Designing multiplayer games to facilitate emergent social behaviours online

This paper discusses an exploratory case study of the design of games that facilitate spontaneous social interaction and group behaviours among distributed individuals, based largely on symbolic presence 'state' changes. We present the principles guiding the design of our game environment: presence as a symbolic phenomenon, the importance of good visualization and the potential for spontaneous self-organization among groups of people. Our game environment, comprising a family of multiplayer 'bumper-car' style games, is described, followed by a discussion of lessons learned from observing users of the environment. Finally, we reconsider and extend our design principles in light of our observations

A Thing of Beauty: Steering Behavior in an Interactive Playground

Interactive playgrounds are spaces where players engage in collocated, playful activities, in which added digital technology can be designed to promote cognitive, social, and motor skills development. To promote such development, different strategies can be used to implement game mechanics that change player's in-game behavior. One of such strategies is enticing players to take action through incentives akin to game achievements. We explored if this strategy could be used to influence players' proxemic behavior in the Interactive Tag Playground, an installation that enhances the traditional game of tag. We placed the ITP in an art gallery, observed hundreds of play sessions, and refined the mechanics, which consisted in projecting collectible particles around the tagger that upon collection by runners resulted only in the embellishment of their circles. We implemented the refined mechanics in a study with 48 children. The playground automatically collected the players' positions, and analyses show that runners got closer to and moved more towards taggers when using our enticing strategy. This suggests an enticing strategy can be used to influence physical in-game behavior

Localised, student-centred curriculum construction : a case study of making Chinese learnable for Australian primary school students

With the turn to ‘zhōng wén rè - 中文热’ (Chinese fever), Chinese is now the most commonly spoken second language in Australia. There has been a concomitant growth in interest in the learning of the Chinese language in local schools. However, it has been reported that there exist huge difficulties and challenges in making Chinese learnable for the predominantly Englishspeaking learners in Australia. The high dropout rate from Chinese language courses presents evidence of this. Consequently, this case study has been conducted in a local public school of New South Wales through the Australia-China educational partnership program entitled ROSETE. Specifically, the purpose of this case study is to draw on the local students’ social practices, undertaken in English, for establishing what to teach in the Chinese language classroom. The aim is to construct an appropriately learnable curriculum which will assist to enrich students’ learning of Chinese. In doing so, this study focuses on local students’ daily recurring sociolinguistic activities and their funds of knowledge in the school-based community through addressing and answering the overarching research question: how can the use of students’ sociolinguistic activities and funds of knowledge contribute to curriculum construction to enrich the learning of the Chinese language? Guided by this question, the study initially investigates particular forms of local students’ daily sociolinguistic activities, performed in English at school, then utilises them as the learning content sources. In effect, it gives priority to mobilising students’ knowledge base in order to adapt their preferred instruction strategies to make them suitable for the local educational milieu. Furthermore, it is suggested that this process of generating Chinese learning materials can and should be adjusted, and then applied to more broadly to emergent second language learners of Chinese around the world, in accordance with their diversified cultural and educational environments. The case study suggests that local students’ potential translanguaging capabilities between English and Chinese are evolving and becoming powerful due in part to the effort exerted by their engagement in this form of situated learning practice. Thus, not only can Chinese be made learnable, but a specific localised vocabulary can become the base for more extensive language learning

Design for Child-Robot Play The implications of Design Research within the field of Human-Robot Interaction studies for Children

This thesis investigates the intersections of three disciplines, that are Design Research, Human-Robot Interaction studies, and Child Studies. In particular, this doctoral research is focused on two research questions, namely, what is (or might be) the role of design research in HRI? And, how to design acceptable and desirable child-robot play applications? The first chapter introduces an overview of the mutual interest between robotics and design that is at the basis of the research. On the one hand, the interest of design toward robotics is documented through some exemplary projects from artists and designers that speculate on the human-robot coexistence condition. Vice versa, the robotics interest toward design is documented by referring to some tracks of robotic conferences, scienti c workshops and robotics journals which focused on the design-robotics relationship. Finally, a brief description of the background conditions that characterized this doctoral research are introduced, such as the fact of being a research founded by a company. The second chapter provides an overview of the state of the art of the intersections between three multidisciplinary disciplines. First, a de nition of Design Research is provided, together with its main trends and open issues. Then, the review focuses on the contribution of Design Research to the HRI eld, which can be summed up in actions focused on three aspects: artefacts, stakeholders, and contexts. This is followed by a focus on the role of Design Research within the context of children studies, in which it is possible to identify two main design-child relationships: design as a method for developing children’s learning experiences; and children as part of the design process for developing novel interactive systems. The third chapter introduces the Research through Design (RtD) approach and its relevance in conducting design research in HRI. The proposed methodology, based on this approach, is particularly characterized by the presence of design explorations as study methods. These, in turn, are developed through a common project’s methodology, also reported in this chapter. The fourth chapter is dedicated to the analysis of the scenario in which the child-robot interaction takes place. This was aimed at understanding what is edutainment robotics for children, its common features, how it relates to existing children play types, and where the interaction takes place. The chapter provides also a focus on the relationship between children and technology on a more general level, through which two themes and relative design opportunities were identi ed: physically active play and objects-to-think-with. These were respectively addressed in the two design explorations presented in this thesis: Phygital Play and Shybo. The Phygital Play project consists of an exploration of natural interaction modalities with robots, through mixed-reality, for fostering children’s active behaviours. To this end, a game platform was developed for allowing children to play with or against a robot, through body movement. Shybo, instead, is a low-anthropomorphic robot for playful learning activities with children that can be carried out in educational contexts. The robot, which reacts to properties of the physical environment, is designed to support different kinds of experiences. Then, the chapter eight is dedicated to the research outcomes, that were de ned through a process of reflection. The contribution of the research was analysed and documented by focusing on three main levels, namely: artefact, knowledge and theory. The artefact level corresponds to the situated implementations developed through the projects. The knowledge level consists of a set of actionable principles, emerged from the results and lessons learned from the projects. At the theory level, a theoretical framework was proposed with the aim of informing the future design of child- robot play applications. Thelastchapterprovidesa naloverviewofthe doctoral research, a series of limitations regarding the research, its process and its outcomes, and some indications for future research

Physical Games for Learning

The goal of this project is to teach elementary mathematics and number sense through the use of a cyber-watch or smartphone. The device enables an alternate learning style fueled by the use of interactive games and other technologies. The hope is to augment the learning process for students that do not learn well in a traditional classroom by providing a fun and engaging learning style. Blending wireless wearable technology, educational games, mathematics, and real time reporting could very well lead to accelerated learning. The outcome of this project is a novel infrastructure, which allows for the creation of a myriad of interactive embodied learning experiences for students of all ages

A Design Exploration of Affective Gaming

Physiological sensing has been a prominent fixture in games user research (GUR) since the late 1990s, when researchers began to explore its potential to enhance and understand experience within digital game play. Since these early days, it has been widely argued that “affective gaming”—in which gameplay is influenced by a player’s emotional state—can enhance player experience by integrating physiological sensors into play. In this thesis, I conduct a design exploration of the field of affective gaming by first, systematically exploring the field and creating a framework (the affective game loop) to classify existing literature; and second by presenting two design probes, to probe and explore the design space of affective games contextualized within the affective game loop: In the Same Boat and Commons Sense. The systematic review explored this unique design space of affective gaming, opening up future avenues for exploration. The affective game loop was created as a way to classify the physiological signals and sensors most commonly used in prior literature within the context of how they are mapped into the gameplay itself. Findings suggest that the physiological input mappings can be more action-based (e.g., affecting mechanics in the game such as the movement of the character) or more context-based (e.g., affecting things like environmental or difficulty variables in the game). Findings also suggested that while the field has been around for decades, there is still yet to be any commercial successes, so does physiological interaction really heighten player experience? This question instigated the design of the two probes, exploring ways to implement these mappings and effectively heighten player experience. In the Same Boat (Design Probe One) is an embodied mirroring game designed to promote an intimate interaction, using players’ breathing rate and facial expressions to control movement of a canoe down a river. Findings suggest that playing In the Same Boat fostered the development of affiliation between the players, and that while embodied controls were less intuitive, people enjoyed them more, indicating the potential of embodied controls to foster social closeness in synchronized play over a distance. Commons Sense (Design Probe Two) is a communication modality intended to heighten audience engagement and effectively capture and communicate the audience experience, using a webcam-based heart rate detection software that takes an average of each spectator’s heart rate as input to affect in-game variables such as lighting and sound design, and game difficulty. Findings suggest that Commons Sense successfully facilitated the communication of audience response in an online entertainment context—where these social cues and signals are inherently diminished. In addition, Commons Sense is a communication modality that can both enhance a play experience while offering a novel way to communicate. Overall, findings from this design exploration shows that affective games offer a novel way to deliver a rich gameplay experience for the player

Players Unleashed! Modding The Sims and the Culture of Gaming

Siirretty Doriast