Could the Player’s Engagement in a Video Game Increase His/Her Interest in Science?

International audienceOur work is to analyze how the practice of chosen video games may influence the player's interest. A set of video games was selected by a group of experts according to their qualities as games and their relations with scientific knowledge. A focus test experiment has been set up to evaluate the correlation between teenagers engagement and their interest in scientific domains. The analysis of the results shows that the desire to pursue the game and the sentiment of responsibility has, respectively, a direct and an indirect influence on the player's scientific interest. Considering that interest is known to be an important motivational factor in learning, these results have important implications for the serious games design. 1 Introduction The present study is a part of the project, Recensement /INMEDIATS 1 , which main goals are to understand the relationship between digital entertainment and the interest in scientific knowledge. Our work is to analyze how the practice of chosen video games may influence the player's interest. Interest is defined to be an emotional and motivational variable [1]. Furthermore, it has been established that the student's personal, situational and topic interest influence positively his/her learning outcomes [2,3]. Finally, in cognitive science, interest is considered to be very closely associated to a person's engagement in a given cognitive activity [4]. Engagement is associated with sensations such as immersion or, even more so, presence: Essentially, the sensation to "be there" [5,6,7]. In particular, Brockmyer & al. establish the relation between engagement and emotions, as fear, in their game engagement questionnaire. Furthermore, some theoretical video game studies observed that emotion can be considered as a component of engagement [8,9]. On the 1 Recensement/INMEDIATS is partly funded by the Government agency ANRU with Universcience, CNAM, the University of Paris 8 as partners

Mergers and difference-in-difference estimator : why firms do not increase prices?

Difference-in-Difference (DiD) methods are being increasingly used to analyze the impact of mergers on pricing and other market equilibrium outcomes. Using evidence from an exogenous merger between two retail gasoline companies in a specific market in Spain, this paper shows how concentration did not lead to a price increase. In fact, the conjectural variation model concludes that the existence of a collusive agreement before and after the merger accounts for this result, rather than the existence of efficient gains. This result may explain empirical evidence reported in the literature according to which mergers between firms do not have significant effects on prices

Evaluating User Experience in a Selection Based Brain-Computer Interface Game: A Comparative Study

In human-computer interaction, it is important to offer the users correct modalities for particular tasks and situations. Unless the user has the suitable modality for a task, neither task performance nor user experience can be optimised. The aim of this study is to assess the appropriateness of using a steady-state visually evoked potential based brain-computer interface (BCI) for selection tasks in a computer game. In an experiment participants evaluated a BCI control and a comparable automatic speech recogniser (ASR) control in terms of workload, usability and engagement. The results showed that although BCI was a satisfactory modality in completing selection tasks, its use in our game was not engaging for the player. In our particular setup, ASR control appeared to be a better alternative to BCI control