Realtime Feedback in Coding Games

Visual feedback in the space of interactive media can give users more insight into the execution of a program. This paper discusses the implications and results of incorporating visual annotations into both programming environments and computer games and how it affects the user experience. We combined both of these spaces and developed a coding-based resource-management game and used playtesting feedback to analyze the impact of the visuals on a user\u27s performance in the game. The collected data shows that in general, the introduction of visuals assists players in making more well-informed decisions within a time limit. Based on these gathered results, there is clearly a lot of undiscovered potential for visual annotations in both coding and gaming to provide more informative experiences

Digital Government Systems: Tackling The Legacy Problem Through A Game-Based Approach To Business Requirements Analysis

Government agency reliance on legacy systems is problematic: they are costly to maintain, difficult to integrate with and they hinder innovation. However, the replacement of legacy systems is not a straightforward endeavor, and it often results in technology substitution that is not accompanied by business process change. The focus of this dissertation is on the phenomenon of legacy system replication wherein the requirements for applications replacing outdated technologies mimic legacy features and reflect status quo operational processes that have been historically shaped by the legacy system itself. This problem is referred to throughout the dissertation as the “legacy problem.” The dissertation investigates its roots and proposes an approach to overcome it. Specifically, a mixed method research approach is taken, including a survey of public sector practitioners to explore the extent of the legacy problem, and a series of semi-structured interviews with government information technology and management professionals to delve into the dynamics of legacy system replacement projects. Findings indicate that the legacy problem often stems from a lack of critical analysis of business requirements and the desire to minimize the risks associated with organizational change, which often result in missed opportunities for digital government innovation. As a consequence, the dissertation proposes a candidate approach to deal with the legacy problem in the development of a requirements game (RE-PROVO) which supports requirements discussions structured around the themes of legacy (or heritage) preservation and innovation. The game is evaluated by local government practitioners through several iterations and their feedback is analysed to gauge the potential utility of the approach. The results indicate that with a streamlined user interface and accentuated game elements RE-PROVO can be a valuable and effective tool for requirements analysis in legacy system replacement projects

A critical analysis of mystery in videogames

Historically, videogame research has focused on how different videogame attributes (like challenge, fantasy, control, goals, etc.) impact the player experience. This type of research is important because it can provide insight into how to design more enjoyable videogames. However, very little exists within the current literature that focuses on mystery and its impact on the player experience. This dissertation is concerned with providing the research community with a better understanding of how mystery manifests in videogames and consequently impacts the player experience, specifically curiosity and motivation. To this end, the research questions are: 1. How do players experience mystery in videogames? 2. How do game designers consider mystery when designing their games? 3. What is the relationship between player-centered and designer-centered views of mystery in videogames? 4. What is the impact of player-centered and designer-centered elements of mystery on player motivation? Such understanding of mystery in videogames is provided in the form of a detailed taxonomy that concentrates on mystery from both the videogame designer and player perspectives. After a thorough review and summary of the related research, this taxonomy was created through two qualitative studies utilizing Grounded Theory. The findings of those studies were validated through an empirical instrument via a third, quantitative study. The conclusions and outcomes of this dissertation provide the gaming community with the knowledge on how to optimize mystery in videogame design which increases player curiosity and motivation. It also offers greater insight to the research community on the impact of mystery, as a videogame attribute, on the player experience. This dissertation describes in detail the methodology and processes of these research studies and how this taxonomy was established, and it explains the impact of this work as well as suggests areas for future work

A framework for the design and analysis of socially pervasive games

Pervasive games have the potential to create large social impacts on players and non-players alike. However, this can only happen when the game becomes integrated and accepted within a social community - or in other words, is socially adopted in its target environment. A socially pervasive game must also adapt to allow people to play at their own convenience. In my research I describe Powell’s Pervasive Play Lens (3PL), a framework for the design and analysis of socially pervasive games. 3PL is a powerful model that elaborates the magic circle to illustrate the concentric boundaries of play that surround socially pervasive games, helping designers understand when and how a person and a community might adopt a new pervasive game. This 3PL framework and theory have been applied to develop and refine Snag’em, a human scavenger hunt that has been applied to help students learn professional networking skills in several conferences over three years. I present my findings in a design research narrative that details the complex and rich social environments for Snag’em and the evolution of it’s design over several iterations. This narrative illustrates the application of 3PL and how designers can predict and measure how particular game elements create affordances that increase the acceptance, adoption, and adaptability of socially pervasive games

Methods of design, an overview of game design techniques

Key Summary Points The design of games for learning requires knowledge of game design and of instructional design. One cannot merely be layer on top of the other. A learning game must be designed to meet pre-specified learning objectives. Games have specific characteristics that require specific design skills: they are entertaining as well as instructional, interactive, visually appealing, and often replayable

Evolutionary Computation 2020

Intelligent optimization is based on the mechanism of computational intelligence to refine a suitable feature model, design an effective optimization algorithm, and then to obtain an optimal or satisfactory solution to a complex problem. Intelligent algorithms are key tools to ensure global optimization quality, fast optimization efficiency and robust optimization performance. Intelligent optimization algorithms have been studied by many researchers, leading to improvements in the performance of algorithms such as the evolutionary algorithm, whale optimization algorithm, differential evolution algorithm, and particle swarm optimization. Studies in this arena have also resulted in breakthroughs in solving complex problems including the green shop scheduling problem, the severe nonlinear problem in one-dimensional geodesic electromagnetic inversion, error and bug finding problem in software, the 0-1 backpack problem, traveler problem, and logistics distribution center siting problem. The editors are confident that this book can open a new avenue for further improvement and discoveries in the area of intelligent algorithms. The book is a valuable resource for researchers interested in understanding the principles and design of intelligent algorithms

Interpretation at the Controller\u27s Edge: The Role of Graphical User Interfaces in Virtual Archaeology

The important role of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) as a medium of interaction with technology is well established in the world of media design, but has not received significant attention in the field of virtual archaeology. GUIs provide interactive capabilities and contextual information for 3D content such as structure-from-motion (SFM) models, and can represent the difference between raw data and thoughtful, skilled scholarly publications. This project explores the implications of a GUI created with the game engine Unity 3D (Unity) for a series of SFM models recorded at a structure known as the Area B House at the ancient central Italian city of Gabii. Unity\u27s capabilities as a game engine allow for an embodied, reflexive, and design-centered approach to archaeological content. This presents some challenges to a strict interpretation of the New Materialism, and its call for unmediated interaction with archaeological things. On the contrary, design oriented thinking encourages us to balance human factors (i.e., the user experience) with the representations of things that constitute our content. The Area B House interface thus embraces a symmetrical view of materiality, wherein humans and things are equally important agents in entangled, recursive relationships. This is particularly true as entanglement, a key concept in symmetrical archaeology, manifests in the emergent systems of gameplay that arise out of embodied experiences with archaeological sites. This thesis will situate the theoretical implications of our interface within some longstanding debates about archaeological objectivity, representation, and communication

From solving usability problems towards experience-driven design in mobile games

Affected by Apple's data tracking privacy changes and macroeconomic turbulence, the mobile games industry is facing a fundamental shift from the previously dominating free-to-play business model to subscription-based games. The success of subscription games relies on providing an outstanding user experience to the players. The present research describes the process of improving the existing mobile game to cater to the needs of players in a subscription model. Experience-driven design is one of the methodologies in the human-computer interaction discipline, emphasizing the importance of the user's intended experience and using it to guide the design process. This research aims to transfer the experience-driven design approach to the context of mobile games and provide user experience designers with clear starting points and guidance for setting experience goals. The present study describes an experiment of setting immersion and approachability as leading experience goals for guiding the improvement process of the existing game. The inspiration for the experience goals was derived from player motivations based on the previous audience study, secondary analysis of the existing internal and player feedback, game reviews, primary analysis of the usability evaluation findings, and accessibility evaluation of the game. For experience goal evaluation, the design of the in-game dialogue feature was refined with immersion and approachability in mind. Comparative prototype testing featuring a playtest and post-test interviews were used to evaluate the renewed feature design with four participants. The initial comparative prototype testing findings helped identify a sense of control as an additional feature-specific goal critical to the experience of the game's narrative during the first minutes of gameplay. These findings suggest that further experience goal evaluation must include later phases of the player journey, such as scaffolding and endgame, to examine how the experience goals evolve over time. The initial comparative prototype testing allowed to prepare a groundwork for the experience goal evaluation that will be performed outside of the scope of this research due to the production delay. In the big picture, the research on experience-driven design in mobile games enhances understanding of user experience and supports the creation of innovative design strategies for engaging, enjoyable, and meaningful experiences for the players