Denna rapport är en avrapportering av projektet Spelbaserad simulering för insatsutbildning. Projektet syftar till att:
Serious games och spelbaserad simulatorträning ses som en möjlighet att vidareutveckla undervisnings- och träningsmiljön inom räddningstjänst. Begreppet serious games definieras som att använda spel och spelteknik för att uppnå syften utöver ren underhållning. För att utnyttja områdets potential i största möjliga mån krävs en kombination av att utveckla och anpassa teknik så att den passar för ändamålet, detta kan till exempel innebära att utnyttja de möjligheter som modern spelteknik ger för att logga användarbeteende och resultat. Dessutom innefattar serious games en komponent av speldesign, det vill säga att utnyttja möjligheter som spel ger för att skapa en motiverande och engagerande lärandemiljö. Detta kan till exempel innebära att skapa tävlingsmoment och poängsystem som sporrar till upprepad användning. I projektet har vi utnyttjat såväl teknik- som speldesignskomponenten.
Projektets syften har uppnåtts genom att producera och utvärdera ett prototypspel för insatsträning samt en modell för hur serious games kan användas i träning och utbildning. De huvudsakliga resultaten består av en spelprototyp av ett webbaserat spel för att träna beslutsfattande på taktisk nivå samt en pedagogisk modell för spelbaserad träning. Prototypen och modellen har testats på en distanskurs för Räddningsledarutbildning i regi av Myndigheten för samhällsskydd och beredskap (MSB). Utvärderingen visar på goda resultat vad gäller systemets användbarhet. Den pedagogiska potentialen har inte kunnat utvärderas fullt ut då prototypen inte blev en tillräckligt integrerad del i kursen där den utvärderades.
Projektet visar att spelbaserad träning kan vara en möjlighet för pedagogisk utveckling med avseende på både teknik och pedagogisk kontext. I detta sammanhang är det viktigt att poängtera vikten av att genomföra och utvärdera pedagogiska anpassningar i samband med spelbaserad träning. Vidare har projektet har samarbetat med olika konstellationer av lärare och kursdeltagare vid MSB. En viktig lärdom är att tydliga resurser och organisatoriskt engagemang finns på plats i den här typen av samproducerande forskningsprojekt.
Game-based tools for rehabilitation of different types of physical and cognitive impairments are becoming more and more popular. By introducing an element of fun, these systems aim at increasing patients' motivation to train and, from a further perspective, improve recovery rates. There is, however, a question whether such tools will be fully accepted by the intended target group. Earlier work on user acceptance has mainly focused on utility systems, i.e. systems used mainly in the work place. However, people use systems for different reasons and that makes it difficult to apply the same principles on systems with the main purpose to entertain. Serious games have characteristics from both utility and entertainment systems, which makes it interesting to study the acceptance of these kinds of systems. In this study, we have developed a home-based entertainment system for stroke rehabilitation, with focus on rehabilitation of motor impairments. By analysing the gaming behaviour and interview responses of five stroke patients, we investigate factors influencing user acceptance of this specific type of system. The results show that current models of acceptance are not sufficient to fully explain acceptance of serious games in general and serious games for rehabilitation in particular. Besides well-known factors, such as perceived usefulness, perceived ease-of-use and perceived enjoyment, other, more specific, factors also play a vital role in the acceptance of the system.
The goal of the project presented in this paper is to enable motor rehabilitation to stroke patients in their home environment and to utilise game enjoyment to achieve frequent training. Stroke patients have an average age above 70 years, which implies that they typically do not belong to a gaming generation. In addition, these patients suffer from motor, and many times cognitive impairments, which make traditional games extremely difficult to use. Nearly all work in this area has been conducted in a clinic environment where it is possible to overcome some of these difficulties by letting professionals assist and guide patients.
In this paper, we present the challenges faced, the system itself and the result from a study where five patients were equipped with a game console in their homes for five weeks. The focus of this paper is on analysing the gaming behaviour of patients, which includes the amount of time they spent, the type of games they selected and their comments on the gaming experience. The conclusion from this analysis is that their behaviour resembles that of gamers. They spent significant voluntary time, and it has been possible for patients, with no prior experience of computer games, to enjoy gaming in their homes where they had no professional assistance.
Elinor is a game based tool for rehabilitation of stroke patients to be used in their home environment. The application is the result of a creative and exploratory development project in which researchers in the serious games area and experts in stroke rehabilitation collaborated in order to develop a motivating, easy to use and relatively inexpensive tool for relearning functions lost due to a stroke. Elinor can be viewed as an integrated system for stroke rehabilitation in that it is both a system, controlled by movements, for training of its primary user group and a system for monitoring the training by medical expertise. In this paper, we will describe the Elinor application itself, the development process and the initial evaluation of it in order to identify implications for serious games.
This article presents the process of creating the game Testament; an action role-playing game for PC which uses the Old Testament as its setting. The game is primarily designed for confirmation education in the Church of Sweden, with the purpose to create interest in the Old Testament. In this paper we describe our experiences with the process of creating a game where the work has been guided by three, in some cases, contradictory goals: the educational value, the source authenticity and the gaming entertainment. Our conclusion is that clear requirements for the entertainment must be created as a counterweight to the practical aspects' requirements, e.g. education and authenticity. To create requirements for game experience, it can be useful to identify a game genre and find a game that can serve as a template. One consequence of the fact that a specific goal for entertainment and a very clear requirement on content existed was that a number of fundamental contradictions could be identified (e.g. narrative, game mechanics, adaptation). When these inconsistencies were encountered, a suitable approach could be chosen in order to reach a compromise. If an existing game used as a reference wasn't available, it is likely that the entertainment would have suffered for the benefit of the educational aspects and biblical authenticity.
Background
Immersion is important for simulation-based education; however, questionnaire-based instruments to measure immersion have some limitations. The aim of the present work is to develop a new instrument to measure immersion among participants in healthcare simulation scenarios.
Methods
The instrument was developed in four phases: trigger identification, content validity scores, inter-rater reliability analysis and comparison with an existing immersion measure instrument. A modified Delphi process was used to develop the instrument and to establish validity and reliability. The expert panel consisted of 10 researchers. All the researchers in the team had previous experience of simulation in the health and/or fire and rescue services as researchers and/or educators and simulation designers. To identify triggers, the panel members independently screened video recordings from simulation scenarios. Here, a trigger is an event in a simulation that is considered a sign of reduced or enhanced immersion among simulation participants.
Results
The result consists of the Immersion Score Rating Instrument (ISRI). It contains 10 triggers, of which seven indicate reduced and three enhanced immersion. When using ISRI, a rater identifies trigger occurrences and assigns them strength between 1 and 3. The content validity analysis shows that all the 10 triggers meet an acceptable content validity index for items (I-CVI) standard. The inter-rater reliability (IRR) among raters was assessed using a two-way mixed, consistency, average-measures intra-class correlation (ICC). The ICC for the difference between weighted positive and negative triggers was 0.92, which indicates that the raters are in agreement. Comparison with results from an immersion questionnaire mirrors the ISRI results.
Conclusions
In conclusion, we present a novel and non-intrusive instrument for identifying and rating the level of immersion among participants in healthcare simulation scenarios.
Studies have found serious games to be good tools for programming education. As anoutcome from such research, several game solutions for learning computer programming have appeared. Most of these games are only used in the research field where only a few are published and made available for the public. There are however numerous examples of programming games in commercial stores that have reached a large audience.This article presents a systematic review of publicly available and popular programming games. It analyses which fundamental software development concepts, as defined by theACM/IEEE Computer Science Curricula, are represented in these games and identifies game design patterns used to represent these concepts.This study shows that fundamental programming concepts and programming methods have a good representation in mainstream games. There is however a lack of games addressing data structures, algorithms and design. There is a strong domination of puzzle games. Only two of the 20 studied games belong to a different genre. The eleven game design patterns identified in this study have potential to contribute to future efforts in creating engaging serious games for programming education.
This paper presents an online training game for incident commanders to enact and create incident scenarios. The incident commander is the person in command on site when a rescue team is dispatched to a fire emergency. The challenge we are addressing in this work is to design a game and a game-based training process which can be used to support the change of work practice of fire fighters to become incident commanders (i.e. taking on a new professional role). The incident commander training game consists of two integrated parts: the IT artifact and the usage process. The two are integrated to provide necessary support for incident commander training via distance learning. The game is online and comprises three modules: The scenario player; the scenario creator, and; the log tool. The game and its pedagogical usage procedure are based on the theories of communities of practice and experiential learning. The novelty of this application lies in the combination of pedagogical theory and a specifically designed game. In comparison to other games for accident management training, the possibility for domain experts lacking of game design skills to create scenarios is an essential feature. Furthermore, the underlying fire simulation renders better "replayability" than a strictly branched scenario as the scenario creation is actually more of a process of setting conditions for the scenario than predicting each action of the player.
Virtual rehabilitation has emerged as a promising tool over the last decade. However the field is diverse and there is no unified understanding of the concept and in which situations it should be used. The most common usage context is a rehabilitation clinic but there is an urge to offer motivating virtual rehabilitation to be used in the homes of patients. The main drive for using such systems is to enhance motivation by introducing an interesting challenge and an element of fun. This paper describes and evaluates the feasibility of Elinor, a gamebased system for stroke rehabilitation in the home.
The Elinor prototype has been positively evaluated with respect to its usability, user acceptance and motivational factors. This paper reports on the initial findings concerning the rehabilitation effect of Elinor. No persons suffered any serious adverse effects from training. We had positive results with respect to the assessment of motor and process skills (AMPS). Even though these improvements were not significant they are still positive enough to motivate future work. The self-reported improvements in the motor activity logs (MAL) also motivate future work.
This paper reports the feasibility of Elinor, a game-based system for stroke rehabilitation in the home. The Elinor prototype has been positively evaluated with respect to its usability, user acceptance and motivational factors as well as its rehabilitation effect. This paper reports the findings from the whole project. To summarize the results, we find that game factors can be used to enhance motivation for rehabilitation. We had positive results with respect to many of the rehabilitation measurements employed. For example, the assessment of motor and process skills was positive as were also the self-reported improvements in daily activities. Furthermore, it seems that an increased self-efficacy with respect to the belief that the treatment can have an effect is positive and expected to increase motivation to undergo necessary rehabilitation. The usability and perceived usefulness of the system were also positively evaluated and the subjects expressed a positive attitude towards the system as well as a belief in its usefulness. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.
The use of games in non-leisure contexts is referred to as serious games. The tradition of using games for purposes beyond entertainment goes back a long time before digital games. However, with the advent of digital games, serious games development has become an issue of both game design and technology development in various combinations. This paper presents a literature review of what types of topics are studied in the realm of serious games development, and contrasts the results with challenges and problems expressed by a panel of developers and researchers in serious games and gamification to identify research gaps. Our findings indicate a lack of research on the actual usage situations of serious games. It seems that the phase of organizational deployment and use is most often overseen. Furthermore, we identified a lack of client/customer perspective in most research on the development of gamified solutions.
Game-based simulators, sometimes referred to as "lightweight" simulators, have benefits such as flexible technology and economic feasibility. In this article, we extend the notion of a game-based simulator by introducing multiple screen view and physical interaction. These features are expected to enhance immersion and fidelity. By utilizing these concepts we have constructed a training simulator for breathing apparatus entry. Game hardware and software have been used to produce the application. More important, the application itself is deliberately designed to be a game. Indeed, one important design goal is to create an entertaining and motivating experience combined with learning goals in order to create a serious game. The system has been evaluated in cooperation with the Swedish Rescue Services Agency to see which architectural features contribute to perceived fidelity. The modes of visualization and interaction as well as level design contribute to the usefulness of the system.
This paper presents Sidh - a game based firefighter training simulator developed in cooperation between the University of Sk¨ovde and the Swedish Rescue Services Agency. Sidh is based on computer game hardware and software solutions but adds a novel interaction model and gameplay specifically developed for the purpose of training firefighters. The simulator environment is a Cave where the player is interacting with the game through a set of sensors. Players move in the virtual world by movements in the physical world and a substantial physical effort is required to accomplish game tasks. Sidh has been used in a feasibility study where 31 firefighter students have been playing the game and the performance of these students as well as their reflections from using the game have been analyzed. Results from this study show that Sidh is a useful complement to traditional training methods and that the subjects give very high grades on the entertainment value of the game which indicate that this form of training may be self-motivating which is an important issue for voluntary, after-hours training.
This study investigates the learning effects of playing racing, action, and sports computer games. In particular we focus on traffic school students’ driving behavior. A survey conducted at three driving schools, questioned driving students about their gaming habits. The driving instructors evaluated their students’ driving skills and traffic safety attitudes. The results indicate that experience in computer games can have a positive effect on driving performance. Experienced gamers were ranked significantly higher by their instructors regarding their overall driving skills compared to students with low experience in computer games. However, no evidence was found to indicate that experienced gamers have a worse attitude towards fellow road-users or traffic safety. Experiments conducted in a driving simulator, using a game developed purposely to enhance certain traffic safety variables, reveals that it is possible to provide an entertaining game with serious content. Preliminary results, however, indicate that the version of the game where the explicit game goals are hidden was found to be the most entertaining one. The results of the investigation warrant further review into the development and utilization of computer games for traffic safety and education purposes.
In this paper we report results from an experimental study of games and traffic safety performed in an advanced gaming environment. During car simulator-sessions we collected data over different traffic safety variables, such as speed, headway distance and lane change behavior, from 70 subjects. The data was analyzed in order to investigate possible individual learning effects and differences between groupings of subjects. The experiment shows clear positive individual learning effects for all traffic safety variables analyzed. Hence we conclude that game based simulations can be used to enhance learning in driving education.
In this article, the authors report on the construction and evaluation of a game-based driving simulator using a real car as a joystick. The simulator is constructed from off-the-shelf hardware and the simulation runs on open-source software. The feasibility of the simulator as a learning tool has been experimentally evaluated. Results are reported from an experimental study of games and traffic safety performed in an advanced gaming environment. During car simulator sessions, the authors collected data about different traffic safety variables, such as speed, headway distance, and lane change behavior, from 70 participants. The data were analyzed to investigate possible individual learning effects and differences between groupings of participants. The experiment shows clear, positive, individual learning effects for all traffic safety variables analyzed. The authors also made a qualitative analysis of the participants’ perception of the simulator as a learning tool. From the results, it is concluded that a game-based simulation can be used to enhance learning in driving education.
Denna delrapport presenterar Sp&Ts-projektets aktiviteter och resultat. Projektet har tre huvuddelar: ett spelutvecklingsprojekt, en spelvaneundersökning bland elever på ett antal trafikskolor och experiment i Högskolan i Skövdes körsimulator. Projektet har delredovisats i två lägesrapporter (hösten 2005 och våren 2006). Denna rapport sammanfattar hela projektet och de resultat som föreligger vid projektavslutet. Samtidigt utgör slutrapporten startskottet för Sp&Ts2 som kommer att bli en fortsättning på detta arbete. I Sp&Ts utvecklas ett bilspel med fokus på säker bilköring, realistiska situationer och en rolig spelupplevelse där spelaren, i en "cave-miljö” och med ett fullt realistiskt gränssnitt, får köra bil i ett antal olika scenarier. Scenarierna är tänkta att testa olika aspekter av bilkörning och på olika sätt utmana spelaren. Under utvecklingsprojektet har vi fört diskussioner med Länsförsäkringar Skaraborg, trafikskolor och Statens Väg och Transportforskningsinstitut (VTI) för att få in trafiksäkerhetsaspekter i arbetet. Under projektet har en enkätundersökning bland elever och lärare på tre trafikskolor (Thorells i Falköping; Anderssons i Mariestad; PO:s i Skövde) genomförts, detta för att undersöka sambandet mellan spelvanor och bedömd körskicklighet. Resultaten från analysen av enkätsvaren redovisades även i lägesrapport 2, våren 2006. I projektets avslutande fas har vi knutit ihop spelutvecklingsprojektet med enkätundersökningen i ett experiment som genomförts i den körsimulator som byggts i samband med projektet. I denna rapport redogörs för genomförandet av dessa experiment. Vi ger även en inledande dataanalys som ligger till grund för det publiceringsarbete som kommer att fortgå.
Rapporten beskriver projektets genomförande (Kapitel 2), genomförande av experiment och initial dataanalys (Kapitel 3) samt exponering av arbete och resultat (Kapitel 4).
This report contains a technical description of the result of the S.A.R.E.K (Simulation – Ambulance – Research – Education - Kinship) collaboration project and the Sim2020 project. The projects are collaborations between researchers in healthcare and IT, and prehospital care practitioners, with the aim to design, develop and test a contextualized simulation environment for prehospital care. We built a simulation environment representing the full depth and width of a prehospital care process. Breadth refers to including all phases of a prehospital mission, from dispatch to handover; while depth refers to detailed representations and recreation of artefacts, information and context for each of these phases. This report outlines the details of the overall design, all equipment and practical solutions used to create this.
Apart from the installation which is described in this report we have also developed methods and carried out a variety of tests and experiments which are reported elsewhere. The focus of this report is the system and its components.
This paper presents the results of an experimental study on designing for self-efficacy in a game based driving simulator. Self-efficacy refers to how people´s beliefs in their capabilities affect their actions. The results show that the design of the feedback system can be used to increae self-efficacy measures thus affecting performance in a driving simulator environment. Self-efficacy has consequences not only for the performance of the particular task, but also for what activities he/she chooses to engage in and the persistence invested in them. Hence we find the results from this study relevant to various aspects of serious games design.
Rapporten bygger på tre delstudier med olika datainsamlingstekniker:
Bibliometristudiens ansats har varit bred. Materialet inkluderar därmed även poster som endast har en perifer koppling till spel, men returnerar i fallet SwePub färre än 3000 poster. Spelforskning bedrivs på många lärosäten i Sverige och publiceras inom många ämnesområden. Totalt 95 forskare har en publicering som omfattar 10 eller fler spelpublikationer1. Det finns starka lokala kluster av forskare som sampublicerar men sampubliceringen mellan svenska och nordiska lärosäten är inte så omfattande. Jämfört med Finland har Sverige färre publikationer med ett tydligt fokus på spelforskning.
Enkätstudien visar att spelforskarmiljöerna oftast består av ett antal forskare med olika ämnesmässig bakgrund där de själva definierar sig som spelforskare snarare än att organisationen som sådan gör det. Miljöerna har sammantaget och högt räknat runt 30 aktiva doktorander men siffran är osäker. 94% av respondenterna anger att deras forskning ligger inom ”spel för andra områden än underhållning” och endast 6% anger ”spelteknikfokus”. 44% anger ”spelbranschen”. Det är tydligt att spel för just underhållning inte ligger fokus för svensk spelforskning. Detta är remarkabelt då den svenska datorspelsindustrin är en multimiljardindustri fokuserad på just spel som underhållning. Det finns alltså en mycket stor diskrepans mellan industri och svensk spelforskning.
Intervjustudien ger en bild av att spelforskningen bedrivs inom splittrade miljöer, av forskare med olika ämnesmässig bakgrund. Det finns en tydlig upplevd brist på forskningsfinansiering inom adekvata områden och det finns brister i de finansieringsinstrument som finns idag. Detta påverkar såväl vilken typ av forskning som kan bedrivas inom spel och rekryteringen av forskarstuderande. Respondenterna är överlag mycket positivt inställda till idén om en nationell forskarskola. Flera ser också Svenska Spelforskarrådet som en viktig aktör för att stärka svensk spelforskning både nationellt och internationellt.
Rekommendationer:
Training actors from public safety agencies (PSA), e.g. emergency medical services, fire departments, police departments involves different technologies and communication and collaboration activities. New technologies promise better support, not only for training, but also for logging relevant information for future analysis and learning. However, choosing the right technologies, defining proper set-ups for the training activities, and identifying premises for long-term use of technical facilities is both difficult and time consuming. Applying earlier lessons from evaluating work in Virtual Environments (VEs) [1], our aim is to develop a better understanding of the impact of new technologies by identifying collaboration patterns influencing training. Collaboration is examined via social, technical, and task related interaction, distinguishable in the different phases of training, from starting an alarm to ending the emergency activities. Our main results illustrate the benefits of (1) building scenarios, and training whole activity chains for certain rescue or other emergency activities, (2) using simulations for better understanding physical places, the task, and (3) distinguishing technical, social and task focused characteristics for factors influencing emergency focused collaboration. Moreover, the results also contribute to understanding the benefits of considering specific simulation technologies when training for emergency and rescue activities.
Objective. Simulation based training with full-size mannequins is a prominent means of training within the healthcare sector. Prehospital missions include all parts of the healthcare process which take place before a patient is handed over to the receiving hospital. This implies that the context for prehospital care is varied and potentially challenging or dangerous in several ways. In this article we present a study which explores immersion and performance by emergency medical services (EMS) professionals in in a training situation which takes the specifics of prehospital interventions into account.
Methods. The study was carried out as a field experiment at an ambulance unit. The experiment was designed to compare the differences between two types of medical scenarios: basic and contextualized. We analyzed the levels of immersion throughout the scenarios and then team performance was evaluated by independent experts. Both analyses were made by observing video recordings from multiple camera angles with a custom made analysis tool.
Results. Our results show that the contextualization of a medical scenario increases both immersion as measured by the Immersion Score Rating Instrument (ISRI) and team performance as measured by the Global Rating Scale (GRS). The overall ISRI score was higher in the contextualized condition as compared to the basic condition, with an average team wise difference of 2.94 (sd = 1.45). This difference is significant using a paired, two-tailed t-test (p<.001). The GRS score was higher for overall clinical performance in the contextualized scenario with an average team wise difference of 0.83 (sd = 0.83, p=.005).
Conclusions. Full-size mannequin simulation based training for EMS professionals may be enhanced by contextualizing the medical scenarios. The main benefits are that the contextualized scenarios better take prehospital medical challenges into account and allow participants to perform better.
Urban planning is a complex process that involves many different stakeholders and has a very long time frame. The United Nations' Declaration of the Rights of the Child states that children should be given the opportunity to express their views and that these should be respected. The complexity of the urban planning process poses challenges on how to involve children. This article presents Stadsbyggarna - a board game designed with the explicit goal to help children understand the nature of urban planning. It has been used in citizen dialog in the development of a new 30-year city plan in a mid-sized Swedish city. Nineteen school classes in the municipality have played the game. The result shows that the gameplay encourage urban planning discussions. Role-playing is identified as a key element of the game. The digital component initially planned to be included in the gameplay was however found to be superfluous.
An important factor for success in project-based learning (PBL) is that the involved project groups establish an atmosphere of social interaction in their working environment. In PBL-scenarios situated in distributed environments, most of a group's work-processes are mediated through the use of production-focused tools that are unconcerned with the important informal and social aspects of a project. On the other hand, there are plenty of tools and platforms that focus on doing the opposite and mainly support informal bonding (e.g., Facebook), but these types of environments can be obtrusive and contain distractions that can be detrimental to a group's productivity and are thus often excluded from working environments. The aim of this paper is to examine how a game-based multi-user environment (MUVE) can be designed to support project-based learning by bridging the gap between productivity-focused and social software. To explore this, the authors developed a game-based MUVE which was evaluated in a PBL-scenario. The result of the study revealed several crucial design elements that are needed to make such a MUVE work effectively, and that the acceptance towards game-based MUVEs is high, even with a rudimentary execution.
The complexity of balancing educational purpose and engaging gameplay mechanics through appropriate design decisions has frequently been discussed in learning game literature. The discussion has primarily focused on highlighting connections between game design principles and learning principles and making guidelines for achieving engaging learning scenarios through game mechanics tailored to specific subject matters. Play, and the learning derived from it, is thus often studied as a phenomenon of the two disparate forces of education and gameplay colliding inside a closed system. The complexity of designing games for educational purposes is subsequently also seen as a product of the dichotomies between these two forces. However, the discussions on the design of learning games and their potential as learning tools seldom take the practicalities of formal educational environments into consideration. In this paper, learning game design principles are investigated alongside developers’ and educators’ working practices. In our analysis we identify and examine a set of issues that complicate learning game design and development. The primary conclusion of this research is that the contexts in which learning games are used significantly alter the way they can be played by introducing constraints as well as facilitating conditions to the play sessions. The paper concludes with an argument for a shift of attention from the product centric view of today to a view that takes pedagogical contexts and organizational values into better account.
This paper reviews empirically grounded research on practices in game development with the intent to give a comprehensive overview of contemporary development practices used in the video game industry. While there are many intangible elements that inform game development processes, this review specifically covers the more immediate practical challenges. The review covers a total of 48 papers published between 2006 and 2016, which were all subjected to thematic analysis by three reviewers. The results of the review show that an almost universal characteristic of game development is that it is almost impossible to accurately plan a development project in detail, largely due to the soft requirements inherent in game production which emerge mid-process during development projects, during when testing is coupled with continuous ideation and refinement. Practicing game developers have created their own frameworks that accommodate for this lack of planning. They include flat hierarchies, democratic decision-making, creative autonomy, and informal communication, which are designed to create an environment that maintains creativity and openness to product changes long into the production process. These frameworks vary significantly between studios and often between individual projects. This review also shows that the term ‘Agile’, while often used by both researchers and developers to characterize the process of game development, is not an apt descriptor of how game developers actually work. Agile is used as shorthand for unstructured and flexible development, rather than serving as a descriptor of a definable or unified work method. Finally, as companies develop more complicated hierarchies of stakeholders and staff, the desired flexibility and autonomy of game development becomes increasingly complicated to maintain, and often necessitates more formalized management processes and company structures. In these cases, inherent tensions of game development become more pronounced, and continuous creativity is hard to maintain due to a growing need to formalize processes.
The process of monitoring user emotions in serious games or human-computer interaction is usually obtrusive. The work-flow is typically based on sensors that are physically attached to the user. Sometimes those sensors completely disturb the user experience, such as finger sensors that prevent the use of keyboard/mouse. This short paper presents techniques used to remotely measure different signals produced by a person, e.g. heart rate, through the use of a camera and computer vision techniques. The analysis of a combination of such signals (multimodal input) can be used in a variety of applications such as emotion assessment and measurement of cognitive stress. We present a research proposal for measurement of player’s stress level based on a non-contact analysis of multimodal user inputs. Our main contribution is a survey of commonly used methods to remotely measure user input signals related to stress assessment.
This paper presents an experiment aimed at empirically exploring the variations of facial actions (FA) during gaming sessions with induced boredom and stress. Twenty adults with different ages and gaming experiences played three games while being recorded by a video camera and monitored by a heart rate sensor. The games were carefully designed to have a linear progression from a boring to a stressful state. Self-reported answers indicate participants perceived the games as being boring at the beginning and stressful at the end. The 6 hours of recordings of all subjects were manually analyzed and FA were annotated. We annotated FA that appeared in the recordings at least twice; annotations were categorized by the period when they happened (boring/stressful part of the games) and analysed on a group and on an individual level. Group level analysis revealed that FA patterns were related to no more than 25% of the subjects. The individual level analysis revealed particular patterns for 50% of the subjects. More FA annotations were made during the stressful part of the games. We conclude that, for the context of our experiment, FA provide an unclear foundation for detection of boredom/stressful states when observed from a group level perspective, while the individual level perspective might produce more information.
Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) can be used to remotely estimate heart rate (HR) of users to infer their emotional state. However natural body movement and facial actions of users significantly impact such techniques, so their reliability within contexts involving natural behavior must be checked. We present an experiment focused on the accuracy evaluation of an established rPPG technique in a gaming context. The technique was applied to estimate the HR of subjects behaving naturally in gaming sessions whose games were carefully designed to be casual-themed, similar to off-the-shelf games and have a difficulty level that linearly progresses from a boring to a stressful state. Estimations presented mean error of 2.99 bpm and Pearson correlationr = 0.43, p < 0.001, however with significant variations among subjects. Our experiment is the first to measure the accuracy of an rPPG techniqueusing boredom/stress-inducing casual games with subjects behaving naturally.
Facial analysis is a promising approach to detect emotions of players unobtrusively, however approaches are commonly evaluated in contexts not related to games, or facial cues are derived from models not designed for analysis of emotions during interactions with games. We present a method for automated analysis of facial cues from videos as a potential tool for detecting stress and boredom of players behaving naturally while playing games. Computer vision is used to automatically and unobtrusively extract 7 facial features aimed to detect the activity of a set of facial muscles. Features are mainly based on the Euclidean distance of facial landmarks and do not rely on pre-dened facial expressions, training of a model or the use of facial standards. An empirical evaluation was conducted on video recordings of an experiment involving games as emotion elicitation sources. Results show statistically signicant dierences in the values of facial features during boring and stressful periods of gameplay for 5 of the 7 features. We believe our approach is more user-tailored, convenient and better suited for contexts involving games.
This paper presents an experiment aimed at exploring the relation between facial actions (FA), heart rate (HR) and emotional states, particularly stress and boredom, during the interaction with games. Subjects played three custom-made games with a linear and constant progression from a boring to a stressful state, without pre-defined levels, modes or stopping conditions. Such configuration gives our experiment a novel approach for the exploration of FA and HR regarding their connection to emotional states, since we can categorize information according to the induced (and theoretically known) emotional states on a user level. The HR data was divided into segments, whose HR mean was calculated and compared in periods (boring/stressful part of the games). Additionally the 6 h of recordings were manually analyzed and FA were annotated and categorized in the same periods. Findings show that variations of HR and FA on a group and on an individual level are different when comparing boring and stressful parts of the gaming sessions. This paper contributes information regarding variations of HR and FA in the context of games, which can potentially be used as input candidates to create user-tailored models for emotion detection with game-based emotion elicitation sources.
Emotion detection based on computer vision and remote extraction of user signals commonly rely on stimuli where users have a passive role with limited possibilities for interaction or emotional involvement, e.g., images and videos. Predictive models are also trained on a group level, which potentially excludes or dilutes key individualities of users. We present a non-obtrusive, multifactorial, user-tailored emotion detection method based on remotely estimated psychophysiological signals. A neural network learns the emotional profile of a user during the interaction with calibration games, a novel game-based emotion elicitation material designed to induce emotions while accounting for particularities of individuals. We evaluate our method in two experiments (n = 20 and n = 62) with mean classification accuracy of 61.6%, which is statistically significantly better than chance-level classification. Our approach and its evaluation present unique circumstances: our model is trained on one dataset (calibration games) and tested on another (evaluation game), while preserving the natural behavior of subjects and using remote acquisition of signals. Results of this study suggest our method is feasible and an initiative to move away from questionnaires and physical sensors into a non-obtrusive, remote-based solution for detecting emotions in a context involving more naturalistic user behavior and games.
This article examines how the unique characteristics of Marvinter, an inclusive transmedia Advent calendar, affected its production and the individual media workers involved in this. In the native transmedia Marvinter project, a radio series and a mobile game were created and released simultaneously. Using ‘partly shared’ resources, the project was developed by two collaborating, non-profit organisations. Each chapter of the digital game had to match the corresponding radio episode. The whole had to be designed to provide a shared cultural experience that included people with hearing or visual impairments. The authors of the present article were part of the game development team and thus directly experienced the complexity of developing a digital game as part of a transmedia project. This article presents the results of a case study with an insider perspective. It is supplemented by semi-structured interviews with key people in the project. The transmedia nature of Marvinter was justified by the need to include people with complementary disabilities. Although sometimes associated with negative connotations of ‘naked commercialisation’ in transmedia contexts, the marketing strategy was here an important element in promoting inclusivity. However, owing to the concurrent work processes, game production became overly complex.
Background: The access to digital tools for parents is increasing, and further exploration is needed to gain knowledge about parents' experiences in using such tools, for example, when preparing for childbirth and parenthood. This study protocol describes a prospective study that will explore serious games as digital tools for parental support, and both parents' and healthcare professionals' views will be included. The objectives of the prospective study are to explore two different serious games: (1) Childbirth Journey (Swedish: Förlossningsresan), relating to pregnancy, childbirth and parenthood; and (2) Interplay (Swedish: Samspel), relating to parental couple relationships and parenthood.
Methods: An intervention study will be conducted. The study will include four different sub-studies (A–D) with both qualitative and quantitative methods and a longitudinal design. Both parents (A, B and D) and healthcare professionals (C) will be included, and data will be collected through interviews (A–C) and repeated web-based questionnaires (D). Data will be analysed using phenomenography and qualitative content analysis (A–C), and descriptive and analytical analyses will be performed for comparisons and associations (D).
Discussion: The value of monitoring and reporting on developments and trends in digital innovation for public health has been stipulated by the World Health Organization. The prospective study will contribute further knowledge about multidisciplinary development of digital tools as professional support for parents, as well as knowledge about parents' and healthcare professionals' experiences using digital tools concerning pregnancy, labour, parenthood and parental couple relationships.
Trial Registration: This study was retrospectively registered (02/10/2020) within the ISRCTN with ID: ISRCTN18017741. http://www.isrctn.com/ISRCTN18017741.
Objective: The aim of this study was to explore expecting parents’ perceptions of the Childbirth Journey as an intervention that includes medical information for parental support, constructed as a serious game.
Methods: In this qualitative study, semi-structured interviews were held with expecting parents in Sweden who were able to talk about specific parts of the Childbirth Journey they appreciated or found difficult to understand. A phenomenographic methodology was employed for data analysis.
Results: Participants perceived the Childbirth Journey to be easily accessible and customized with reliable information. The design and features of the intervention were perceived by the expecting parents to enhance the intervention’s usability, appeal, and trustworthiness. When parental couples used the Childbirth Journey together, it gave them an opportunity to discuss and better understand each other’s situation. The participants proposed several changes to the existing version of the game, mostly related to extending practical information and illustrated scenarios but also to the further development of the game’s design and animations. The participants found the Knowledge portal to be the most appealing part of the Childbirth Journey.
Conclusions: The Childbirth Journey intervention was concluded to be a valuable digital complement to in-person profes- sional support, especially given the current COVID-19 pandemic restrictions in place in Sweden, which do not allow antenatal visits by partners. However, in its current form, the Childbirth Journey has some deficiencies and would therefore benefit from further development and exploration.
Tabletop Role Playing Games (TRPG) are games that require players to become the characters they play through engaging in role-play. The challenge of training AI lies in the requirement of it not only understanding the explicitly stated game rules, but also the implicit ones that come with role-playing. Previous studies endeavouring said challenge allude to aspects of role-play, but do not emphasise its role in their methods, indicating that the definition of role-play and how it is to be employed remains unclear. This short paper aims to investigate a proposed definition of role-play based on previous research and employ its use on Large Language Model LLM, eliciting an understanding thereof through a novel prompting method dubbed Controlled Chain of Thought (CCoT). CCoT allows for the LLM to highlight absence of information in inputs given to it by generating questions, which become the template for its chain of thoughts when answered. This paper presents an initial pilot testing of CCoT as well as opens up the discussion of how a definition of role-play can be beneficial for future studies.
This paper presents an effort to create a unified model for conducting and assessing undergraduate dissertations, shared by all disciplines involved in computer game development at a Swedish university. Computer game development includes technology-oriented disciplines as well as disciplines with aesthetical traditions. The challenge has been to create a unified process and assessment procedure while maintaining the individual disciplines? academic standards. The unification has been achieved through the development of the Interdisciplinary Dissertation Model ? a shared model where the assessment is focused on fundamental academic principles, and there is a clear separation between summative and formative assessment and well-defined interaction loops between examiners, supervisors and students. Examiners from all involved disciplines have regular meetings focusing on creating an interdisciplinary view on the summative assessment of undergraduate dissertations. The model developed has been successful in that it allows for a unified process for disciplines from fundamentally different academic traditions. The quality of the examined dissertations has been evaluated in a national evaluation. The result shows that all participating disciplines meet the requirements from their respective communities. This shows that the proposed model successfully unifies disciplines without sacrificing the quality in any discipline.
Digital games have become a ubiquitous part of our society. In many countries, game development is a substantial and important industry. Academic institutions provide programmes aimed at preparing students for careers in game development. Over the past 20 years, there has been great interest in game research. However, very few studies address game development. Instead, most studies have focused on: serious applications of games; analysis of games and players; or, social aspects of playing.
This book provides an overview of the scattered academic landscape of game development research. It highlights studies from a wide range of disciplines and raises arguments for game development to be understood as a complex activity that inherently includes elements of science, engineering, design and art. The consequences of this complexity need to be taken into account by research and/or academic programmes that have a disciplinary focus. There is otherwise the risk that the true nature of game development will not be understood.
Previous studies have revealed a gap between game research and industry game production. This article presents an analysis of this research gap using the tracks and summits at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) as a point of reference. The result shows that there are several areas where there exists very little research. The DiGRA conference is no exception – since 2006, only a handful of papers present empirics from game production. Studies are in particular rare for content producing areas, such as audio, visual arts, and narrative. There are plenty of opportunities for researchers to extract experiences and knowledge from game professionals and to identify problems to be addressed. To do this, collaboration models need to be established that endure non-disclosure agreements and crunch cultures.
In a computer game narrative, a user influences the ordering of events. To model this behaviour, game designers and writers need to use some kind of programming primitives. A computer game script will hence differ from, for instance, a movie screenplay in that traditional dialogue text is complemented with some textual or visual logic formalism. Not all groups involved in production of a game have a programming background and may therefore be unable to easily comprehend such formalisms. This paper presents a novel approach to game dialogue writing where traces from play-throughs are used as the core of the script. Alternative branches are identified and presented in relation to the main trace. The approach has been implemented in a tool that has been used successfully by three professional writers in mobile game production. The results indicate that this is a promising approach to enable non-programmers to work with interactive narratives.
This article presents the process of creating the game Testament; an action role-playing game for PC which uses the Old Testament as its setting. The game is primarily designed for confirmation education in the Church of Sweden, with the purpose to create interest in the Old Testament. In this paper we describe our experiences with the process of creating a game where the work has been guided by three, in some cases, contradictory goals; the source authenticity, the educational value, and the gaming entertainment. A pilot study is also presented in which confirmands have been interviewed focusing on their experiences from playing the game, as part of their confirmation studies.
Our conclusion is that clear requirements for the entertainment must be created as a counterweight to the practical aspects' requirements, e.g. education and authenticity. To create requirements for game expericene, it can be useful to identify a game genre and find a game that can serve as a template. One consequence of the fact that a specific goal for entertainment and a very clear requirement on content existed was that a number of fundamental contradictions could be identified (e.g. narrative, game mechanics, adaptation). When these inconsistencies were encountered, a suitable approach could be chosen in order to reach a compromise. If an existing game used as a reference wasn't available, it is likely that the entertainment would have suffered for the benefit of the educational aspects and biblical authenticity. The pilot evaluation shows that the confirmands appreciate Testament for its gaming qualities and that they express a positive and curious attitude towards the biblical content presented in the game.
The aim of this paper is to explore how contextualization of a healthcare simulation scenarios impacts immersion, by using a novel objective instrument, the Immersion Score Rating Instrument. This instrument consists of 10 triggers that indicate reduced or enhanced immersion among participants in a simulation scenario. Triggers refer to events such as jumps in time or space (sign of reduced immersion) and natural interaction with the manikin (sign of enhanced immersion) and can be used to calculate an immersion score.
An experiment using a randomized controlled crossover design was conducted to compare immersion between two simulation training conditions for prehospital care: one basic and one contextualized. The Immersion Score Rating Instrument was used to compare the total immersion score for the whole scenario, the immersion score for individual mission phases, and to analyze differences in trigger occurrences. A paired t test was used to test for significance.
The comparison shows that the overall immersion score for the simulation was higher in the contextualized condition. The average immersion score was 2.17 (sd = 1.67) in the contextualized condition and −0.77 (sd = 2.01) in the basic condition (p < .001). The immersion score was significantly higher in the contextualized condition in five out of six mission phases. Events that might be disruptive for the simulation participants’ immersion, such as interventions of the instructor and illogical jumps in time or space, are present to a higher degree in the basic scenario condition; while events that signal enhanced immersion, such as natural interaction with the manikin, are more frequently observed in the contextualized condition.
ConclusionsThe results suggest that contextualization of simulation training with respect to increased equipment and environmental fidelity as well as functional task alignment might affect immersion positively and thus contribute to an improved training experience.
A data warehouse can be described as a collection of materialised views over distributed, heterogeneous, and autonomous sources. Although most data warehouse research efforts have been focused on business-oriented decision support, many of the general principles apply to other areas. In this paper we analyse how previous work on data warehouse maintenance can be applied to the maintenance of biological data collected from web-sources. We have studied the widely used protein sequence database SWISS-PROT and the related classification database PROSITE. The results of this analysis show that these sources, although unsophisticated from a database perspective, provide a rich set of capabilities to support automatic maintenance.Moreover, the complex computations required to combine this type of data imply that incremental maintenance methods are almost always beneficial. This result contrasts some previous¯findings reported in the database literature.
INTRODUCTION: Serious games is an effort to combine the engagement and motivation from games with some sort of utility beyond mere entertainment.
OBJECTIVES: The objective of this paper is to revisit and analyse six projects to explore the design space for serious games and derive design guidelines for serious games.
METHODS: We analysed our project portfolio to identify a set of projects which satisfied well-established guidelines for design science research. By analysing these projects as well as their outcomes we generated a set of design principles for serious games.
RESULTS: The results from this study is a conceptualisation of the design space for serious games and seven design principles.
CONCLUSION: By explicating the game design component in serious games and relating it to the utility dimension we add to the understanding of the serious games from a game perspective, which is relevant to any development effort intending to use the persuasive and motivational power of games.
This article presents the methodology and initial analysis of a systematic literature review that aims to explore how the craft and processes of game development have been studied in previous research. In particular, the review focuses on how previous research treats the inherent duality of video game development, since it both involves computer software development and creative production. Researchers are often in a position where they need to emphasize game development’s relation to one of these disciplines, and it is not unusual for game development to be treated as a direct offspring of one field with some mild influences from another. Employing a more all-encompassing review approach, that includes research conducted from the perspectives of both com- puter science and the arts and humanities equally, makes the presented study different from previous literature reviews. The results show that there is a tendency that the management of software development has a negative correlation with the management of creativity in the studied material. The heterogenity of the fields and the limited amount of studies that focus on the duality of game development suggest that there is a need for a deeper analysis of the individual components and to synthesize results from disparate fields.
This paper describes the active object-oriented database system ACOOD developed at the universities of Skövde and Exeter. ACOOD adds active functionality on top of the commercially available Ontos DB. The active behaviour is modelled by using Event-Condition-Action (ECA) rules. ACOOD offers all essential functionality associated with an active database. The semantics and user interface have been clearly defined in order to produce a prototype that can be used to develop database applications. The historical background of active databases and the development of ACOOD are covered in the paper together with a detailed description of the latest, redesigned version of the system. There is also a discussion of experience gained through the work with ACOOD and a comparison with similar systems.
A game is best evaluated by playing it and prototyping is therefore an important activity in game development. Game writers and narrative designers are responsible for the narrative structure of a game, which may have a varying degree of interactivity to it. The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of prototyping tools for game writers. There is a limited range of such tools available, of which Twine is one of the most established. Most of these tools have a text-based programming interface for modelling of game mechanics. This paper presents Deig—a proto- typing tool for creating point-and-click adventure games. In Deig, game mechanics is modelled graphically using nodes from a set of primitives. We present an interview study where game writing students reflect on their experience of using Deig and Twine as prototyping tools. The result shows that both tools have their merits and complement each other. Deig was found to be intuitive for modelling of game mechanics, which lead students to create interactive narratives. Twine was found to be more useful for experimental writing. The conclusion of this work is that there is a need for a diverse set of prototyping tools to support game writing.
The aim of the project presented in this paper is that visually impaired and sighted players should be able to play the same game and share a gaming experience. The goal is that the game should be accessible to visually impaired players without any additional tools, such as text-to-speech, that may reduce the immersion. At the same time, sighted players should perceive the game as a regular game. This paper presents an evaluation of the game where the player immersion has been evaluated through a post test immersion questionnaire. The study was conducted with three independent groups: sighted players using graphics (n=10), blindfolded sighted players (n=10) and visually impaired players (n=9). Although progress in the game and the reported sense of control differed between groups, player immersion was very high in all groups. There were differences between the three groups only in one out of five immersion factors. The result shows that it has been possible to provide an immersive experience irrespective of whether the players are playing the game with graphics or using audio only.