The things we learned on Liberty Island: designing games to help people become competent game players

The growing interest in the relationship between games and learning has, to date, be dominated by two traditions of work. The first treats games as potential educational content; the second considers the social contexts of learning from games, but only at a general level. A methodology has been developed that permits the detailed analysis of how people learn from particular instances of game play. This approach is used here to study two approaches to playing Deus Ex, one involving the training level and one neglecting this. The analysis revealed the things players learnt, the strategies they developed to progress through the game, the way in which these strategies evolved and also the way in which previous experience was transferred to this new context of play. This analysis permits conclusions to be drawn about the value of training levels and the importance of designing games in a way that recognizes previous gaming experience. The analysis also has implications for defining game genres, for decisions about the inclusion of design features such as quick saves and for the design of AI scripts

Potential collusion and trust: Evidence from a field experiment in Vietnam

We conduct framed trust games using contract dairy farmers in Vietnam as first movers to assess the impact of potential collusion on trust. Disaggregated analysis suggests that female farmers are more likely to trust overall, but are also more responsive to the addition of a third party and potential collusion. A third party induces them to trust at higher levels, but potential collusion between the trustee and the third party also induces them to trust at lower levels. Our findings corroborate well with existing studies on gender differences in decision making, which suggest that women's social preferences are more context-specific than men's.collusion, field experiment, Gender, trust game,

Understanding Game-based Approaches for Improving Sustainable Water Governance : The Potential of Serious Games to Solve Water Problems

The sustainable governance of water resources relies on processes of multi-stakeholder collaborations and interactions that facilitate knowledge co-creation and social learning. Governance systems are often fragmented, forming a barrier to adequately addressing the myriad of challenges affecting water resources, including climate change, increased urbanized populations, and pollution. Transitions towards sustainable water governance will likely require innovative learning partnerships between public, private, and civil society stakeholders. It is essential that such partnerships involve vertical and horizontal communication of ideas and knowledge, and an enabling and democratic environment characterized by informal and open discourse. There is increasing interest in learning-based transitions. Thus far, much scholarly thinking and, to a lesser degree, empirical research has gone into understanding the potential impact of social learning on multi-stakeholder settings. The question of whether such learning can be supported by forms of serious gaming has hardly been asked. This Special Issue critically explores the potential of serious games to support multi-stakeholder social learning and collaborations in the context of water governance. Serious games may involve simulations of real-world events and processes and are challenge players to solve contemporary societal problems; they, therefore, have a purpose beyond entertainment. They offer a largely untapped potential to support social learning and collaboration by facilitating access to and the exchange of knowledge and information, enhancing stakeholder interactions, empowering a wider audience to participate in decision making, and providing opportunities to test and analyze the outcomes of policies and management solutions. Little is known about how game-based approaches can be used in the context of collaborative water governance to maximize their potential for social learning. While several studies have reported examples of serious games, there is comparably less research about how to assess the impacts of serious games on social learning and transformative change

Testing the moderating role of social context on media violence effect in the case of peer aggression among adolescents

The main aim of the study was to examine a potential moderator role of social context in which children are exposed to media (alone, with peers, with parents) in the relationship between the frequency of media use and the frequency of committed peer aggression. The study included 880 elementary school students, which completed the following self-assessment measures: Peer violence among school children questionnaire (Velki, Kuterovac Jagodić, & Vrdoljak, 2012), and Exposure to the media scale (Velki & Kuterovac Jagodić, 2012). A moderation effect of parental and peer social context was found ; e.g. social context had a positive effect on decreasing the correlation between watching TV and electronic peer aggression. Peers social context during playing computer games was associated with decrease in physical peer aggression. Browsing the Internet with parents or peers also decreased physical and/or electronic peer aggression. The importance of social context as a protective factor is highlighted in the discussio

Peran Permainan Tradisional dalam Pendidikan Anak Usia Dini

Early childhood education serves a significant role in fostering the cognitive, social, and motor skill development of young children. For ages, traditional games have been an integral aspect of human society and are widely recognised as a significant element in the realm of early childhood education. The primary objective of this study is to elucidate the significance of traditional games within the context of early childhood education. The research methodology employed in this study involves doing a comprehensive review of relevant literature. The findings of this study indicate that traditional games designed for early childhood have the potential to enhance the development of imagination and creativity, enhance spatial reasoning and visualisation skills, foster social interaction and collaborative engagement, improve fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination, and instill a sense of achievement and self-confidence

Games & Theory

‘Games & Theory’ was an international exhibition of the work of contemporary artists who share interests in play, sports and gaming. It was curated by Hammonds for the South London Art Gallery (SLG) in summer 2008. Conventionally, play is understood as unfettered creative freedom, while gaming addresses competition and strategy. The exhibition’s originality lay in the way it brought these two distinct theories into dialogue. Hammonds’s exhibition explored the proposition that, as a social practice, play can also be understood as a form of political negotiation. Taking its cue from Situationist thinking, the exhibition explored the radical potential of play as a form of resistance and expression of freedom. The exhibition was structured as a playground to test the extent to which the conventional spaces of the gallery and its immediate environment could be modified and extended. ‘Games & Theory’ also engaged with the challenge of examining the ways in which conventional art practices and objects – such as painting – could be modified by participatory practices associated with play. This was one of a series of projects curated by Hammonds at the SLG that transformed the gallery into an alternative social space. The exhibition marked the starting point of a three-year programme of ‘play’ within the SLG’s programme. Hammonds set these curatorial ideas in a critical and artistic context in an essay entitled ‘Games people play’ in the accompanying book, The Cat Came as a Tomato: Conversations on Contemporary Art and Play (2011). In it, Hammonds reflected on the ways in which art has been conventionally grouped with play to contain it outside the public/political space. The exhibition was reviewed in Frieze, Art Monthly, Time Out and Art Review (all 2008)

Adolescent video game addiction: issues for the classroom

In the popular press, most of the reported effects of video games appear to centre upon the alleged negative consequences such as increased aggression, medical consequences of excessive play, and addiction. Although in extreme cases, video game playing can be addictive, there are many benefts that children and adolescents can get from playing video games. These can be educational, social, and/or therapeutic. This paper examines various issues about the use of video games in the classroom. This includes reasons as to why video games may be useful in educational contexts, the factors that a teacher should evaluate when choosing an educational video game to be used in a classroom situation, and some practical advice and guidance for teachers about video game playing (particularly in the context of reducing excessive video game play). It is concluded that video games have great educational potential in addition to their entertainment value and may possess advantages not present in other learning strategies

Spillover modes in multiplex games: double-edged effects on cooperation, and their coevolution

In recent years, there has been growing interest in studying games on multiplex networks that account for interactions across linked social contexts. However, little is known about how potential cross-context interference, or spillover, of individual behavioural strategy impact overall cooperation. We consider three plausible spillover modes, quantifying and comparing their effects on the evolution of cooperation. In our model, social interactions take place on two network layers: one represents repeated interactions with close neighbours in a lattice, the other represents one-shot interactions with random individuals across the same population. Spillover can occur during the social learning process with accidental cross-layer strategy transfer, or during social interactions with errors in implementation due to contextual interference. Our analytical results, using extended pair approximation, are in good agreement with extensive simulations. We find double-edged effects of spillover on cooperation: increasing the intensity of spillover can promote cooperation provided cooperation is favoured in one layer, but too much spillover is detrimental. We also discover a bistability phenomenon of cooperation: spillover hinders or promotes cooperation depending on initial frequencies of cooperation in each layer. Furthermore, comparing strategy combinations that emerge in each spillover mode provides a good indication of their co-evolutionary dynamics with cooperation. Our results make testable predictions that inspire future research, and sheds light on human cooperation across social domains and their interference with one another

The Short-term Effect of Playing Co-operative and Competitive Card-/Board Games on Pro-social Behavior

The thesis experiment tested whether card-/board games could be used to increase pro-social behavior among participants. Positive results would give credence to their use for improving team work among groups, e.g. in the work place. The study utilized three different games, a cooperative, a neutral and a competitive game. Participants were randomly assigned a game to play for 5 minutes before being given a pro-social task. The pro-social task involved asking participants to assign tangram puzzles of varying difficulty for another person to solve, and if the person could solve 10/11 puzzles within a 10 minute time frame they would receive a monetary reward. The participants could, thus, help the other person by assigning easy puzzles or hinder them by assigning difficult puzzles. The study found differences in pro-social tendencies among the three game groups however the differences were not statistically significant. The effect of gender was also analyzed, and no statistically significant difference was found between genders. The result was unexpected as past research testing video games effect on pro-social behavior found significant differences between violent, co-operative games and neutral games. Three potential reasons for the result were identified. First the utilized game time of 5 minutes was very short, pro-social scripts may not have had enough time to be primed in the participants’ minds and thus their effect on the pro-social task were negligible. The medium of card-/board games may not have been beneficial in inducing the pro-social behavior. Finally it is worth noting that while not statistically significant there was an increase in pro-social tendencies both in the competitive and co-operative game group. Both games were played with other participants, while the neutral game was played solo. This may suggest that the context of playing with other people mattered more than the content of the game played. The study found that short durations of game play utilizing card-/board games did not show statistically significant benefits in improving pro-social behaviors

Electronic forms of entertainment in the context of physical activity and addiction risk – a knowledge review

A new way of spending leisure time browsing the Internet, using social networking sites, and playing games has created a new health problem: cell phone addiction. So-called phonoholism or netholism is most thriving among young people, who prioritize entertainment in the real world, which most often necessitates physical activity, over entertainment in the virtual world, which requires a more static approach. However, some companies have gone against the traditional use of phone games by creating multimedia city games that require a dynamic-movement approach. The aim of this review is to gather current theoretical knowledge about electronic forms of entertainment in the context of their influence on users' physical activity, creation of health potential and formation of risk of addiction to such forms of entertainment