FDG

Crowdsourcing games involving image labeling tasks are commonly digital, played online, and have rules set by designers. In this work we explore the potential of tabletop image labeling games, incorporating physical elements, in-person community-based gameplay, and support for customizable rules. We developed an augmented reality game toolkit called Tile-o-Scope AR and conducted two studies. The first study demonstrates how the toolkit can facilitate in-person discussions through collaborative image labeling, and the toolkit’s potential adaptability to other games and applications. The second study, using three different activities designed for the toolkit, demonstrates the toolkit’s flexibility for creating customized experiences for audiences of different backgrounds.

To recognize satire, the audience must be aware of the context and the satirical intent of the work in question. Academic research on the possibilities and effects of satire in games is minimal, if compared with other rhetorical uses of playful interaction. This paper contributes to our understanding of satire in games by discussing and annotating design decisions that were meant to be taken satirically. More specifically, the focus of this paper is Construction BOOM!, a tile-laying boardgame designed by the some of the authors of the paper (Gualeni and Schellekens) themselves with the overt intention of satirizing the current situation of real-estate development in Malta. Part of our contribution consists in leveraging the notion of the ’implied designer’ as articulated by Van de Mosselaer and Gualeni to show how game elements participate in the player’s inferring a satiric implied designer for the game. The paper highlights the opportunities available for designers to implement satire into the various elements of a game and opens the door to further research into exploring how much these elements influence the perception of satire by players.

When evaluating the effectiveness of gamified app experiences in cultural heritage venues in terms of informal learning outcomes, a core challenge is the complexity involved in assessing intangible measures such as visitors’ appraisal of artwork. A comprehensive summary of the literature for conducting museum visitor evaluations is needed in order to understand how to measure the impact of gamification on user engagement, and the enhancement of the cultural heritage experience on learning. This paper first reviews related literature regarding the application of intrusive versus nonintrusive user evaluation methods, focusing on the REMIND protocol for conducting experiments with museum visitors. We relay our findings when applying the REMIND protocol in four gamified cultural heritage applications in the CrossCult project. Focusing on the assessment of informal learning in an application specifically designed for the visitors of the National Gallery of London, the paper concludes with recommendations, challenges, and future steps in evaluating games for cultural heritage.

In this paper, we study the effect of time pressure on player behaviour during a dilemma-based crisis management game. We employ in-game action tracking, physiological sensor data and selfreporting in order to create multi-modal predictive models of player stress responses during a crisis management scenario. We were able to predict the experimental condition (time pressure vs. no time pressure) with 84.5% accuracy, using a game-only feature set. However, lower accuracy was observed when physiological sensor data was used for the same task. The method presented in this paper can be employed in crisis management training, aiming at assessing players’ responses to stressful conditions and manipulating player stress levels to provide personalised training scenarios.

The persuasive potential of games and their use in political propaganda and raising social awareness are well-established components of the game studies discourse, and the literature around persuasive games highlights satire among the expressive tones of several games. Despite this, what persuasive games’ literature still lacks is a complete and stand-alone defining account of satire in games, which could be useful in analyzing both analog and digital games used for satirical purposes. Our intention with this paper is to frame satire within the field of game studies through notions and perspectives borrowed from other media studies and narratology. In that pursuit, we initially give an operational definition of satire focusing on concepts such as entertainment, critique, and rhetoric. Subsequently, we explore how this definition relates to, and interacts with, key concepts in game studies, such as procedural rhetoric, and the implied designer.

Reflection is a critical aspect of the learning process. However, educational games tend to focus on supporting learning concepts rather than supporting reflection. While reflection occurs in educational games, the educational game design and research community can benefit from more knowledge of how to facilitate player reflection through game design. In this paper, we examine educational programming games and analyze how reflection is currently supported. We find that current approaches prioritize accuracy over the individual learning process and often only support reflection post-gameplay. Our analysis identifies common reflective features, and we develop a set of open areas for future work. We discuss these promising directions towards engaging the community in developing more mechanics for reflection in educational games.

Interactive narratives are widely used to frame and contextualize education in games. However, the specifics of how their designs aid the learning process and outcomes remains relatively unexplored. To better understand this space, a study was conducted that focused on one sub-genre of interactive narrative, Visual Novels. Specifically, in this paper we conducted a survey of thirty-one existing educational Visual Novels, analyzing design elements that fostered learning and delivered educational content. The resulting taxonomy consists of five key dimensions for educational design and teaching strategies within Visual Novels: 1) Teaching Through Choice, 2) Teaching Through Scripted Sequences, 3) Teaching Through Mini-games, 4) Teaching Through Exploration and 5) Non-interactive Teaching. These dimensions demonstrate that there are a number of design considerations for supporting learning through Visual Novels. This work has implications for designers of educational games by classifying the different designs a Visual Novel can employ to teach—ultimately informing how to better present educational subject matter in interactive narrative games.

Game design is emerging in contemporary education, especially in constructionist curricula for student-centered and discovery learning. While previous work focused on assessing how complementary skills (e.g., computational thinking) develop through game design, few have attempted to assess the very games designed by students. Here, we show preliminary results on using the Triadic Game Design (TGD)model to assess the elements that may constitute a "balanced" student-designed game in the context of constructionist learning. Our results show that TGD is viable to carry out such assessment. We conclude by discussing the limitations of our approach and propose directions for future work.

Videogames and learning/training applications that address racial discrimination have risen in popularity recently, coinciding with the rapid development of the field of serious (or impact) games. While there has been much focus on understanding the efficacy of these systems as interventions to reduce racial bias, there has been less attention paid to how individuals’ prior physical-world racial attitudes influence their experiences of such games about racial issues. Toward addressing this gap, the study presented here examines the relationships between PreK-12 educators’ colorblind racial attitudes and their game experience and narrative interpretations in narrative videogame modeling racial and ethnic socialization called Passage Home. Passage Home embeds a novel computational model and simulation informed by the Racial Encounter Coping Appraisal and Socialization Theory (RECAST) to simulate a discriminatory racial encounter in a classroom setting. The system serves as a tool for assessing players’ racial and ethnic socialization (RES) experiences to support interventions for learning about racial bias. This paper presents the results of a user study deploying Passage Home with PreK-12 educators. Analysis revealed that players’ colorblind racial attitudes and ethnic identity were related to their in-game racial appraisal and feelings of competence, negative affect, and empathy in the game. Given the prevalence of colorblind racial ideology across racial and ethnic groups in the United States, we propose an initial typology of players’ colorblind racial attitudes emerging from this analysis to aid in the future development of serious game interventions addressing racial discrimination.