4,348 research outputs found

    An Architecture for Designing Content Agnostic Game Mechanics for Educational Burst Games

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    abstract: Currently, educational games are designed with the educational content as the primary factor driving the design of the game. While this may seem to be the optimal approach, this design paradigm causes multiple issues. For one, the games themselves are often not engaging as game design principles were put aside in favor of increasing the educational value of the game. The other issue is that the code base of the game is mostly or completely unusable for any other games as the game mechanics are too strongly connected to the educational content being taught. This means that the mechanics are impossible to reuse in future projects without major revisions, and starting over is often more time and cost efficient. This thesis presents the Content Agnostic Game Engineering (CAGE) model for designing educational games. CAGE is a way to separate the educational content from the game mechanics without compromising the educational value of the game. This is done by designing mechanics that can have multiple educational contents layered on top of them which can be switched out at any time. CAGE allows games to be designed with a game design first approach which allows them to maintain higher engagement levels. In addition, since the mechanics are not tied to the educational content several different educational topics can reuse the same set of mechanics without requiring major revisions to the existing code. Results show that CAGE greatly reduces the amount of code needed to make additional versions of educational games, and speeds up the development process. The CAGE model is also shown to not induce high levels of cognitive load, allowing for more in depth topic work than was attempted in this thesis. However, engagement was low and switching the active content does interrupt the game flow considerably. Altering the difficulty of the game in real time in response to the affective state of the player was not shown to increase engagement. Potential causes of the issues with CAGE games and potential fixes are discussed.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Engineering 201

    Facilitating educational contents of different subjects with context-agnostic educational game: A pilot case study

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    Educational games are increasingly popular and successful in facilitating various subjects and educational topics. Developing the games are often costly as the developers need to develop specific game content to facilitate each different educational content. One solution to the cost problem is the context-agnostic approach, which allows a game to facilitate educational contents of different subjects or educational topics with zero or minimal modifications to its game content. However, researches on the approach are still scarce, including those aimed at examining real-world applications of the approach. This case study was intended to fill the research gap by examining the application of a context-agnostic educational platformer game in a higher education scenario. The game was used to present educational contents of binary number system and ASCII codes, where both are taught in Informatics Engineering Department. The game was context-agnostic because it was able to flexibly assign educational content elements to various objects in its gameplay. Activity Theory-based Model of Serious Games (ATMSG) was used to guide the design of our educational game. The experiment was conducted with the participation of 60 first-year students of Informatics Engineering Department. The results show that the game can facilitate a more fun and engaging class session for the two educational topics without requiring any changes to the game content. The implication of the results and the implementation complexity of the context-agnostic approach are also discussed

    A framework for branched storytelling and matchmaking in multiplayer games

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    Video games often either have good single player campaign modes or good multi-player campaign-less modes. This paper presents a framework aimed at the full game development pipeline, from designers to programmers, to aid in creating multiplayer campaigns by providing components that help singleplayer story modes to be used in multiplayer interaction settings. We also propose a custom matchmaking system capable of matching players so as to intertwine their individual stories. The proposed framework has been validated in a case study. A set of experimental results show that the framework is capable of producing valuable story crossings and proper matchmaking.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

    Playing with Identity. Authors, Narrators, Avatars, and Players in The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide

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    This article offers a comparative analysis of Davey Wreden’s The Stanley Parable (Wreden 2011 / Galactic Cafe 2013) and The Beginner’s Guide (Everything Unlimited Ltd. 2015) in order to explore the interrelation of authors, narrators, avatars, and players as four salient functions in the play with identity that videogames afford. Building on theories of collective and collaborative authorship, of narratives and narrators across media, and of the avatar-player relationship, the article reconstructs the similarities and differences between the way in which The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide position their players in relation to the two games’ avatars, narrators, and (main) author, while also underscoring how both The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide use metareferential strategies to undermine any overly rigid conceptualization of these functions and their interrelation

    Tree of Clarifications: Answering Ambiguous Questions with Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models

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    Questions in open-domain question answering are often ambiguous, allowing multiple interpretations. One approach to handling them is to identify all possible interpretations of the ambiguous question (AQ) and to generate a long-form answer addressing them all, as suggested by Stelmakh et al., (2022). While it provides a comprehensive response without bothering the user for clarification, considering multiple dimensions of ambiguity and gathering corresponding knowledge remains a challenge. To cope with the challenge, we propose a novel framework, Tree of Clarifications (ToC): It recursively constructs a tree of disambiguations for the AQ -- via few-shot prompting leveraging external knowledge -- and uses it to generate a long-form answer. ToC outperforms existing baselines on ASQA in a few-shot setup across the metrics, while surpassing fully-supervised baselines trained on the whole training set in terms of Disambig-F1 and Disambig-ROUGE. Code is available at https://github.com/gankim/tree-of-clarifications.Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 202
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