On the popularization of digital close-range photogrammetry: a handbook for new users.

Εθνικό Μετσόβιο Πολυτεχνείο--Μεταπτυχιακή Εργασία. Διεπιστημονικό-Διατμηματικό Πρόγραμμα Μεταπτυχιακών Σπουδών (Δ.Π.Μ.Σ.) “Γεωπληροφορική

Serious ‘Slow’ Game Jam - A Game Jam Model for Serious Game Design

The Serious ‘Slow’ Game Jam (SSGJ) is a new model for use in serious game design and research. Game jams contribute to creative, innovative and collaborative design, however, game jams for serious purposes require an alternative model that integrates domain experts within the jammer community to ensure the validity of their designs and content. Furthermore, a rigorous yet accessible design methodology is required to balance pedagogic and game aspects to support jammers, as well as to assist researchers in subsequent analysis and evaluation. A standard entertainment game jam model does not afford support for these aspects. The SSGJ model addresses these needs through an inclusive, collaborative, and creative framework for multidisciplinary teams, which includes: encouraging reflection and knowledge exchange; improving content validity; and providing continuous support and mentoring to participants. Reflection on the model highlights the importance of framing serious game jams as explicitly educational activities and embedding them into existing training contexts. The SSGJ model contributes to a collaborative serious game design methodology for the wider research community, irrespective of application domains

Reclaiming common space in saturated urban environment- a neighborhood center in Kato Patisia

Η εργασία επιχειρεί να: -συνθέσει τα προβληματικά στοιχεία του κατοικείν στο κέντρο της Αθήνας -χαρτογραφήσει συγκεκριμένες περιοχές που τα μορφοποιούν -ανιχνεύσει τις (πολεοδομικές) λειτουργίες και το δυναμικό μετασχηματισμού τους -προτείνει ένα σύστημα αναπτυξιακής αυτοδιαχείρισης τους με μονάδα τη γειτονιάThis paper deals with negative aspects of central residential areas in Athens and tries to put together a system of utilizing the remaining potential in favor of the neighborhood.Όλγα Σ. Χατζηφώτ

Serious Game Rapid Online Co-design to Facilitate Change Within Education

Serious games have potential for facilitating change processes but require rigorous, interdisciplinary design to be effective. A novel, rapid online work-flow was developed for co-design of games for change with school teachers. Major design challenges included: short timescale; appropriately scaffolding a complex process; remote online interactions; and interdisciplinary commu-nication. The resulting workflow is highly visual, structured, and focused on swift knowledge exchange between pedagogy and game experts, drawing on relevant frameworks. Two workshops used the new method, producing eight co-designed serious games. Analysis suggests the workflow is effective for knowledge exchange for the rapid and rigorous co-design of serious games and has advantages for inclusivity and confidence in the co-design process

Provoking Games to Encourage Critical Reflection

The SECRIOUS project takes a game-based approach to improving knowledge and attitudes in cybersecurity practices. Our methodology includes interdisciplinary Serious Game co-design with coders and aims to produce critical reflection on participants’ own coding practice. To encourage this we created a series of Small Provoking Games (SPGs) about the project’s three overarching topics (Code Security; API Security; Security Lifecycle) and five co-produced themes (Coder Practices; Code Motivation; Morality; Resources; Communication). Games and play are well-suited for creating both reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action. Provoking a lasting change in attitudes towards secure coding practice requires dialogic or inquiry-based reflection leading to transformative reflection We define a ‘provoking game’ as one that uses the techniques of reflective game design to produce cognitive and affective challenge – a eudaimonic appreciation of the player experience. This emphasises a players’ sense of purpose and aims to create exo-transformation (change in attitudes and/or practice outside the game). SPG design foregrounded Khaled’s principles of reflective game design and was led by serious game experts, a cybersecurity expert, and a playwright but included input from the entire SECRIOUS team to define each game’s specific focus. Two SPGs were produced: Protection (which challenges the assumption of ‘absolute’ cybersecurity protection) and Collaboration (which highlights communication in cybersecurity developer teams) with a third in progress. SPGs feature highly exploratory gameplay, expected failure, and focus on metaphor (of both game objects and player actions) to create doubt, contradicting existing mental models and encouraging the players to question the game rules and underlying concepts. The games were used within game-jams to provoke critical discussion, a creative mindset, and group reflection. This paper analyses the design process of these two SPGs and reflects on our contribution to reflective game design

Protection

This game is the direct result of a process of investigation leading to new insights, effectively shared. It is therefore firmly a research output in terms of both methodology and purpose. An extended abstract justifying this follows. Game description Protection is a small, provoking game (SPG) for software developers and amateur coders aimed at challenging commonly-held false preconceptions about cybersecurity. The game was designed and developed by an interdisciplinary research team on the SECRIOUS project to fit into the overarching topic of Code Security and the theme of Coder Practices. The game designers converted basic cybersecurity concepts, principles and practices into game objects, rules, and player actions respectively, and the gameplay situates the player in this challenging environment with minimal guidance. By exploring and experimenting, players are expected to piece together their personal interpretation of what ‘protection’ is and how to achieve it. The game has a post-play activity where players are prompted to actively compare their in-game mental model with their real-life coding practices and to reflect on any consequent shifts in their perspective. The game has a light-hearted tone with unconventional iconography to convey cybersecurity issues in a more accessible manner. Gameplay Protection is a short, 2d, side-scrolling, single-player game with elements from action (move/avoid/collect), strategy (manage/select) and puzzle (choose/combine) genres. The game features a main character that navigates a landscape of risk, constantly trying to survive against various threats by using a diverse range of defence systems. The game design, though, removes common gaming tropes associated with these genres (e.g. score, time pressure, boosters, lifecount) in order to support the free experimentation attitude that the designers considered as conducive to critical thinking. Productive failure is a core concept and the player is expected to ‘die’ at least once as part of exploratory gameplay. Reducing the demand for gameplay skills (e.g. high reaction speed, complex input controls, sensory overload, etc.) served to make the game more accessible and to provide players with cognitive space to focus and critically explore the underlying rule system instead. The player needs to observe and analyse the feedback loops to reverse engineer the game’s rules and create appropriate defence responses. Feedback is frequently counterintuitive or surprising, subverting players’ expectations. The three main in-game actions are moving, collecting, and installing (or uninstalling) defence systems. Premise The game’s premise is a fictional universe where entities are composed of biological, electronic and mechanical components with the intention to be ambiguous as to their nature. No other information is explicitly presented to the player, allowing them to make their own interpretations. The main character could be a robot, an alien, a computer system, a human coder, or anything that matches the metaphor, showcasing the universal nature of the concept of security. Story The story takes the protagonist on a journey of natural evolution and intentional change e.g. becoming aware of their existence, movement, and developing a metabolic cycle (input/output), then ensuring survival by installing combinations of defence systems. The character has no explicit purpose, other than surviving in its harsh, native environment. The story concludes with the protagonist symbolically mastering these conditions and breaking the boundaries of their environment to access new dimensions (flying away). Learning outcomes Protection was designed to have highly constructivist learning outcomes by deliberately provoking the player to try to figure out the metaphors inherent in design and gameplay to construct their own understandings. A key outcome was to provoke inquiry-based reflection on players’ own coding practice and (hopefully) transformative attitude change towards cybersecurity into the future. This game drew on observations from the wider research project in which it was created. Previous results note that: cybersecurity is seen by coders as an obscure domain, exclusive to dedicated experts (whereas it should be viewed as an essential aspect of any application.) even when possessing technical skills at implementing cybersecurity measures, coders face difficulties with risk assessment and defensive planning. cybersecurity needs constant adapting strategies and/or updating of knowledge to be effective. Key learning outcomes for Protection are: Absolute security is not possible. At the very least, the inability to be aware of all threats in an environment is in itself a source of risk. The assessment of risk for the same threat (and, therefore, the sense of security) fluctuates over time and is influenced by a multitude of factors, such as contextual threats, environmental conditions, system state, etc. Security comes with a trade-off on usability: balance is necessary to ensure functionality, since overloading a system with security systems can become a liability. There can be various defence strategies towards the same threat. Defence strategies may have varying degrees of efficiency and side-effects, and different degrees of compatibility with each other. As a result of all of the above, the appropriate defence plan is contextual and subject to change at any point, therefore one must remain constantly aware. The game aims to achieve these outcomes by exposing players to metaphors of the following, and encouraging active interpretation: different threat types: weathering conditions, harmful objects and malicious agents different risk types: e.g. data corruption, data/resource theft, functionality impairment, loss of control different attack methods: e.g. DDoS, viruses, worms, malware, control/process hi-jacking a variety of cybersecurity defence strategies: prevention, detection, in-place defence, live defence, contingency/resilience. Research insights Unlike other educational games on cybersecurity for coders, our game aims not to inform its players about cybersecurity algorithms or train them in their technical implementations. The game relies on a pre-existing familiarity with the above (even if only at novice level), so that the players may identify the real life counterparts of the various game entities based on their behaviour in the game. Instead, the game serves as a medium to abstract those concepts, model their relationships in a transparent manner and to relate to them in an experiential way. Furthermore, the game does not dictate its teaching content, but allows players to explore and take away their own messages based on their background and experience. It is not a game to ‘educate’ but rather to encourage critical reflection and, ideally, attitude and/or behavioural change in coding practices. In terms of gameplay, this game differentiates from conventional approaches within its genre as it does not include instructional elements (e.g. tutorial or providing explicit goals), competitive elements (e.g. score/leaderboard), or motivational rewards. The challenge of the game is to reverse-engineer its rules and achieve a series of moments of realisation, rather than developing a competence in mastering them. Failure, frustration, and surprise are all used to encourage players to construct their own meanings from the game. It is also deliberately short (c. 15-20 minutes’ play) as this was felt to be long enough to achieve the hoped-for reflection without risking losing player engagement. Finally, our approach innovates in the fact that the game is linked with unique post-play activities, which helps carry and translate the in-game messages to real-world coding practices. As well as functioning as a standalone game, Protection was specifically designed to enmesh with a game jam on Code Security and was used to provoke critical discussion between jammers as they compared their different interpretations and to offer a platform for cybersecurity experts to impart knowledge. Its purpose in this context was to contribute to the process of serious game design of new games arising out of the game jam. As such this small provoking game plays a part in wider methodological development for the co-design of serious games

Collaboration

This game is the direct result of a process of investigation leading to new insights, effectively shared. It is therefore firmly a research output in terms of both methodology and purpose. An extended abstract justifying this follows. Game description Collaboration is a small, provoking game (SPG) for software developers working in larger projects and showcases the importance of teamwork regarding cybersecurity across the whole software development lifecycle. The game was designed and developed by an interdisciplinary research team on the SECRIOUS project. The game addresses three themes: 1) Communication between co-workers, especially the non-technical, human side of communication, as an important parameter in defining the quality of the output and the work efficiency of the team. 2) Resource management, including the distribution of workforce, work hours and assets in relation to the necessary workload for production of safe and functional code. 3) Responsibility of individuals to ensure code security across the lifecycle. Collaboration celebrates the importance of psychology, responsibility, and human relationships in a cybersecurity environment and their impact on the final outcome. After engaging with the game, there is a post-play activity, where players are actively prompted to reflect on their own professional life, their co-workers' needs and values, their own communication skills and its impact on others. The game adopts the same fictional universe with its light-hearted tone and colourful iconography as its sister game (“Protection”, also produced by the SECRIOUS project), but expands the list of in-game metaphors to include concepts for: a publicly-used software application (the RAINBOW) and its cybersecurity requirements (colours/lanes) the team of developers that are tasked with creating it (the protagonist and their associates) a period of development cycles (the monsoon season) data flow and data corruption (pure or acid rain) and the user community and their safety (the digital rainforest trees and the overall health of the ecosystem). The player controls one of the members of the dev team and needs to work with their associates to construct and release the RAINBOW which has seven distinct parts. The RAINBOW is a metaphor for public software infrastructure which serves a need. It contributes to the digital rainforest by creating rain, however ‘rain’ has variable safety levels, depending on how well the RAINBOW has been constructed, and this can either benefit or potentially harm the ecosystem. Collaboration plays as a turn-based, puzzle game, with each level being a work day. Each team member has their own expertise and personality (behaviour). The player should master the RAINBOW construction manual on the one hand (the technical aspect), and observe and understand their (NPC) colleagues’ different personalities on the other (the human aspect), in order to take the appropriate actions each time and make sure that by the end of the day, the rainforest has the safest RAINBOW it can get. Each worker has an action point pool that symbolizes their energy/time during a work shift and can power two types of player actions: either directly constructing a rainbow lane (writing code) or talking to another co-worker (sharing info). Talking can be done with various moods/communication styles which will influence the response of their co-worker. Players are free to revoke their actions with no cost so as to allow for maximum experimentation. Learning outcomes Collaboration was designed to have constructivist learning outcomes by deliberately provoking the player to try to figure out the metaphors inherent in design and gameplay to construct their own understandings. A key outcome was to provoke inquiry-based reflection on players’ own coding practice and (hopefully) transformative attitude change towards communication as part of the cybersecurity community into the future. This game was created in response to three identified issues related to cybersecurity: Developers (or teams) working on different parts of the code may operate in an isolated way and cybersecurity issues may creep in as a result of lacking overview and/or communication. Developers may not treat communication as an important part of their job description and consequently may not be willing to devote time and energy away from development to cater to it. Human/“soft” skills are an undervalued and frequently untrained skill set in highly technical work environments, but are crucial for successful project delivery and good/healthy work conditions. The game aims to address these by building counternotions into the game’s foundations. More specifically, the game through its rule system and feedback loops evokes the following key learning outcomes: The security of the product is as good as the security of the weakest link. If one element fails, the whole system is impaired. Security needs to be implemented in multiple aspects and stages, therefore overview and communication throughout the development pipeline is necessary. The quality of communication across teams can affect the quality of the end-product. The human side of communication is as important, energy consuming and skill demanding as the technical content. Others may be very different from you - and from each other. Although there is no manual for how people work, with patience and observation you can understand them. The quality of the end-product will be judged by its performance in the long-term. Releasing unsafe code even once may have an irreversible impact on the user community. Research insights This game, like its sister game (Protection, also from the SECRIOUS research project) uses a “provoking” game design strategy, which focusses on exploratory gameplay and players actively constructing meaning with the core aim to encourage critical reflection and, ideally, attitude and/or behavioural change in coding practices. As well as functioning as a standalone game, Collaboration was specifically designed to enmesh with a game jam on the Security Lifecycle and was used to provoke critical discussion between jammers as they compared their interpretations. Its purpose in this context was to contribute to the process of serious game design. As such this small provoking game plays a part in wider methodological development for the co-design of serious games. Specifically, the game is unique in its intervention area and modification of commonplace game design strategies. Our intervention steers away from technical matters and is focused on the human aspect of cybersecurity, as indicated by findings that show that the majority of cybersecurity incidents are attributed to human factors. The game abstracts the technical cybersecurity content to the utmost degree, so that the post-play activity is essential to a complete experience, since that is when the game experience is again re-contextualized in the domain of cybersecurity. This choice doubles as an attempt to show the universality of some of the statements that the game aims to make outside of cybersecurity. In terms of game design, the game subverts common player expectations, for example, that every challenge presented is both feasible and perfectable. On the contrary, in real life, many challenges can only be handled with a “as good as it gets” approach, where others may be simply impossible due to bad management, which can manifest as lacking expertise, overload and/or conflicting priorities. The game deliberately uses ‘impossible to perfect’ levels within the gameplay to allow players to construct this notion for themselves. Another common concept that is rejected within this game is that of a mandatory ‘baseline’ of a player’s performance. A player may make progress in the game (complete a level and unlock the next) with even the worst possible performance. Instead of restricting progress, the game represents the detrimental effect on the digital ecosystem instead. This aspect can be explored (and to some extent, mitigated) using player actions within the menu screen (using resources they have earned to improve the digital rainforest.) The gameplay leaves the player as the only person truly responsible to safeguard the quality of their own work, again supporting our goals of reflection rather than instruction. This was also done as an expression of the fact that in real life, given lack of industry standards, each individual’s responsibility over security issues acts as the regulator for the safety of the end-product