Sideffect GamePlan: Development of an alcohol and other drug serious game for high school students using a systematic and iterative user-centred game development framework

Serious games have shown to be effective in improving motivation to learn, knowledge and retention, thus are being increasingly used for alcohol and other drug (AOD) education. This paper outlines the development of an online AOD serious game for in-class use by Australian secondary school teachers for students in Years 9–10. Adapted from Edwards et al. (2018), the seven-step systematic and iterative user-centred development framework included: (1) Forming an expert multidisciplinary design team, (2) Defining the problem and establishing user preferences, (3) Incorporating the evidence base, (4) Serious game design, (5) Incorporating behavioural and psychological theory, (6) Developing a logic model and investigating causal pathways, and (7) User testing. High school students (n = 8), health and physical education teachers (n = 7), and parents (n = 8) were engaged throughout different stages of the development process to inform development and provide feedback on considerations for promoting engagement, acceptability, and usability of the game amongst both students and teachers. Overall, participants rated game acceptability and usability favourably and would recommend the game for learning about AOD. Constructive feedback and suggestions for improvements from user testing sessions were implemented to form the final version of the game and module. The next step is to test Sideffect GamePlan in a simulated classroom environment before piloting in school settings

Foreseeing Meaningful Choices

Abstract A choice positively contributes to a player's sense of agency when it leads to meaningfully different content. We shed light on what a player may consider meaningfully different by developing a formalism for interactive stories in terms of the change in situational content across choices. We hypothesized that a player will feel a higher sense of agency when making a choice if they foresee the available actions lead to meaningfully different states. We experimentally tested our formalism's ability to characterize choices that elicit a higher sense of agency and present evidence that supports our claim. Study participants (n = 88) played a choose-your-ownadventure game and reported a higher sense of agency when faced with choices that differed in situational content over choices that didn't, despite these choices differing in non-situational ways. We contend our findings are a step toward principled approaches to the design of interactive stories that target specific cognitive and affective states

Exploring the potential of using a text-based game to inform simulation models of risky migration decisions

Background: In this paper, we explore the potential of games to collect empirical data for informing agent-based simulation models of migration. To examine the usefulness of game-based approaches, we conducted a simple, yet carefully designed psychological experiment. Methods: In a preregistered study, we used a novel, immersive experimental setting to investigate the risky migration decisions made by migrants and non-migrants. Participants (284 migrants and 284 non-migrants) played a choice-based interactive fiction game—a fully text-based game where players progress by selecting from a list of possible actions—that involved making three risky migration decisions. In one condition, participants were shown a non-linear progress bar and explicit acknowledgements of the choices they made to promote perceived agency: the feeling that one’s actions have a non-trivial impact on the game. In the other condition, the progress bar was linear, and the explicit acknowledgements were omitted. Results: Our experimental manipulation was successful; participants in the former condition self-reported higher perceived agency than participants in the latter condition, as did migrants compared to non-migrants. Nevertheless, condition and migrant status did not meaningfully affect the risky migration decisions participants made in the game. Conclusion: These findings indicate that the results of generic studies on risky migration decisions conducted on non-migrants can potentially inform simulation models of migration. However, these findings were obtained from a single experiment, and thus warrant replication and further research before definitive conclusions can be drawn. Furthermore, a simple text-based game may be too superficial to allow deep insights into the idiosyncrasies of migration decision-making. This suggests a possible trade-off between clear interpretability of the results and the usefulness for informing simulation models of complex social processes, such as migration

Developing the Mechanics of Plusminus: Designing for Emergence and Control in a Physics-Based Game

“Plusminus” is a single-player action-puzzle-adventure game about magnetism, with mechanics developed to promote emergent gameplay. Agency, the ability to make choices, is an important factor in players’ enjoyment of games, and emergent gameplay can facilitate such agency. However, as emergence often arises in unexpected ways, it can also result in players feeling a lack of control and reduced agency. Furthermore, players expect physics in games to act consistently, according to the world around us, but their understanding and expectations of some physical phenomena like magentism may vary and be incomplete. This makes designing mechanics that promote emergence in a physics-based game challenging. In “Plusminus”, we augmented a physics system with magnetism, and gave players meaningful control over it, to promote emergent gameplay and agency. The thesis contributes an approximate model of magnetic forces that ensures stable simulation, game design flexibility, and still conforms well enough to player expectations. More specifically, 1) to enable the player to turn objects into monopole magnets of positive or negative polarity, we simulate Coulomb forces between charged particles and shells, instead of actual magnetic fields. 2) To ensure stable simulation and allow the player to better anticipate simulation behaviour, each magnet has a maximum “field radius” visualised as a transparent bubble, and two magnets only attract or repel each other if their field bubbles intersect. This allows players and level designers to initiate and prevent interactions in a precise manner, and also prevents objects in separate game areas from affecting each other uncontrollably. 3) To ensure that forces produce stable and controllable interactions regardless of scale, the forces are computed such that the maximum possible accelerations produced between two magnets depends only on the mass ratio between them, as opposed to a combination of masses and magnetic charges. This reduces the number of variables that need balancing, making it easier to achieve a stable simulation. The findings improved player controllability while maintaining opportunities for emergence, in a way that matches player expectations of physics

Dynamic theme-based narrative systems

The advent of videogames, and the new forms of expressions they offered, sprouted the possibility of presenting narratives in ways that could capitalize on unique qualities of the media, most notably the agency found in their interactive nature. In spite of many people in the game studies’ field interested in how far said novelty could bring narrative experiences, most approached the creation of narrative systems from a structural approach (especially the classical Aristotelian one), and concurrently, with a bottom-up (characters defining a world) or top-down (world defining characters) perspective. While those more mainstream takes have been greatly progressing what interactive digital narrative can be, this research intended to take a bit of a detour, proposing a functionally similar system that emphasized thematic coherence and responsiveness above all else. Once the theoretical formulation was done, taking into consideration previously similar or tangential systems, a prototype would be developed to make a first step towards validating the proposal, and contribute to building a better understanding of the field’s possibilities

Towards a crowdsourced solution for the authoring bottleneck in interactive narratives

Interactive Storytelling research has produced a wealth of technologies that can be employed to create personalised narrative experiences, in which the audience takes a participating rather than observing role. But so far this technology has not led to the production of large scale playable interactive story experiences that realise the ambitions of the field. One main reason for this state of affairs is the difficulty of authoring interactive stories, a task that requires describing a huge amount of story building blocks in a machine friendly fashion. This is not only technically and conceptually more challenging than traditional narrative authoring but also a scalability problem. This thesis examines the authoring bottleneck through a case study and a literature survey and advocates a solution based on crowdsourcing. Prior work has already shown that combining a large number of example stories collected from crowd workers with a system that merges these contributions into a single interactive story can be an effective way to reduce the authorial burden. As a refinement of such an approach, this thesis introduces the novel concept of Crowd Task Adaptation. It argues that in order to maximise the usefulness of the collected stories, a system should dynamically and intelligently analyse the corpus of collected stories and based on this analysis modify the tasks handed out to crowd workers. Two authoring systems, ENIGMA and CROSCAT, which show two radically different approaches of using the Crowd Task Adaptation paradigm have been implemented and are described in this thesis. While ENIGMA adapts tasks through a realtime dialog between crowd workers and the system that is based on what has been learned from previously collected stories, CROSCAT modifies the backstory given to crowd workers in order to optimise the distribution of branching points in the tree structure that combines all collected stories. Two experimental studies of crowdsourced authoring are also presented. They lead to guidelines on how to employ crowdsourced authoring effectively, but more importantly the results of one of the studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the Crowd Task Adaptation approach

Abschätzung von Innovationsbereitschaft und Technologieakzeptanz mittels immersivem Sci-Fi-Prototyping : eine Evaluation am Use Case «AI & Democracy»

Der digitale Wandel ist allgegenwärtig und führt zu nie dagewesenen Formen von Innovationen. Aufgrund seines umfassenden Charakters und seiner potenziell tiefgreifenden Auswirkungen bringt er jedoch auch neue Herausforderungen mit sich. Technologiefolgeabschätzungen untersuchen die langfristigen Auswirkungen von Technologien auf Gesellschaft und Umwelt. Ein Aspekt dabei ist ein breiter gesellschaftlicher Diskurs, der in einer funktionierenden Demokratie als unabdingbar gilt. Dazu werden verschiedene Perspektiven, insbesondere von Experten aus Wissenschaft, Wirtschaft und Politik, aber auch die Meinung der Öffentlichkeit eingeholt. In der Praxis stellt dies jedoch eine Herausforderung dar. Wie soll die Öffentlichkeit in der Lage sein, sich eine fundierte Meinung über einen technologischen Wandel zu bilden, wenn dieser Wandel vielschichtig und nicht leicht durchschaubar sowie nachvollziehbar ist? Aktuell wird eine anstehende Innovation in einer textuell-bildlichen Darstellung vermittelt und die Innovationsbereitschaft bzw. Technologieakzeptanz in einer nachgelagerten Umfrage gemessen. Diese Anwendung spricht die kognitive Seite der Probanden an und vernachlässigt die emotionale Seite, welche jedoch bei der Entscheidung in der Realität eine wichtige Rolle spielt. In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird die Haltungsbildung und Haltungsveränderung gegenüber einer neuen Technologie anhand eines Science-Fiction-Prototyps im Handlungsfeld Demokratie näher untersucht. Das Hauptaugenmerk liegt dabei auf der Immersion. Die technologische Innovation sowie mögliche Technologiefolgen werden mit der immersiven Sci-Fi-Prototyping-Methode in der virtuellen Realität erlebbar gemacht, wodurch die Emotionen in den Prozess der Haltungsbildung miteinbezogen werden. Es werden die Forschungsfragen, ob sich die immersive Science-Fiction-Prototyping-Methode für die Erfassung der Haltung eignet und wie sich die technische Immersion auf die Haltungsveränderung auswirkt, untersucht. Zu diesem Zweck wird ein Laborexperiment mit einer Vor- und Nachbefragung durchgeführt. Die Ergebnisse der Low-Immersion-Gruppe, die sich durch den Sci-Fi-Prototyp als Hypertext im Browser klickt, werden mit denen der High-Immersion-Gruppe verglichen, die den Sci-Fi-Prototyp mittels VR erlebt. Die Resultate zeigen, dass sich die Sci-Fi-Prototyping wie auch die immersive Sci-Fi- Prototyping-Methode für die Erfassung der Haltung eignen. Bei der immersiven Sci-Fi-Prototyping-Methode können sich die Probanden die Technologie besser vorstellen und generell hat das Medienformat VR einen stärkeren Einfluss auf die Haltungsveränderung gezeigt. Diese Ergebnisse beziehen sich auf den digitalen, demokratischen Assistenten, welcher im Sci-Fi-Prototyp vorgestellt wird

Lecture Notes on Interactive Storytelling

These lecture notes collect the material used in the advanced course 'Interactive Storytelling' organized biannually at the Department of Future Technologies, University of Turku, Finland. Its aim is to present the key concepts behind interactive digital storytelling (IDS) as well as to review proposed and existing IDS systems. The course focuses on the four partakers of IDS: the platform, the designer, the interactor, and the storyworld. When constructing a platform, the problem is to select an appropriate approach from tightly controlled to emergent storytelling. On this platform, the designer is then responsible for creating the content (e.g., characters, props, scenes and events) for the storyworld, which is then experienced and influenced by the interactor. The structure and relationships between these partakers is explained from a theoretical perspective as well as using existing IDS systems as examples.</p