This framework provided us with the appropriate simulation environment. Some experiences were made and results show that this tool has potential for practitioners and planners to use it for training building occupants."

"In this thesis we present the design and evaluation of a learning game based on the concept of 'stealth learning' and the theory of constructivism, which provides an early introduction to basic programming concepts and procedural literacy to children from 10 years upwards, attempting to provide the highest possible degree of immersion. The evaluation involves a number of tests verifying usability, immersion and motivation, and an attempt to test the transferability of the ingame acquired knowledge to reading pseudocode, the results of which, triggered further reflection on the possibility of adding new layers of complexity and embedding evaluation of learning within the game experience."

"The continuous quest for ever increasing fidelity in 3D virtual worlds is running parallel to the emergence and adoption of low-cost technologies to implement such environments. In education and training, complex simulations can now be implemented on standard desktop technologies. However, such tools lack the means to represent multisensory data beyond audio-visual feedback. This paper reports on a study that involved the design, development and implementation of a 3D learning environment for underground mine evacuation. The requirements of the environment are discussed in terms of the sensory information that needs to be conveyed and techniques are described to achieve this using multiple modes of representation, appropriate levels of abstraction and synesthesia to make up for the lack of tactile and olfactory sensory cues. The study found that audio-visual cues that used such techniques were effective in communicating complex sensory information for novice miners."

abstract: "This paper discusses a scenario in which human computation is used to segment timestamped fashion images for mining trends based on visual features of garments (e.g., color and texture) and attributes of portrayed subjects (e.g., gender and age). State-of-the-art algorithms for body part detection and feature extraction can produce low quality results when parts of the body are occluded and when dealing with complex human poses. In such cases, these algorithms could benefit from the assistance of human agents. In order to jointly leverage the potential of crowds and image analysis algorithms, a game with a purpose (GWAP) is proposed, whereby players can help segment images for which specialized algorithms have failed, so as to improve the extraction of color and texture features of garments and their association with the features of the subject wearing them."