Languages of games and play: A systematic mapping study

Digital games are a powerful means for creating enticing, beautiful, educational, and often highly addictive interactive experiences that impact the lives of billions of players worldwide. We explore what informs the design and construction of good games to learn how to speed-up game development. In particular, we study to what extent languages, notations, patterns, and tools, can offer experts theoretical foundations, systematic techniques, and practical solutions they need to raise their productivity and improve the quality of games and play. Despite the growing number of publications on this topic there is currently no overview describing the state-of-the-art that relates research areas, goals, and applications. As a result, efforts and successes are often one-off, lessons learned go overlooked, language reuse remains minimal, and opportunities for collaboration and synergy are lost. We present a systematic map that identifies relevant publications and gives an overview of research areas and publication venues. In addition, we categorize research perspectives along common objectives, techniques, and approaches, illustrated by summaries of selected languages. Finally, we distill challenges and opportunities for future research and development

The complexity of playing durak

International audienceDurak is a Russian card game in which players try to get rid of all their cards via a particular at-tack/defense mechanism. The last player standing with cards loses. We show that, even restricted to the perfect information two-player game, finding optimal moves is a hard problem. More precisely , we prove that, given a generalized du-rak position, it is PSPACE-complete to decide if a player has a winning strategy. We also show that deciding if an attack can be answered is NP-hard

Designing Location-based Games : How to support players’ social interaction, physical activity and learning about their local environment

The earliest academic studies on location-based games (LBGs) were conducted in the early 2000’s, but the recent upsurge in the popularity and success of commercial LBGs has created a need to re-examine the genre in light of new empirical evidence. In 2016, Pokemon GO brought the LBG genre into a spotlight by being downloaded hundreds of millions of times and generating over 4 billion USD in lifetime revenue to date. Since then, new games such as Jurassic World: Alive, The Walking Dead: Our World and The Witcher: Monster Slayer have emerged. Understanding phenomena related to LBGs is important for various stakeholders from game designers to urban designers and educators. In this dissertation we take an inductive approach to LBG design by gathering evidence from popular commercial LBGs with six original research articles (Studies I-VI). The studies focus on game mechanics that are unique to the LBG genre, and how reported positive outcomes of playing LBGs can be tied to these mechanics. Through the six studies we derive a game mechanics -focused design framework for LBGs, which we name the Triune PoI System, where PoI stands for point of interest. The system consists of three central components: exploration, discovery and navigation, and at the heart of these lies moving to trigger gameplay. The Triune PoI System highlights the importance of LBGs to provide multimodal motivation for players to move and play, and the crucial importance of the playing locations, the PoIs for scaffolding positive outcomes. We demonstrate how the following benefits of playing LBGs (1) physical activity; (2) social interaction; and (3) learning and discovery; are ultimately tied to the Triune PoI System (Studies I-IV). We also investigate the effects of aggressive marketing and LBG game mechanics on players’ well-being (Study V). Here we identify that aggressive marketing can exhaust players, but that the overall LBG playing intensity had a strong significant association with psychological well-being in our sample. We also demonstrate that nostalgia and imagination play crucial roles in scaffolding perceived meaningfulness of playing LBGs (Study VI). Finally, we propose that the popularity of LBGs may be explained by them embodying aspects of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle that are missing in the urban way of living. TIIVISTELMÄ Varhaisimmat akateemiset tutkimukset paikkatietoon pohjautuvista peleistä julkaistiin jo vuosituhannen alussa, mutta pelien viimeaikainen suosio ja kaupallinen menestys antavat aihetta tarkastella paikkatietoon pohjautuvien pelien suunnittelua uuden empiirisen todistusaineiston valossa. Vuonna 2016 julkaistua Pokémon GO:ta on ladattu satoja miljoonia kertoja ja sen suosion inspiroimana on julkaistu sellaisia paikkatietoon pohjautuvia pelejä kuin Jurassic World: Alive, The Walking Dead: Our World sekä The Witcher: Monster Slayer. Näiden pelien ja niihin liittyvien ilmiöiden ymmärtäminen voi olla hyödyllistä monille eri tahoille, kuten pelisuunnittelijoille, kaupunkisuunnittelijoille ja koulutuksesta vastaaville. Tässä väitöskirjatutkimuksessa lähestytään paikkatietoon pohjautuvien pelien suunnittelua induktiivisesti kuuden alkuperäisartikkelin avulla. Tutkimuksessa selvitetään mitkä ovat paikkatietoon pohjautuvien pelien keskeisimmät pelimekaniikat ja miten raportoidut positiiviset vaikutukset nivoutuvat niihin. Tulokset osoittavat, että suosittujen paikkatietoon pohjautuvien pelien keskiössä on ns. "Triune PoI System", joka koostuu 3+1 komponentista: tutkiminen, löytäminen ja navigointi; sekä liikkuminen. Toisin sanoen pelaajat lähtevät tutkimaan ympäristöään, löytävät sieltä mielenkiintoisia kohteita ja navigoivat niiden luokse. Lisäksi pelien keskeisenä elementtinä on pelkästä liikkumisesta palkitseminen. Tutkimuksessa osoitetaan, että liikunta, sosiaalinen vuorovaikutus ja oppiminen on suosituissa peleissä, kuten Pokémon GO:ssa, keskeisesti sidottu Triune PoI Systemiin. Lisäksi selvitetään mitä vaikutuksia kaupallisten paikkatietoon pohjautuvien pelien markkinoinnilla ja mikrotransaktiomekanismeilla on pelaajien hyvinvointiin. Tutkimuksessa havaitaan, että markkinointi saattaa väsyttää pelaajia, mutta kokonaisuutena paikkatietoon pohjautuvien pelien pelaamisella ja hyvinvoinnilla on tilastollisesti merkitsevä vahva yhteys. Lisäksi osoitetaan, että nostalgia ja mielikuvitus tukevat tunnetta pelaamisen merkityksellistä. Lopuksi ehdotetaan, että paikkatietoon pohjautuvien pelien suosiota saattaa selittää niiden tarjoamat metsästäjä-keräilijä-elämän aspektit, joista urbaanissa miljöössä elävät ihmiset jäävät arkielämässään paitsi

Serious Games and Mixed Reality Applications for Healthcare

Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have long histories in the healthcare sector, offering the opportunity to develop a wide range of tools and applications aimed at improving the quality of care and efficiency of services for professionals and patients alike. The best-known examples of VR–AR applications in the healthcare domain include surgical planning and medical training by means of simulation technologies. Techniques used in surgical simulation have also been applied to cognitive and motor rehabilitation, pain management, and patient and professional education. Serious games are ones in which the main goal is not entertainment, but a crucial purpose, ranging from the acquisition of knowledge to interactive training.These games are attracting growing attention in healthcare because of their several benefits: motivation, interactivity, adaptation to user competence level, flexibility in time, repeatability, and continuous feedback. Recently, healthcare has also become one of the biggest adopters of mixed reality (MR), which merges real and virtual content to generate novel environments, where physical and digital objects not only coexist, but are also capable of interacting with each other in real time, encompassing both VR and AR applications.This Special Issue aims to gather and publish original scientific contributions exploring opportunities and addressing challenges in both the theoretical and applied aspects of VR–AR and MR applications in healthcare

KEER2022

Avanttítol: KEER2022. DiversitiesDescripció del recurs: 25 juliol 202

Recent Developments in Smart Healthcare

Medicine is undergoing a sector-wide transformation thanks to the advances in computing and networking technologies. Healthcare is changing from reactive and hospital-centered to preventive and personalized, from disease focused to well-being centered. In essence, the healthcare systems, as well as fundamental medicine research, are becoming smarter. We anticipate significant improvements in areas ranging from molecular genomics and proteomics to decision support for healthcare professionals through big data analytics, to support behavior changes through technology-enabled self-management, and social and motivational support. Furthermore, with smart technologies, healthcare delivery could also be made more efficient, higher quality, and lower cost. In this special issue, we received a total 45 submissions and accepted 19 outstanding papers that roughly span across several interesting topics on smart healthcare, including public health, health information technology (Health IT), and smart medicine

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 4: Learning, Technology, Thinking

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 4 includes papers from Learning, Technology and Thinking tracks of the conference