Glitchspace:teaching programming through puzzles in cyberspace

There is an increasing need to address the player experience in games-based learning. Whilst games offer enormous potential as learning experiences, the balance between entertainment and education must be carefully designed and delivered. Successful commercial games tend to focus gameplay above any educational aspects. In contrast, games designed for educational purposes have a habit of sacrificing entertainment for educational value which can result in a decline in player engagement. For both, the player experience is critical as it can have a profound effect on both the commercial success of the game and in delivering the educational engagement. As part of an Interface-funded research project Abertay University worked with the independent games company, Space Budgie, to enhance the user experience of their educational game Glitchspace. The game aimed to teach basic coding principles and terminology in an entertaining way. The game sets the player inside a Mondrian-inspired cyberspace world where to progress the player needs to reprogramme the world around them to solve puzzles. The main objective of the academic-industry collaborative project was to analyse the user experience (UX) of the game to increase its educational value for a standalone educational version. The UX design focused on both pragmatic and hedonic qualities such playability, usability and the psychological impact of the game. The empirical study of the UX design allowed all parties to develop a deeper understanding of how the game was being played and the initial reactions to the game by the player. The core research question that the study sought to answer was whether when designing an educational game, UX design could improve philosophical concepts like motivation and engagement to foster better learning experiences.</p

Use of Tools: UX Principles for Interactive Narrative Authoring Tools

The technology supporting Interactive Digital Narrative (IDN) is of particular significance to cultural heritage research. IDN technology provides a means of engagement in cultural heritage sites, a medium for culturally significant stories, and culturally significant story-centric games. While previous work in this space has numerous examples of user experience (UX) evaluations of the interactive narrative works themselves, there is significantly less in terms of evaluation of technology for authoring IDN, creating a UX research space in this area that is focused on audience and not authors. We propose to balance this focus by considering the UX of authoring tools more closely. In this work, we undertake a review of the state of the art of authoring tools for IDN such as story-centric games, and report on a rigorous UX evaluation of representative technologies (n=21). We also address the challenges of UX research for these tools through an original evaluation methodology where authors complete a story composed of representative story features. Our study leads us to conclude 7 UX principles for IDN authoring tools that both explore how authors use tools to create story-focused games, and how the interface for these tools impacts the creative process

User Experience Evaluations in Rehabilitation Video Games for Children: A Systematic Mapping of the Literature

Background: In recent years, the interest in user experience (UX) evaluation methods for assessing technology solutions, especially in health systems for children with special needs like cognitive disabilities, has increased. Objective: Conduct a systematic mapping study to provide an overview in the field of UX evaluations in rehabilitation video games for children. Methods: The definition of research questions, the search for primary studies and the extraction of those studies by inclusion and exclusion criteria lead to the mapping of primary papers according to a classification scheme. Results: Main findings from this study include the detection of the target population of the selected studies, the recognition of two different ways of evaluating UX: (i) user evaluation and (ii) system evaluation, and UX measurements and devices used. Conclusions: This systematic mapping specifies the research gaps identified for future research works in the area

A Novel Design Pipeline for Authoring Tools

Interactive digital narrative research presents a diverse range of authoring tools. Although our field often publishes the technology, it less often publishes a refined UX design pipeline for those tools' authoring experience. This is despite the UX of these tools long being identified as a key challenge and UX design pipelines being an active area of research in adjacent technologies such as the games that sometimes deliver our stories. We present a three-stage design pipeline targeting the creation of interactive narrative authoring tools that is informed by existing design pipelines that consider the user and their experience at all stages. We then detail our own application of this pipeline to the design of a new authoring tool, reporting on the methodologies, analyses, and findings of each step

The power of immersive technologies: a sociopsychological analysis of the relationship between immersive environments, storytelling, sentiment, and the impact on user experience

This dissertation initially focused on exploring the potential of immersive technologies for the distant future. However, the emergence of the COVID-19 virus in late 2019 disrupted the world, causing a pause in many areas. Nevertheless, the butterfly effect of the pandemic spurred the development of immersive technologies, resulting in the rise of the metaverse, web3, non-fungible tokens (NFT), and avatars, which are gaining increasing popularity. The excitement for the metaverse is growing in both academia and industry, leading to new avenues of research, digital marketing, video games, tourism, and social media. This dissertation explores this rapidly emerging technological revolution and its effects on user experience (UX)

Pengembangan UI/UX Game “SWEET CITY” Menggunakan Metode UCD (User Centered Design) dan Unity Game Engine

Penelitian yang dilakukan oleh penulis adalah untuk mengembangkan game dari sisi UI/UX pada game edukasi “Sweet City” yang bergenre action-platformer dengan menggunakan metode User Centered Design (UCD). Tujuan dalam pengembangan UI/UX pada game tersebut adalah untuk membantu user memahami bahaya konsumsi manisan berlebih dan diiringi dengan gameplay yang mudah. Maka untuk menghasilkan desain UI yang baik dan mampu memberikan user experience dari materi pembelajaran yang dikemas dengan menarik maka peneliti memutuskan menggunakan User Centered Design sebagai metode penelitian dalam perancangan UI/UX nantinya. Setelah proses desain selesai, komponen game dimasukkan ke dalam Unity Game Engine untuk merealisasikan desain menjadi game sepenuhnya. Berdasarkan penelitian tersebut, ditemukan 66.7% dari 12 responden dapat memahami bahaya memakan manisan dengan baik dan 58.3% menyatakan game edukasi tersebut layak digunakan sebagai media edukasi.The study by the author is to develop UI/UX for the education game "Sweet City". The game use genre action-platformer and the method to design this game is user centered design (UCD). The purpose in UI/UX development on the game is to help the user understand the dangers of overindulgence and accompanied by easy gameplay. Accordingly to create a good UI design and to deliver the user experience of the attractively packed learning materials, researchers decided to use the centered design user as the research method in UI/UX design later. After the design process is completed, game components are incorporated into the unity game engine to realize the design into the game completely. Based on the study, it has been found 66.7% of 12 respondents can understand the dangers of eating sweets properly and 58.3% stating the educational games are worthy of being used as education media

Playful finance: Gamification and intermediation in FinTech economies

This paper examines how digital gamification techniques, which incorporate video gaming elements (rather than full-fledged games) into apps, are reshaping the logics and practices of intermediation that are core to FinTech economies. First, we argue gamification brings into view socio-technical knowledges, such as behavioral science, digital marketing, and user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design, which are increasingly important to constituting FinTech intermediation. Second, gamification features specialist firms that are presently overlooked by research into the roles of changing advanced producer services (APS) complexes in FinTech and financial intermediation. Third, gamified apps are deployed to advance competitive intermediary positions which playfully capture user attention and configure user behavior, contrasting with FinTech strategies that typically promise users’ ease of access, reduced transaction costs and personalized products and services. We illustrate these arguments through three firm-level case studies from across Asia, where the development of gamified FinTech apps has been especially prominent

User Experience Evaluation in BCI: Filling the Gap

Brain-computer interface (BCI) systems can improve the user experience (UX) when used in entertainment technologies. Improved UX can enhance user acceptance, improve quality of life and also increase the system performance of a BCI system. Therefore, the evaluation of UX is essential in BCI research. However, BCI systems are generally evaluated according to the system aspect only so there is no methodology to evaluate UX in BCI systems. This paper gives an overview of such methods from the human-computer interaction field and discusses their possible uses in BCI research