Agonistic Games: Multiperspective and Unsettling Games for a Social Change

Historical narratives of conflict typically revolve around heroes and villains or perpetrators and victims. However, this dichotomy of events and people into good and evil greatly reduces the extent to which the past can be analysed, explained, and understood.To truly understand the actions that lead to conflict, one must appreciate the dense network of relationships between social agents, each with their own personal motivations and ideals. A contemporary political viewpoint capturing this multiperspectivity is that of Agonism. Focusing on the characters and events, Agonism emphasises the socio-cultural interactions and relationships between all agents involved including bystanders and, crucially, perpetrators. We discuss two `Games for a Social Change' that we have developed to promote an Agonistic view: Endless Blitz and Umschlagplatz '43. We describe the games themselves, and the framework of memory studies that informs our work

Public Narratives and the Construction of Memory Among European Muslims

This chapter draws on group and individual interviews with 735 European Muslims in 5 European countries and explores some key aspects of the politics of memory that form an inextricable component of European Muslim self-definitions, discourses and narratives deployed in the attempt to negotiate their inclusion in European societies

Multisensory games-based learning - lessons learnt from olfactory enhancement of a digital board game

Serious games are becoming an alternative educational method in a variety of fields because of their potential to improve the quality of learning experiences and to facilitate knowledge acquisition and content understanding. Moreover, entertainment-driven learners are more easily motivated to benefit from the learning process through meaningful activities defined in a game context. Interfacing educational computer games with multisensorial interfaces allows for a seamless integration between virtual and physical environments. Multisensorial cues can improve memory and attention and increase the cognitive and sensory-motor performance. Despite of the increasing knowledge in sensory processes, multisensory experiences and interactions in computer based instruction remain insufficiently explored and understood. In this paper, we present a multisensory educational game - Fragrance Channel - and we investigate how enabling olfaction can contribute to users' learning performance, engagement and quality of experience. We compare results obtained after experiencing Fragrance Channel in the presence and absence of olfactory feedback on both a mobile and a PC. A knowledge test administered before and immediately after showed that our proposed educational game led to an improvement of performance in all the explored conditions. Subjective measurements carried out after the olfactory experience showed that students enjoyed the scenario and appreciated it as being relevant.European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programm

From Global to National:Mapping the Trajectory of the South African Video Game Industry

Using a critical media industry studies framework, this chapter explores the South African (SA) video game industry to determine its current level of development and how that relates to its capacity to engage national identity. It also examines the wide range of conversations pertaining to select SA video games on international gaming forums. It demonstrates that while South African game developers are up-and-coming on a global stage, they are currently not designing games with content that reflects or references the SA nation in any direct way. The chapter discloses that the model in operation for a functioning and financially viable video game industry in SA appears to be one that operates on a global level first before game developers venture to produce nationally specific content

Stories from the History of Czechoslovakia, A Serious Game for Teaching History of the Czech Lands in the 20th Century – Notes on Design Concepts and Design Process

Part 2: Serious Games (Learning and Training)International audienceIn the context of curricular history education both commercial entertainment games as well as serious games specifically tailored for educational purposes were employed. Especially the latter types of games were reported as being promising concerning instructional effectiveness. Still, there are not many complex serious games for history education, particularly in the secondary schools context. In this work-in-progress paper, we report on the progress of project Stories from the History of Czechoslovakia, a serious game for teaching history of the Czech lands in the 20th century. We introduce main game concepts, describe two main design challenges we have been facing during the development and how we have addressed them and overview our feasibility study on 71 high-school students. This paper can be informative for researchers and designers working on similar projects