Recall and recognition of in-game advertising : the role of game control

Digital gaming has become one of the largest entertainment sectors worldwide, increasingly turning the medium into a promising vehicle for advertisers. As a result, the inclusion of advertising messages in digital games or in-game advertising (IGA) is expected to grow steadily over the course of the following years. However, much work is still needed to maximize the effectiveness of IGA. The aim of the study was to contribute to IGA effectiveness research by analyzing the impact of two factors on the processing of IGA in terms of brand awareness. The primary objective was to investigate the effect of a person’s sense of involvement related to the control and movement mechanisms in a game (i.e. kinesthetic involvement). A within-subjects experiment was conducted in which control over a racing game was varied by manipulating game controller type, resulting in two experimental conditions (symbolic versus mimetic controller). Results show that the variation in game controller has a significant effect on the recall and recognition of the brands integrated into the game, and that this effect can be partially brought back to players’ perceived control over the game: when a game is easier to control, the control mechanisms require less conscious attention, freeing attentional resources that can be subsequently spent on other elements of the game such as IGA. A second factor that was taken into account in the study was brand prominence. The influence of both the size and spatial position of in-game advertisements was examined. Findings demonstrate that there are significant changes in effectiveness between different types of placements. Spatial position seems to be the most important placement characteristic, with central brand placements obtaining the highest recall and recognition scores. The effect of ad size is much smaller, with the effectiveness of the large placements not differing significantly from the effectiveness of their smaller counterparts

Persuasive design of a mobile energy conservation game with direct feedback and social cues

Pervasive gaming has the potential of transforming the home into a persuasive environment in which the user can learn about appliances and their electricity consumption. Power Explorer is a mobile game with a special sensing approach that provides real-time electricity measurements and feedback when the user switches on and off devices in the home. The game was developed based on persuasive principles to provide an engaging means to learn about energy with positive and negative feedback and social feedback from peers on real energy actions in the home. We present the design and rationale of this game and discuss how pervasive games can be viewed from a persuasive and learning point of view

A behavioural framework for designing educational computer games

Research has indicated that computer games can be innovative and powerful tools for education. Indeed, combining psychological research and games design principles offers a framework for developing educational games that promote learning while maintaining high motivation of the players. If designed correctly, it appears that games can utilize the inherent motivation demonstrated by game players to teach skills that are of immediate practical benefit. The current paper explores “the edges of gaming” in terms of proposing a novel theoretical and methodological framework for the design of educational games

Bringing tabletop technologies to kindergarten children

Taking computer technology away from the desktop and into a more physical, manipulative space, is known that provide many benefits and is generally considered to result in a system that is easier to learn and more natural to use. This paper describes a design solution that allows kindergarten children to take the benefits of the new pedagogical possibilities that tangible interaction and tabletop technologies offer for manipulative learning. After analysis of children's cognitive and psychomotor skills, we have designed and tuned a prototype game that is suitable for children aged 3 to 4 years old. Our prototype uniquely combines low cost tangible interaction and tabletop technology with tutored learning. The design has been based on the observation of children using the technology, letting them freely play with the application during three play sessions. These observational sessions informed the design decisions for the game whilst also confirming the children's enjoyment of the prototype

The Impact of Flow in an EEG-based Brain Computer Interface

Major issues in Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) include low usability and poor user performance. This paper tackles them by ensuring the users to be in a state of immersion, control and motivation, called state of flow. Indeed, in various disciplines, being in the state of flow was shown to improve performances and learning. Hence, we intended to draw BCI users in a flow state to improve both their subjective experience and their performances. In a Motor Imagery BCI game, we manipulated flow in two ways: 1) by adapting the task difficulty and 2) by using background music. Results showed that the difficulty adaptation induced a higher flow state, however music had no effect. There was a positive correlation between subjective flow scores and offline performance, although the flow factors had no effect (adaptation) or negative effect (music) on online performance. Overall, favouring the flow state seems a promising approach for enhancing users' satisfaction, although its complexity requires more thorough investigations

Why Johnny Can't Fly: Treating Games as a Form of Youth Media Within a Youth Development Framework

Part of the Volume on the Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and LearningIn this chapter, I use anecdotes and case studies from both work and personal experience to make an argument for treating games as a form of youth media and explore what this means for after-school youth programs. I talk about my son. I talk about a hotdog stand. I talk about two after school programs in which youth make or use games to engage with serious global issues. I explore the creation of Ayiti, a game about poverty in rural Haiti, and what it meant four youth of color to take part in its creation. I explore a teen program in the virtual world of Teen Second Life that created a maze to educate their peers about child sex trafficking. I discuss James Paul Gee's Situated Learning Matrix, the digital literacy theories of Henry Jenkins and the perspectives of other key thinkers in this volume and in the field to explore their implications for media literacy and youth development programs. The chapter concludes by talking about 21st Century Skills as a context for situating games-based learning and references Carol Channing's voice as a source of hope

Improving social game engagement on Facebook through enhanced socio-contextual information

In this paper we describe the results of a controlled study of a social game, Magpies, which was built on the Facebook Online Social Network (OSN) and enhanced with contextual social information in the form of a variety of social network indices. Through comparison with a concurrent control trial using an identical game without the enhanced social information, it was shown that the additional contextual data increased the frequency of social activity between players engaged in the game. Despite this increase in activity, there was little increase in growth of the player-base when compared to the control condition. These findings corroborate previous work that showed how socio-contextual enhancement can increase performance on task-driven games, whilst also suggesting that it can increase activity and engagement when provided as context for non task-driven game environments

Manipulating the Quota in Weighted Voting Games

Weighted voting games provide a popular model of decision making in multiagent systems. Such games are described by a set of players, a list of players' weights, and a quota; a coalition of the players is said to be winning if the total weight of its members meets or exceeds the quota. The power of a player in such games is traditionally identified with her Shapley--Shubik index or her Banzhaf index, two classical power measures that reflect the player's marginal contributions under different coalition formation scenarios. In this paper, we investigate by how much the central authority can change a player's power, as measured by these indices, by modifying the quota. We provide tight upper and lower bounds on the changes in the individual player's power that can result from a change in quota. We also study how the choice of quota can affect the relative power of the players. From the algorithmic perspective, we provide an efficient algorithm for determining whether there is a value of the quota that makes a given player a {\em dummy}, i.e., reduces his power (as measured by both indices) to 0. On the other hand, we show that checking which of the two values of the quota makes this player more powerful is computationally hard, namely, complete for the complexity class PP, which is believed to be significantly more powerful than NP