GameTale: Facilitating the Design of Gameful Museum Experiences

Digital technologies - games in particular - are offering museums new opportunities to engage the public with active and interactive experiences. Visitors are looking for experiences that are not only educative but also entertaining and more interactive than the traditional passive visit. While museums are pressured into designing experiences that are more interactive and digital, they are yet faithful to the traditional passive experience and are struggling to adapt to the new requirements. Thus, a game jam named GameTale was organized to facilitate museums with the design of new experiences that are emotionally and psychologically similar to games (i.e. gameful experiences). In order to achieve this purpose, participants should be given two main constraints: a short timeframe (i.e. 2 days) and a theme (i.e. develop the game around a specific artefact)

GameTale: Facilitating the Design of Gameful Museum Experiences

Digital technologies - games in particular - are offering museums new opportunities to engage the public with active and interactive experiences. Visitors are looking for experiences that are not only educative but also entertaining and more interactive than the traditional passive visit. While museums are pressured into designing experiences that are more interactive and digital, they are yet faithful to the traditional passive experience and are struggling to adapt to the new requirements. Thus, a game jam named GameTale was organized to facilitate museums with the design of new experiences that are emotionally and psychologically similar to games (i.e. gameful experiences). In order to achieve this purpose, participants should be given two main constraints: a short timeframe (i.e. 2 days) and a theme (i.e. develop the game around a specific artefact)

Facilitating an Educational Board Game Jam:Analysing Different Game Design Strategies

There is a long tradition of using board games for educational purposes. Moreover, the growth of the game jam events where participants typically gather at physical locations with an aim of creating new games, has expanded over the last decades. This paper is based on an exploratory study, where we wanted to create a game jam for teachers, student teachers, facilitators, and consultants interested in designing and redesigning board games to enhance learning for different target groups. With a point of departure in design thinking, the game jam was framed through three phases: ideation, build a board, and playtesting. The participants were given the challenge of designing a board game incorporating co-op elements such as collaboration, problem-solving in teams, collective efforts towards a mutual enemy, etc. The game jam was held in a university college where the participants had access to a variety of materials such as pens, papers, cardboards, and discarded board games. The empirical data consisted of observations of participants, who were divided into groups of 2-4 persons based on their prior game experiences and game interests. The analysis presents preliminary findings in relation to the participants’ different strategies for developing board games. The empirical data showed how the groups struggled to balance simplicity vs. complexity in their designs in relation to both time frame and target group of their board games. The playtesting session fostered discussions around the essential game mechanics and elements of each board game prototype. Furthermore, the ongoing feedback and playtesting created a joyful and curious bridge between the groups. Based on the analysis, the paper presents a series of design principles aimed at facilitating educational board game jams

Exploring the Impact of Competition and Incentives on Game Jam Participation and Behaviour

Competitive elements are a common feature of many game jams. However, there has been little research to date on the impact of competition on participants and their behaviours. To better understand how incentives and competition may affect the motivations and behaviour of game jam participants, we surveyed 47 game jam participants and analysed data from 4,564 online game jams. We found that incentives and competition were neither strong deterrents nor significant motivators for game jam participation. However, a significant percentage of the participants surveyed indicated that incentives and competition would affect their behaviour during a game jam. Our findings suggest this effect is dependent on the nature (or contingency) of the incentive. In addition to its practical implications for game jam organisation, this study highlights a largely untapped potential for further research into the complexities of game jams, incentives and competition

The History of Quantum Games

In this paper, we explore the historical development of playable quantum physics related games (\textit{\textbf{quantum games}}). For the purpose of this examination, we have collected over 260 quantum games ranging from commercial games, applied and serious games, and games that have been developed at quantum themed game jams and educational courses. We provide an overview of the journey of quantum games across three dimensions: \textit{the perceivable dimension of quantum physics, the dimension of scientific purposes, and the dimension of quantum technologies}. We then further reflect on the definition of quantum games and its implications. While motivations behind developing quantum games have typically been educational or academic, themes related to quantum physics have begun to be more broadly utilised across a range of commercial games. In addition, as the availability of quantum computer hardware has grown, entirely new variants of quantum games have emerged to take advantage of these machines' inherent capabilities, \textit{quantum computer games}Comment: 8 pages, from which 1.5 pages of references, 11 figures, one table, presented in the IEEE Conference on Games 202