Gaming to master the game - Game usability and game mechanics

Health intervention aimed at children using serious games are starting to grow on popularity, however, Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) paradigm for serious games is in its infancy. In this article, we present a series of IDS educational games developed with the aim of promoting responsible antibiotic use and hygiene part of the edugames4all project. Despite commercial success and market popularity of IDS games one of the major challenges we encountered when the games were distributed to schools for evaluation was that many children never played a similar game before and found the concept challenging. As a result, some of the children enjoyed the game while others were frustrated and gave up at a certain point. Although the phenomenon is not new, and it present even in commercial games, we proposed a new approach to ensure that all children understand the message delivered and at the same time, they enjoy playing the game. This paper proposes the introduction of a training mission that teaches children in a game like environment the basic concepts necessary to progress through the game. The training mission was evaluated in experimental settings with two groups of children, one playing the training mission before playing the game and another one who did not. The results showed that there is no statistically significant difference in terms of usability between the two groups, however the group that did not play the training mission found the game more “awkward” to play, and the difference between the groups in this case was statistically significant

Ubiquitous Bugs and Drugs Education for Children Through Mobile Games

Increasing mobile device ownership among children makes them an attractive platform for raising awareness about health issues. At the same time, children are using mobile devices for playing games and therefore these games could be used to facilitate the delivery of important healthcare messages in an enjoyable manner. In this article we present edugames4all MicrobeQuest!, a mobile game that aims to create awareness among 9 to 12 years old on healthcare issues related to microbe transmission, food and hand hygiene, and responsible antibiotic use. This article discusses the preliminary research performed in assessing the usability of the game

Edu-Interact:An Authoring Tool for Interactive Digital Storytelling based Games

In this research, we present an authoring environment, Edu-Interact, that supports the creation of adaptive interactive digital storytelling based games. Edu-Interact allows to design a story that seamlessly evaluates the student knowledge, performs the subsequent adaptation of the digital storytelling, and provides a summative assessment. The authoring environment allows also to assign weights to different concepts the student could accumulate through the interaction with the storytelling. This can provide a score that could be used as a means of gamifying the interactive digital storytelling or provide teachers or other stakeholders with feedback on the student performance

Um Mapeamento Sistemático sobre Acessibilidade e Usabilidade no Desenvolvimento de Jogos Digitais para Idosos

Este mapeamento buscou conhecer como, quando e onde aspectos de acessibilidade e usabilidade são abordados durante o desenvolvimento de jogos digitais para usuários idosos. Abordamos 20.270 resultados iniciais, amostramos 1.755 e identificamos 46 publicações após o processo do mapeamento. Os resultados deste mapeamento mostraram uma preferência em pesquisas que abordem avaliação de acessibilidade e de usabilidade neste domínio. Este mapeamento também evidenciou que, neste domínio e na amostragem considerada, pesquisas apenas abordaram acessibilidade quando usabilidade também foi abordada por alguma razão. Ainda, as análises de resultados indicaram a predominância significativa ($\chi^2 = 45.9103$, p-valor < .01) de abordagens que consideram usabilidade (43) sobre abordagens que consideram acessibilidade (11). Neste contexto, sugerimos questões de pesquisa para revisões sistemáticas futuras na área