Evaluation of the game development process of a location-based mobile game

There is a growing interest of government bodies and NGOs in using (serious) video games in awareness campaigns. Until now, however, little was known on how to set up such a campaign so as to effectively cater to the needs of different stakeholders including the target audience. Hence designing, developing and translating a game for educational purposes whilst balancing between fun and learning is a complex process, this paper aims to evaluate this by presenting a methodological framework for involving stakeholders in the design and development of a game-based awareness campaign based on a user-centered software design methodology and assesses its effectiveness in a concrete use case: the development of the location-based mobile game City Jam. The goal was to develop a game-based road safety campaign to confront adolescents with road traffic situations with the aim to positively influence road safety attitude and behavior. Mobile technologies offer new opportunities to embed digital game based learning by in different contexts. Given the nature of the road safety campaign, a location-based game format was chosen, aiming to facilitate learning by means of an extended three-way interaction (human interaction, game and context). Different user-centered design methods were deployed throughout several phases of the game development process: In phase one (the opportunity identification) a literature review was performed to investigate relevant fields for the game’s goal. In phase two (the game concept development) expert interviews and a focus groups were conducted with relevant stakeholders and in phase three (the game concept design) co-design sessions and a focus group resulted in a game design document. In phase four (game development and testing) the beta version of City jam was developed and tested in an iterative field testing design and resulted in the final game. Results obtained throughout the game development process provided us the opportunity to evaluate several major aspects. Firstly the impact of stakeholder involvement on the different phases of the design process and the final product resulted in a game that was tailored to the preferences and needs of the target group. Secondly translating the game concept into practice, such as game elements, proposed educational game elements, were evaluated based on the usability, playability principles and social and technological aspects. Benefits and challenges of user-centered design methods are discussed and how budget constraints and differing desired outcomes of different stakeholders challenge but also enrich the process

The Hackathon Phenomenon

date-added: 2015-03-24 04:16:59 +0000 date-modified: 2015-03-24 04:16:59 +0000date-added: 2015-03-24 04:16:59 +0000 date-modified: 2015-03-24 04:16:59 +000

Digital Innovation: The Hackathon Phenomenon

date-added: 2015-03-24 04:16:59 +0000 date-modified: 2015-03-24 04:16:59 +0000date-added: 2015-03-24 04:16:59 +0000 date-modified: 2015-03-24 04:16:59 +0000This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, CreativeWorks London Hub, grant AH/J005142/1, and the European Regional Development Fund, London Creative and Digital Fusion

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Texas Student Medi

Project:Filter - using applied games to engage secondary schoolchildren with public policy

Applied games present a twenty-first-century method of consuming information for a specific purpose beyond pure entertainment. Objectives such as awareness and engagement are often used as intended outcomes of applied games in alignment with strategic, organizational, or commercial purposes. Applied games were highlighted as an engagement-based outcome to explore noPILLS, a pan-European policy research project which presented policy pointers and suggested methods of interventions for reducing micropollution within the wastewater treatment process. This paper provides an assessment of a video game which was developed for the purpose of public engagement with policy-based research. The video game, Project:Filter, was developed as a means of communicating noPILLS to secondary school children in Scotland as part of a classroom-based activity. Knowledge development and engagement were identified using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to evidence topical awareness, depth of understanding, and suggested methods of intervention. Analysis of observations also provided insights into challenges surrounding logistics, pedagogy, social interactions, learning, and gender as contributing factors to the schoolchildren’s experiences of Project:Filter. The intention of this paper is two-fold: firstly, to provide an example of developing video games from policy-based research; and secondly, to suggest methods of phenomenological assessment for identifying play-based engagement

Tweeting your Destiny: Profiling Users in the Twitter Landscape around an Online Game

Social media has become a major communication channel for communities centered around video games. Consequently, social media offers a rich data source to study online communities and the discussions evolving around games. Towards this end, we explore a large-scale dataset consisting of over 1 million tweets related to the online multiplayer shooter Destiny and spanning a time period of about 14 months using unsupervised clustering and topic modelling. Furthermore, we correlate Twitter activity of over 3,000 players with their playtime. Our results contribute to the understanding of online player communities by identifying distinct player groups with respect to their Twitter characteristics, describing subgroups within the Destiny community, and uncovering broad topics of community interest.Comment: Accepted at IEEE Conference on Games 201

The Official Student Newspaper of UAS

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Designing multiplayer games to facilitate emergent social behaviours online

This paper discusses an exploratory case study of the design of games that facilitate spontaneous social interaction and group behaviours among distributed individuals, based largely on symbolic presence 'state' changes. We present the principles guiding the design of our game environment: presence as a symbolic phenomenon, the importance of good visualization and the potential for spontaneous self-organization among groups of people. Our game environment, comprising a family of multiplayer 'bumper-car' style games, is described, followed by a discussion of lessons learned from observing users of the environment. Finally, we reconsider and extend our design principles in light of our observations

The Official Student Newspaper of UAS

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