Narrative support for young game designers’ writing

Creating narrative-based computer games is a complex and challenging task. Narrative Threads is a suite of software tools designed to aid young people (aged 11-15) in creating their own narrative-based games as a writing development activity. A participatory design process highlighted the areas where additional support was required, and informed the iterative design of Narrative Threads. The tools are implemented as a plugin to a commercial game creation toolset, and constitute character and object design tools, a branching narrative diagramming tool and an augmented story map view. In this paper, we provide an overview of the design of the tools and describe an evaluation carried out with 14 children over a four-day workshop. The study examined tool usage patterns, and compared games created with Narrative Threads to those created using the standard toolset. The results suggest a number of ways in which dynamic external representations of story elements can support writing activities in narrative-based game creation. Young designers using Narrative Threads wrote more character dialogue, made stronger links between the conversations they wrote and wider game events, and designed more complex characters, compared to those using the standard toolset. In addition to showing how Narrative Threads can support young games designers, the results have broader implications for anyone looking to support storytelling and writing through game creation activities and tools

Practical, appropriate, empirically-validated guidelines for designing educational games

There has recently been a great deal of interest in the potential of computer games to function as innovative educational tools. However, there is very little evidence of games fulfilling that potential. Indeed, the process of merging the disparate goals of education and games design appears problematic, and there are currently no practical guidelines for how to do so in a coherent manner. In this paper, we describe the successful, empirically validated teaching methods developed by behavioural psychologists and point out how they are uniquely suited to take advantage of the benefits that games offer to education. We conclude by proposing some practical steps for designing educational games, based on the techniques of Applied Behaviour Analysis. It is intended that this paper can both focus educational games designers on the features of games that are genuinely useful for education, and also introduce a successful form of teaching that this audience may not yet be familiar with

Narrative Threads: supporting young people in developing writing skills through narrative-based game creation

This thesis examines how narrative-based game creation can be used as an activity to improve writing skills for young people aged 11-15, and how additional representational support in a game creation tool can increase the benefits of the activity. Creating narrative-based games can involve traditional writing skills as well as requiring the 21st century skills of multimodal and interactive writing. Toolsets make it possible for young people to create 3D role-playing games with a commercial look and feel, but they do not provide support for the complex task of interactive and multimodal narrative creation. To investigate the desirable features of a tool that would support this task and the associated learning, an extensive learner-centred design process was conducted. This involved teachers and young people, and also incorporated relevant theory synthesised into a design model. A suite of tools, Narrative Threads, was designed and developed through an iterative process to provide the support highlighted as important. Two evaluative studies were conducted in different learning contexts; a secondary school and a vacation workshop. A mixed-methods approach was used to examine the overall potential for the activity to support writing skills development and the impact made by additional representational support. Comparative studies between groups showed some evidence that writing skills were improved for those taking part in game creation, and there were further benefits for groups using Narrative Threads in the workshop setting, but not in the school setting. Additionally, a multimodal analysis of the games created showed that many participants demonstrated a developing proficiency in using 3D graphical elements, text and sound to convey an interactive narrative. The findings indicate promise for the approach, although additional curricular and pedagogical support would be crucial if the potential is to be actualised in a classroom context

Enhancing Questionnaire Design Through Participant Engagement to Improve the Outputs of Evaluation.

Questionnaires are habitual choices for many user experience evaluators, providing a well-recognised and accepted, fast and cost effective method of collecting and analysing data. However, despite frequent and widespread use in evaluation, reliance on questionnaires can be problematic. Satisficing, acquiescence bias and straight lining are common response biases associated with questionnaires, typically resulting in suboptimal responses and provision of poor quality data. These problems can relate to a lack of engagement with evaluation tasks, yet there is a lack of previous research that has attempted to alleviate these limitations by making questionnaires more fun or enjoyable to enhance participant engagement. This research seeks to address whether ‘user evaluation questionnaires can be designed to be engaging to improve optimal responding. The aim of this research is to investigate if response quality can be improved through enhancing questionnaire design both to reduce common response biases and to maintain participant engagement. The evaluation context for this study was provided by MIXER, an interactive, narrative-based application for intercultural sensitivity learning, used and evaluated by 9-11 year old children in the classroom context. A series of Participatory Design studies with children investigated engagement and optimal responding with questionnaires. These initial studies informed the design of a series of questionnaires created in the form of three workbooks that were used to evaluate MIXER with over 400 children. 3 A mixed methods approach was used to evaluate the questionnaires. Results demonstrate that by making questionnaire completion more enjoyable data quality is improved. Response biases are reduced, quantitative data are more complete and qualitative responses are more verbose and meaningful compared to standard questionnaires. Further, children reported that completing the questionnaires was a fun and enjoyable activity that they would wish to repeat in the future. As a discipline in its own right, evaluation is under-investigated. Similarly user evaluation is not evaluated with a lack of papers considering this issue in this millennium. Thus, this research provides a significant contribution to the field of evaluation, highlighting that the outputs of user evaluation with questionnaires are improved when participant engagement informs questionnaire design. The result is a more positive evaluation experience for participants and in return a higher standard of data provision for evaluators and R&D teams

Designing an interface for multimodal narrative creation

Many young people struggle with developing writing skills, and computer game creation is a motivating activity with potential in this area. Existing software allows young people to design 3D areas and add game objects, but provides little or no interface support for writing and structuring narratives. This research explores the support required to create 3D multimodal narratives, adopting user-centred methods to design, build and evaluate a suite of dynamic representational tools. A key interface design challenge is developing representations that foster writing skills without losing the motivational immediacy of the activity