Towards Industrialized Conception and Production of Serious Games

Serious Games (SGs) have experienced a tremendous outburst these last years. Video game companies have been producing fun, user-friendly SGs, but their educational value has yet to be proven. Meanwhile, cognition research scientist have been developing SGs in such a way as to guarantee an educational gain, but the fun and attractive characteristics featured often would not meet the public's expectations. The ideal SG must combine these two aspects while still being economically viable. In this article, we propose a production chain model to efficiently conceive and produce SGs that are certified for their educational gain and fun qualities. Each step of this chain will be described along with the human actors, the tools and the documents that intervene

Player agency in interactive narrative: audience, actor & author

The question motivating this review paper is, how can computer-based interactive narrative be used as a constructivist learn- ing activity? The paper proposes that player agency can be used to link interactive narrative to learner agency in constructivist theory, and to classify approaches to interactive narrative. The traditional question driving research in interactive narrative is, ‘how can an in- teractive narrative deal with a high degree of player agency, while maintaining a coherent and well-formed narrative?’ This question derives from an Aristotelian approach to interactive narrative that, as the question shows, is inherently antagonistic to player agency. Within this approach, player agency must be restricted and manip- ulated to maintain the narrative. Two alternative approaches based on Brecht’s Epic Theatre and Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed are reviewed. If a Boalian approach to interactive narrative is taken the conflict between narrative and player agency dissolves. The question that emerges from this approach is quite different from the traditional question above, and presents a more useful approach to applying in- teractive narrative as a constructivist learning activity

Game-based learning or game-based teaching?

Emerging technologies for learning report - Article exploring games based learning and its potential for edcuatio

Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion

Agents for educational games and simulations

This book consists mainly of revised papers that were presented at the Agents for Educational Games and Simulation (AEGS) workshop held on May 2, 2011, as part of the Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (AAMAS) conference in Taipei, Taiwan. The 12 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized topical sections on middleware applications, dialogues and learning, adaption and convergence, and agent applications