Generation of effective serious games with static and dynamic content

With video games being a huge market, attracting and engaging millions of players, it is tempting to use these motivational aspects not just for entertainment. After all, play as the basis of games has inherent learning aspects, for example seen at the way how children play and learn. The serious games movement that took off at the beginning of the 21st century wants to achieve exactly that: provide playful learning environments and utilize the motivational aspects of games to transport serious content to players. Getting from such an idea to an actual game, however, is far from trivial. A fundamental problem is how to integrate serious content and game parts. Finding ways how to improve the game creation process to produce applications that are both fun to play and effective in delivering a serious content is the main focus of this thesis. Therefore, the problem is approached in two ways: by providing best practice tips for the creators of serious games and by presenting results of different practical game implementations and studies. Two sets of serious games — seven in total — have been developed within the course of this thesis. The first set comprises games with static serious content. These games depict the regular development approach. Here, a static game concept is created and implemented by professional game developers. This approach allows for a high degree of freedom in the game creation process. Nevertheless, emphasis has to be put on combining serious content in the right way to produce effective and fun serious games. Best practice tips are given along with presenting results from user studies that are based on the implemented game prototypes. The second set of games features dynamic learning content. In contrast to static variants, these games support changing the learning content at runtime. This allows for more accessible creation methods: Once created, any domain expert can create own custom games without the need for expertise in game development. On the other hand, special emphasis has to be put on designing the frameworks in a manner that game scenario and learning content are well integrated, despite not having a thematic connection. Different approaches are examined by developing games with dynamic content. The games are evaluated in terms of their usefulness. Different user studies look at the motivational aspects as well as at the learning outcome. Furthermore, the effect of not having a connection between game scenario and learning content is examined to compare the effectiveness of static and dynamic variants

Customizable teaching on mobile devices in higher education

Every teacher struggles with the student’s attention when giving a lecture. It is not easy to meet every single student at its knowledge level in a seminar group, and it becomes nearly impossible in huge university lectures with hundreds of students. With the spread of mobile devices among students, Audience Response Systems (ARS) proved as an easy and cheap solution to activate the audience and to compare the students’ real knowledge base with the lecturer’s estimation. Today, lecturers are able to choose between a huge variety of different ARSs. But as every lecturer has a very individual teaching style, he or she is not yet able to create or customize their individual audience response teaching scenario within a single system. The available systems are quite similar to each other and mostly support only a handful of different scenarios. Therefore, this work identified the abstract core elements of ARSs and developed a model to create individual and customizable scenarios for the students’ mobile devices. Teachers become able to build their individual application, define the appearance on the students’ phones in a scenario construction kit and even determine the scenario’s behavior logic. Two ARS applications were implemented and used to evaluate the model in real lectures for the last four years. A first ARS was integrated into the university’s learning management system ILIAS and provided lecturers with basic question functionalities, whereas a second and more advanced stand-alone version enabled lecturers to use personal scenarios in a variety of lecture settings. Hence, scenarios like quizzes, message boards, teacher feedback and live experiments became possible. The approaches were evaluated from a technical, student and lecturer perspective in various courses of different areas and sizes. The new model showed great results and potential in customization, but the implementation reached its limits as it lacked in performance scalability for complex scenarios with a large amount of students

Columbia Chronicle (11/08/2004)

Student newspaper from November 8, 2004 entitled The Columbia Chronicle. This issue is 40 pages and is listed as Volume 38, Number 7. Cover story: Hokin broken for upgrades Editor-in-Chief: Andrew Greinerhttps://digitalcommons.colum.edu/cadc_chronicle/1621/thumbnail.jp

'Stitched up' in the 'Conversengine': using expressive processing and multimodal languages to create a character-driven interactive digital narrative

My practice-based research, which this thesis supports, explores the question: How can a convincing interactive character, with apparent psychological depth, be modelled in a playable digital narrative that adapts to reader choice? To this end I am building my own platform, the 'Conversengine', for authoring and, in future, publishing and playing text-driven interactive narratives that rely on enactment rather than narration. Currently, the platform consists of the 'Convowriter', the authoring tool, which I am using to develop 'Stitched Up', an interactive psychological thriller. Using the concept of the black box from second-order cybernetics with possible worlds and theory of mind from narratology, I show how combining these theories, mapping one onto another, provides a framework for not only thinking about the character-driven interactive narrative, but also a methodology for authoring one, in both natural language and computer code, and designing its richly responsive visual interface. This incorporates a unique emotional data visualisation system ('emoviz') to dynamically represent interactive fictional characters. This system is built upon the Pleasure-Arousal-Dominance Emotional State Model (Russell and Mehrabian, 1977) and informed by existing psychological research into colour, shape and motion. I contend that abstract visualisations, coupled with the characters' text-based thoughts and/or speech, can eloquently express convincing mental and emotional behaviour. This provides the feedback in my cybernetic 'steering-a-course' game engine, which, whilst maintaining narrative coherence, allows the reader-player to steer their own course through the narrative. Creating an interactive narrative of this kind, which simulates psychological rather than physical action, requires a different approach to game writing, development and design. In part two of this thesis, I explore how the distinction between story and narrative discourse has practical implications for the creation of interactive digital narratives. I discuss how using existing game engines and tools can be limiting, and how this led to building my own interactive narrative engine with its own expressive domain-specific language. I show how the combined features of the 'Conversengine' offer a new way of representing complex interactive characters with psychological depth

Towards a critical game based pedagogy

This thesis outlines and examines core concepts of game-based learning as identified by James Paul Gee, and Kurt Squire, among other scholars. These findings are then connected to the contemporary, transformative threshold concepts of composition—as explored in Naming What We Know. This connection seeks to argue game-based pedagogy may be an invaluable tool for introducing critical perspectives to composition students in order to better equip them with critical thinking strategies and cultural critiques, while improving their writing skills. A theoretical framework is presented in the form of four “Pillars” of a Critical Game-Based Pedagogy: Literacy, Identity, Social Learning, and Multimodality—all key components of critical game-based curricula, which centers expanded definitions of literacy, resists social constructions, encourages cooperation, and practices a wide variety of multimedia composition strategies. The concluding discussion attempts to illustrate these concepts through anecdotal reflections on teaching, particular games, and their relationship to digital humanities—including a supplementary digital platform hosting this research

Abstracts: HASTAC 2017: The Possible Worlds of Digital Humanities

The document contains abstracts for HASTAC 2017

Looking BK and Moving FD: Toward a Sociocultural Lens on Learning with Programmable Media

Part of the Volume on Digital Young, Innovation, and the Unexpected This chapter is a look back at ideas about programming as a form of digital media for learning in the mid-1990s to help realize more of the potential of these tools in the future. It presents a close examination of the work of children who became fluent in programming animations, games, and interactive stories using MicroWorlds Logo. A vignette from the creation of a movie remix by African American girls in a culturally relevant school is analyzed. Their work supports a constructionist perspective that children can learn both programming and other subject-matter ideas through creating personally meaningful projects with programmable media. Unexpected from this view is that the children brought practices from living culturally to define and produce their project and that these cultural practices were integral to their learning. Implications are outlined for educators, policy makers, and researchers to use views of culture in learning with programmable media to connect more children to the benefits of these media

Digital Dialogism: Space, Time, and Queerness in Video Games

Video games are multimodal pieces of media; they communicate meaning through many layers of signification including aural, visual, narrative, mechanical, and more. To understand the ways that games communicate meaning and influence interpretation, it is crucial to not just examine the various layers of game modalities, but the ways that those layers communicate with each other as multimodal objects. By adapting Mikhail Bakhtin’s literary and language theory of dialogism (1981), this dissertation argues that because games are multimodal, they have layers of different “voices” that communicate ideas about the game to its players. These dialogic multimodalities “speak” different meanings to players, who then transform their interaction with these multimodalities into a narrative whole. Joining queer theory, narrative theory, and game studies, this dissertation examines one of the most successful video game titles to date, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (2011), which in addition to its widespread popularity, has also been identified by white supremacist groups as a game that supports white nationalist causes. Through a dialogic analysis of the multimodalities of temporal and spatial representation within the game, this dissertation identifies narrative, genre, gameplay, and representational elements of Skyrim that support white nationalist play while also silencing potential anti-racist perspectives within the game. Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and Chapter 3 work together towards a functional version of dialogism for the study of games, proving its relevance, formalizing the changes I make to the original theory, and indicating how important dialogic readings can be. Chapter 4 argues that the construction of timespace of Skyrim follows a chronotope of domination, where the player’s use of and engagement with the game are devoted to the control of time and space. Chapter 5 examines player self-narration and embodiment in queered space, looking at how spaces communicate to players, and Chapter 6 makes the case that player use and manipulation of queered time in the game encourages players to understand and interact with Skyrim in particular ways. Together, these chapters suggest that the ways players are oriented to play Skyrim, based on its spaces and temporalities, points players towards interpretations of the game that normalize and uphold instances of white supremacy based on narrative, interactive, and mechanical means