Group items tagged

towards a game tutorial to "adapts to the skill of the player and tailors itself to the individual player"

Abstract: "Reality-based interfaces bring new design opportunities to social games. These novel game interfaces, exemplified by Wii, Kinect, and Smart phones, leverage players' existing physics, bodily, environmental, and social skills. Moreover, they enable a shared hybrid physical-digital space in which the players' co-presence can be enhanced by their physical and digital co-location. However, many digital social games occupy players' attention with the digital display and content, reducing their attention spent on one another and limiting the synchronization of actions and emotions among players. How do we design technologies that do not interfere with social play but enhance and innovate it? In this thesis work, I focus on one particular kind of reality-based interfaces, Handheld Augmented Reality (HAR), to extend players' interaction from the small mobile devices to the shared hybrid space around a computationally trackable surface. This thesis explores how to encourage social play with HAR interfaces, which brings in challenges of designing with the affordances and constraints of the HAR interface, understanding the complicated phenomenon of social play, and integrating these understandings in multiplayer HAR game design. Adopting Research-through Design as the overarching research method, I collaborate with multiple teams, design and study three multiplayer HAR game prototypes. I present four main contributions. First, this work yields design artifacts and examples of social games with HAR interfaces. I communicate to the game design and Augmented Reality communities through these prototypes, including BragFish, ARt of Defense, and NerdHerder. Second, I provide empirical findings on social play in a shared hybrid space. Through lab-based user studies, observation, video analysis, interviews, and surveys, I collect and analyze interpersonal play behaviors and emotions in the shared hybrid space enabled by the HAR interface. Third, I adopt and adapt sociologic

"Millions flock to their computers, consoles, mobile phones, tablets, and social networks each day to play World of Warcraft, Farmville, Scrabble, and countless other games, generating billions in sales each year. The careful and skillful construction of these games is built on decades of research into human motivation and psychology: A well-designed game goes right to the motivational heart of the human psyche. In For the Win, authors Kevin Werbach and Dan Hunter argue persuasively that gamemakers need not be the only ones benefiting from game design. Werbach and Hunter are lawyers and World of Warcraft players who created the world's first course on gamification at the Wharton School. In their book, they reveal how game thinking?addressing problems like a game designer?can motivate employees and customers and create engaging experiences that can transform your business. For the Win reveals how a wide range of companies are successfully using game thinking. It also offers an explanation of when gamifying makes the most sense and a 6-step framework for using games for marketing, productivity enhancement, innovation, employee motivation, customer engagement, and more."

Value of computer game design and serious games courses for all computer students

"Show the world your word sleuthing skills!" "HTML5 real time word game"

Introduces the Game Book concept as used by an 11 year old to work with ideas for games that aren't yet made and also to develop creativity skills analogous to graduate attributes, useful in university and beyond.

"Games offer a compelling medium for learning. However, designing a successful learning game that features engagement alongside its educational objectives is a craft that is still underway. Our research adapts a user-centered approach toward designing a game that will teach children conflict resolution skills. By involving users of the game, namely teachers and students, in the design process we reveal new considerations for how to create convincing narratives of conflict, sustain children's engagement and gain teachers' support. At the same time, our work highlights the challenges facing researchers in this domain who must balance users' values, needs and expectations with the game's learning objectives."

"Abstract The use of simulations and digital games in learning and assessment is expected to increase over the next several years. Although there is much theoretical support for the benefits of digital games in learning and education, there is mixed empirical support. This research report provides an overview of the theoretical and empirical evidence behind five key claims about the use of digital games in education. The claims are that digital games (1) are built on sound learning principles, (2) provide more engagement for the learner, (3) provide personalized learning opportunities, (4) teach 21st century skills, and (5) provide an environment for authentic and relevant assessment. The evidence for each claim is presented and directions for future research are discussed."

June 28, 2012 - A new video game design lab will research and develop compelling video games that engage students in innovative ways and validate student learning of the core skills deemed critical by states for college and the 21st century workplace.

Abstract: "To improve musical auditory habilitation for children post cochlear im- plantation, we developed MOGAT: MObile Games with Au- ditory Training. The system includes three musical games built with o-the-shelf mobile devices to train their pitch perception and intonation skills respectively, and a cloud- based web service which allows music therapists to monitor and design individual training for children. The design of the games and web service was informed by a pilot survey (N=60 children). To ensure widespread use with low-cost mobile devices, we minimized the computation load while retaining highly accurate audio analysis. A 6-week user study (N=15 children) showed that the music habilitation with MOGAT was intuitive, enjoyable and motivating. It has improved most children's pitch discrimination and production, and several children's improvement was statistically signicant (p < 0:05)."

Abstract: "The video game industry is a billion dollar industry with an ever-growing fan base. Massachusetts, along with other states, has begun to take an interest in further developing this dynamic industry. A problem facing many policy makers and economic developers is accurately defining the video game industry, determining the types of workers that form of human capital within its workforce and where these businesses are located. This study helps to solve this problem by converting video game credits, found in all video games, into Standard Occupational Codes to identify the types of workers who comprise the industry and by conducting spatial analysis using Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS). It also uses the Occupational Information Network to evaluate what forms of human capital comprises the video game industry. The results show the video game workforce comprises both creative workers such as artists and musicians, but also computer programmers, engineers, and business management and marketing professionals. This workforce tends to be concentrated not only in larger U.S. metropolitan areas but also in regions with a significant high-technology workforce, college towns, and government laboratories. Also, as this diverse workforce contains a wide variety of skills and abilities, a common theme is being able to work together as a team to develop a product. This study is part of a growing body of research and initiatives to identify and to locate new, creative industries within metropolitan regions. This research will contribute to future research using occupational analysis to identify new and growing industries."

From the abstract: "This paper presents a design project of a computer game for integration in multisensory stimulation environments, to be played by children with intellectual disability. The LED-ME prototype is based on accessible technological solutions and dispenses the manipulation of peripheral devices resorting to Camspace® software. The different stages of the project are presented, from the design problem, to the definition of design guidelines, the pilot test and discussion of results. The LED-ME game is suitable for use in multisensory environments, enabling moments of play that require basic cognitive and motor skills."

Ongoing study funded by National Institute of Child Health and Human Development involving some 300 minority youths ages 9 t0 14 based on research that skills learned in video game play will translate into real life personal health management

Electronic Arts Inc. and NCAA Football announced that Richard Mancuso and Clint Oldenburg will join the EA Sports NCAA Football development team as a part of the inaugural EA Sports NCAA Football fellowship, a sixteen-week full-time, paid opportunity for former football student-athletes to apply their skills and knowledge of the sport to the development of the NCAA Football videogame.

"Without achieving a clear understanding of the learning domain, it is difficult to develop a successful serious game that enables users to achieve the desired learning outcomes. Thus, the first step in serious game design is to establish an understanding of the particular learning domain, usually through consultation with domain experts. Whilst game design is inherently a creative process, we believe the capturing of the knowledge domain can be systematised and we present a structured approach to knowledge elicitation and representation as a basis for serious game design. We have adapted and extended the applied cognitive task analysis (ACTA) method and have combined it with additional knowledge representation frameworks. We explain how the outputs of this approach can inform the game mechanic and the development of non-player characters, and apply it to the design of a serious game aimed at reducing time-tocompetence in soft project management skills for professionals working in corporate environments. A total of 26 domain experts from five different countries were involved in a two-stage interview process. The interviews yielded more than 300 task elements, and information about the cognition underlying the more challenging tasks. This data was incorporated into several representation frameworks and used to indicate features to be implemented in the game and the game mechanics of the supported features."

"a method for the automatic generation of virtual players that adapt to the player skills; this is done by building initially a model of the player behavior in real time during the game, and further evolving the virtual player via this model in-between two games."

"In cross-functional teams, team performance depends on how skillfully function managers carry out the cross-function coordination of team members' complementary expertise and activities. In this paper, we argue (i) that function managers' coordination skills develop in part through the coordination experience gained from interacting with managers from other function, (ii) that coordination experience has general and firm-specific dimensions, and (iii) that coordination experience leads to better team performance. Using data on development teams in the electronic games industry, we show that coordination experience and its general and firm-specific components have a positive impact on the commercial success of electronic games, and that this effect is robust to tests for omitted variables and reverse causality. Our results have implications for the theory of learning and coordination in teams and for the practice of team design in project-based organizations."

From the introduction: "This paper describes why and how an introductory video game design course was conceived and implemented, the best practices developed, and lessons learned since its first implementation in spring 2009. Introduction to Video Game Design was conceived at Johns Hopkins University as a creative, design-based course in which undergraduates work in collaborative, interdisciplinary teams on authentic projects. Students gained a broad knowledge of the gaming industry, along with practical development skills, through regular lecture-discussion sessions coordinated with weekly labs. The interdisciplinary student teams were mentored by industry professionals and worked throughout the semester to produce video games. The course development team faced a variety of challenges stemming from the inter-institutional, inter-departmental collaboration. The authors hope the case study described and evaluation data shared can help other schools planning to implement design-based courses, whether it is based on video game design or not."

"Given the accessibility of games, Fiellin and other Yale researchers see them as an ideal way to teach kids the skills they need to prevent HIV infection. The project is being funded by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars program at Yale."