Co-design personal sleep health technology for and with university students

University students often experience sleep disturbances and disorders. Personal digital technologies present a great opportunity for sleep health promotion targeting this population. However, studies that engage university students in designing and implementing digital sleep health technologies are scarce. This study sought to understand how we could build digital sleep health technologies that meet the needs of university students through a co-design process. We conducted three co-design workshops with 51 university students to identify design opportunities and to generate features for sleep health apps through workshop activities. The generated ideas were organized using the stage-based model of self-tracking so that our findings could be well-situated within the context of personal health informatics. Our findings contribute new design opportunities for sleep health technologies targeting university students along the dimensions of sleep environment optimization, online community, gamification, generative AI, materializing sleep with learning, and personalization

Publication and Evaluation Challenges in Games & Interactive Media

Faculty in the fields of games and interactive media face significant challenges in publishing and documenting their scholarly work for evaluation in the tenure and promotion process. These challenges include selecting appropriate publication venues and assigning authorship for works spanning multiple disciplines; archiving and accurately citing collaborative digital projects; and redefining “peer review,” impact, and dissemination in the context of creative digital works. In this paper I describe many of these challenges, and suggest several potential solutions

Bridging the Physical Learning Divides: A Design Framework for Embodied Learning Games and Simulations

ABSTRACT Due to a broad conceptual usage of the term embodiment across a diverse variety of research domains, existing embodied learning games and simulations utilize a large breadth of design approaches that often result in seemingly unrelated systems. This becomes problematic when trying to critically evaluate the usage and effectiveness of embodiment within existing designs, as well as when trying to utilize embodiment in the design of new games and simulations. In this paper, we present our work on combining differing conceptual and design approaches for embodied learning systems into a unified design framework. We describe the creation process for the framework, explain its dimensions, and provide examples of its use. Our design framework will benefit educational game researchers by providing a unifying foundation for the description, categorization, and evaluation of designs for embodied learning games and simulations

Music to My Ears: Developing Kanji Stroke Knowledge through an Educational Music Game

Millions of people worldwide are taking up foreign languages with logographic writing systems, such as Japanese or Chinese. Learning thousands of characters necessary for literacy in those languages is a unique challenge to those coming from alphabetic backgrounds, and sustaining motivation in the face of such a momentous task is a struggle for many students. Many games exist for this purpose, but few offer production memory practice such as writing, and the vast majority are thinly veiled flashcards. To address this gap, we created Radical Tunes—a musical kanji-writing game—which combines production practice with musical mnemonic by assigning a melody to each element of a character. We chose to utilize music as it is a powerful tool that can be employed to enhance learning and memory. In this article, we explore whether incorporating melodies into a kanji learning game can positively affect the memorization of the stroke order/direction and overall shape of several Japanese characters, similar to the mnemonic effect of adding music to text. Specifically, we conducted two experimental studies, finding that (1) music improved immersion—an important factor related to learning; and (2) there was a positive correlation between melody presence and character production, particularly for more complex characters

Generominos: Ideation Cards for Interactive Generativity

We present Generominos, a set of design cards to model inter- active generative systems. While many ideation cards exist, Generominos attempts to model the constraints of making a transformative pipeline of data in the constraints of the cards themselves. For this paper, we contribute the design of the Generominos cards and a preliminary evaluation of perceived usefulness in an undergraduate alternative controller class

Music to My Ears: Developing Kanji Stroke Knowledge through an Educational Music Game

Millions of people worldwide are taking up foreign languages with logographic writing systems, such as Japanese or Chinese. Learning thousands of characters necessary for literacy in those languages is a unique challenge to those coming from alphabetic backgrounds, and sustaining motivation in the face of such a momentous task is a struggle for many students. Many games exist for this purpose, but few offer production memory practice such as writing, and the vast majority are thinly veiled flashcards. To address this gap, we created Radical Tunes—a musical kanji-writing game—which combines production practice with musical mnemonic by assigning a melody to each element of a character. We chose to utilize music as it is a powerful tool that can be employed to enhance learning and memory. In this article, we explore whether incorporating melodies into a kanji learning game can positively affect the memorization of the stroke order/direction and overall shape of several Japanese characters, similar to the mnemonic effect of adding music to text. Specifically, we conducted two experimental studies, finding that (1) music improved immersion—an important factor related to learning; and (2) there was a positive correlation between melody presence and character production, particularly for more complex characters

Searching for Balanced 2D Brawler Games: Successes and Failures of Automated Evaluation

Automated game design (AGD) research focuses on creating systems that can design entirely new games. This is often done by a genetic algorithm, with a fitness function that is used to find individual games that satisfy certain design criteria. However, it is difficult to tell if generated games actually have the desired emergent properties (such as balance), since the fitness function might not align well with human aesthetic judgments about such properties. This is particularly problematic when trying to automatically design balanced, fair, yet asymmetrical games for multiple players. In this paper we present an implementation of an optimization-based AGD system for brawler games, and present findings from a preliminary user study of generated games. We show that while the system successfully optimizes for our written fitness function during human play, we found that this optimization did not necessarily translate to our hypothesized human experience of the game

Evaluating AI-Based Games through Retellings

We propose a new approach to the human-centered evaluation of AI-based games, grounded in the analysis of player retellings of their play experiences. Retellings offer unique insight into dimensions of player experience that can be hard to get at through existing evaluation methods, such as the typical narrative structures that tend to emerge in the player’s mind when they play a particular game; the variety of subjectively experienced narratives that are possible and probable within a particular game; and the ways in which a game supports, or fails to support, the player’s process of narrativization. We used a grounded theory methodology to analyze retellings of play experiences in Civilization VI, Stellaris, and two distinct versions of the research game Prom Week. We also interviewed the creators of several retellings to gain insight into the subjective experience of story construction in collaboration with these games

Games and Software Engineering: Engineering fun, inspiration, and motivation

Games are a popular form of entertainment and, due to their nature (i.e., interactive, immersive, etc.), strongly lend themselves for use beyond this original intent. Serious games, or games with a purpose, have been introduced to integrate the entertainment value games with domain specific objectives on important topics within education, health, and the environment to mention a few. In addition, gamification has been used to enhance nonentertainment applications with game elements; it aspires to foster behavioral changes, engagement, motivation, and participation in activities. In this context, the actions performed have meaning/value in the game experience in order to improve workplace performance or learn something in real life. The growing adoption of gameful experiences in all of the previous contexts make their design and development increasingly complex due to, for example, the number and variety of users, and their potential mission criticality. This complexity is nurtured, among the other factors, by a lack of theoretical grounding and adequate frameworks to engineer the intended solutions. In this paper, we report the outcomes of the 6th International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering: Engineering fun, inspiration, and motivation (GAS 2023 ) 1, which was held as part of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2022) in Pittsburgh, PA, USA on May 20, 2022. The workshop program includes two exciting keynotes discussing topics related to training and learning, and fulfilling the promise and potential of gamification. The two paper sessions examined gamification from the perspectives of software project, testing, and, design. The conclusion of the workshop is anchored by a panel of four highly qualified researchers and practitioners discussing lessons learned and the future of gamification