Phaedra Boinodiris, serious games program manager at IBM, touts the potential of games beyond academia

Honors thesis in philosophy GSU

Application of games to project management tasks to improve emotional intelligence

the creator of JSJoust reviews game studies and literature and offers a concept in contrast to "rule-base" games, "idea of game as alibi - as a culturally-recognized excuse to "act out" and play the fool."

"paper discusses the question of how game designers can keep their games fair when adding collaborative content and rewards. The paper presents findings from World of Warcraft in-game chat transcripts and data gathered through an online survey that was placed online for approximately 9 months during 2010. From the chat transcripts, we find that players sometimes do abuse mechanisms for collaborative content, which displeases the other players involved. We also find that players believe that there needs to be some kind of sanctioning mechanism to players that abuse grouping mechanisms. Finally we present suggestions to game designers on how to create sanctioning mechanisms based on human cooperation research."

applied behavior analysis

"Game-based simulation systems are increasingly being used to train users in several applications across government, in- dustry, and academia. Designing game-based training sys- tems that can measurably improve learning while providing an engaging training experience is a challenging problem. In this paper, we describe a novel framework that tightly inte- grates game-based training systems with instructional com- ponents using data analysis to address this problem. Intelli- gent training systems based on this framework dynamically adapt both the training and the instructional components to measurably improve learning in play sessions. We propose a three phase approach to automatically identify points in a play session to predict high-value future scenarios, validate predictions, and prescribe actions. A case study using the KDD Cup 2010 educational data set is described illustrating the e®ectiveness of the proposed approach."

"Video recordings of 19 play sessions in home environments generated the empirical data. The study comprises 39 players in groups of two or three, aged 10 to 14, as they were playing The Sims or The Sims 2 for one hour. The theoretical tools in the analysis were assembled within a sociocultural perspective on learning and communication, and also by using Vygotsky's ideas on fantasy and creativity and Goffman's ideas on social interaction. ....

"MACHS, a platform for the generation of serious games, i.e. courses in 3D environments for machine-tool training. The platform consists of two applications: an easy-to-use authoring tool for editing the courses and a 3D simulator for running them."

Virtual reality applied to learning experiences

"we look into various research papers that has used computer games as a tool in teaching introductory CS to students. The challenge here now is "how to design a successful CS educational game?" Different research in this area are conducted to discover the factors that make a lovable educational CS game that is easily adapted by new CS students, while being helpful for learning the course related contents."

A patent application describing "display devices visible to a limited number of players," that could even be "worn on the forearm," for strategic games

"This action research study investigated whether the combination of the appreciative learning approach as a pedagogical strategy and computer game development as a technological tool enhances student creativity in terms of the products produced. The study consisted of three phases. Phase I used an experimental design with randomized subjects and a control group to investigate the effectiveness of the combination of appreciative learning and computer game development for creativity enhancement. Phases II and III used a one-group pretest-posttest experimental design for the treatment group only. Subjects of the study consisted of 13 and 14-year-old students. Product creativity was evaluated through the Computer Game Assessment Inventory (COMGAIN). Findings in Phase I indicated that the treatment group produced more creative products than the control group. Improvements in the implementation of the appreciative learning approach and computer game development increased product creativity levels in Phases II and III. Thus, this study provides evidence of the transformational possibilities of the appreciative learning approach when combined with computer game development with regards to student creativity."

Description of a game developed to teach cultural heritage to young Indonesians

"Abstract. While building a game engine in Microsoft XNA 4 that pow- ered a RTS (real-time strategy) tower defense type game, we were faced with the issue of increasing the amount of visual feedback received by the player and adding value to the gameplay by creating a more immersive atmosphere. This is a common goal shared by all games, and with the recent advancements in graphics hardware (namely OpenGL, DirectX and the advent of programmable shaders) it has become a necessity. In this pa- per we will build upon the shadowing techniques known as VSM (variance shadow map) and LVSM (layered variance shadow map) and discuss some of the issues and optimizations we employed in order to add real-time soft shadowing capabilities to our game engine."

Selected contributions from the meeting 11/17-18/11 "field of gamebased learning. This is a refereed scientific conference acting as a forum for scientists, teachers / trainers, and practitioners to present their latest research, results, ideas and developments on games and learning. The focus is on the use of educational games in creative teaching methodologies."

From the abstract: "This paper will examine the relationship of pattern recognition and Gestalt principles to procedural form in gameplay. It will identify key features of pattern based play mechanics and outline important synergies between programming paradigms and procedural form. In the course of the paper I will examine the formal and aesthetic qualities of procedural structures and discuss how they generate the experience of psychological flow. I will also identify the role of these mechanisms and their effects in current game design."

More than 760 US libraries and 27,000 participants

First master's level game design program in NYC area