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.
This paper reports on the use of mobile terminals in historical spaces to play an adventure game, using a location-based platform to awaken the fantasy and curiosity of children about cultural heritage; the design of a mystery game as the medium to convey content along with features shared by pervasive games, such as mobile exploration, team work, and the combination of virtual and real worlds. It includes the process of adapting history to storytelling and the results of using a method to evaluate the experience.
This paper presents the initial results from a project that aimed to collect visitor data at a traveling exhibition starting at the Regional Museum in Kristianstad, Sweden during 2014-2016. The project was intended also to contribute to the creation of an atmosphere “About time”, which was the subject of the exhibit. We built a system that was integrated as an interactable part of the exhibition by using elements of quiz game mechanics in combination with elements of data based tracking applications and elements of visual art installations. The data provides statistics which are used to visualize the current status of the visitors’ attitude toward specific questions about time, imprinting the visitors themselves an integral part of the exhibition. Visitors build a visual Game Ego when answering questions and at the same time provided statistical data that can be monitored and extracted from the system. The results show that we succeeded to some degree but more can be done towards incorporating game design elements to engage the user, such as feedback and challenge.
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.
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.
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.
The learning goals of project-based courses are typically specific for each involved discipline. Game development is deeply interdisciplinary and some of its core principles are shared across disciplines, from art to programming. This article presents a project-based approach where students majoring in arts and students majoring in technology share learning objectives. The course has been developed in a Sino- Scandinavian collaboration. Experiences from well-established Scandinavian game development programmes have been transferred to a Chinese university context.
This article presents an explorative mixed method evaluation of this course. The research design had two phases with an initial qualitative analysis resulting in a set of observations that were tested in the second, quantitative phase. A total of 34 students from a range of disciplines participated in a two week course. The quantitative analysis shows that art (n=13) and technology (n=14) students' reported very similar experiences and similar insights into core learning objectives. This study shows that deeply interdisciplinary project-based courses, with shared learning objectives can successfully be conducted even in a context with no prior experience of such approaches.
During recent years a rise of small, independent game developers have become a large part of the global game industry. These indie developers are often distributing their games using digital distribution with a self-publishing business model. While the possibilities to reach a large global audience are expanding with digital distribution, there are also challenges for the developers, where the work tasks previously handled by a publisher now has to be handled by the developers themselves. One such work task directly related to the globalness of the game industry is localization, which is the process of altering a product in such ways it can be used by consumers in a specific target market.
The main objective of the thesis project is to understand how indie game developers are working with game localization as a part of the development process. In this case, "indie" refers to developers with limited resources in terms of financing and manpower, using a self-publishing business model. The research has partly been carried out through participatory field studies in close connection to indie game developers and development clusters in Sweden, China, and India. In addition to this, the technical aspects of game localization have been scrutinized through studies of localization support in commonly used game engines and game development tools.
The results of the thesis show that game localization is an important development task due to the global nature of the game industry, but that its complexity often is underestimated by the developers. To reach a large player base, localization is a must and should be planned for early in the process. Further, the results show that game localization is less resource demanding ifusing a localization friendly production pipeline, and that the tools to set up such production pipelines are available in all major game engines
The main goal of this PhD project is to study how small and independent game development studios are handling the global nature of the game industry of today from a game development and localization perspective. To understand this, the PhD work will integrate theories and views from three main areas; Indie game development, Game localization and Distribution models.
This paper focus on how localization is addressed in research on game development processes. The research aim is to get an understanding of how localization, game localization and its subsets of content and cultural issues, linguistic issues and technical issues are addressed and discussed in game development research. This has been done through a literature study, where 488 papers regarding game development processes have been scrutinized in order to identify game localization related research. The results shows that localization is rarely addressed in game development research, but regional aspects and relevant concepts related to game localization can be found.
This paper addresses localization from a game development perspective by studying the state of tool support for a localization work in general purpose game engines. Using a systematic mapping study, the most commonly used game engines and their official tool libraries are studied. The results indicate that even though localization tools exists for the game engines included in the study, the visibility, availability, and functionality differ. Localization tools that are user facing, i.e., used to create localization, are scarce while many are tool facing, i.e., used to import localization kits made outside the production pipeline.
This paper investigates the process of game localization from an indie development perspective. The global nature of the digitally distributed game industry gives opportunities for game studios of all sizes to develop and distribute games on a global market. This poses a challenge for small independent developers with limited resources in funding and personnel, seeking to get as wide spread of their game as possible. To reach the players in other regions of the world localization needs to be done, taking language and other regional differences in mind. In an AAA or big-budget game production, these questions are handled by separate entities focusing solely on the localization process – but how do small independent game developers handle this? Indie game developers in Sweden, China and India have been interviewed to investigate the research question of how do indie game developers handle localization in the development process. The results points to a widespread use of community- and fan translation, and that only basic localization is done i.e. culturalization aspects are not considered. The results also show that the reason for localizing can be both business decisions but also to spread a specific message using games.
The focus of this paper is the design and player reception of a serious game called Missing released on Google Play with the intention of spreading awareness of trafficking and its impact on individuals and society. The aim of the paper is to investigate how the game has been received by its players, focusing on its trafficking theme, by analyzing player metrics and app store data available from the Google Play digital distribution system. The paper presents results focusing on three main knowledge contributions: the identification and characterization of the tension between the designer’s intention with a game’s mechanics and how they help to convey the message of the game, the identification of the complexity of finding relevant reviews relating to the serious theme of the game and the identification and characterization of the tension between the star rating and the content of the reviews. One of the conclusions is that even a negative review can mirror a positive result in terms of fulfillment of the purpose.
The game development industry has historically been strongly associated with a few particularly dominant actors, namely Japan and the US. As a result, video game development processes and game content that have originated from these actors are often used as a benchmark for what game development is and can be. Discussing the games industry from these perspectives can, however, gloss over important nuances that make other game development regions unique. With this in mind, this paper intends to discuss the ways in which different cultural and regional contexts are reflected in the structure of local game development industries and, to some extent, in produced game content. To inform this discussion, the authors use the foundation and growth of game development practices in three different regions: the Nordic region, India, and China. These three regions serve as specific exemplifying cases of how video game industries and praxis can take different shapes depending on what resources and components they have available. The paper concludes that all regional games industries and game development practices are heavily influenced by the precedent set by historically dominant actors. This results in game content and development practices that often mimics pre-established standards. But, over time, the conditions surrounding the formation of regional industries manifest themselves in more locally unique content and development processes.
Game engines are a vital part of a game production pipeline, but there is a vagueness of definitions regarding the boundaries of components in a game engine and the rest of the production tools used in a game development pipeline. The aim of this paper is to nuance the use of the term game engine and to put it into the context of a game development pipeline. Based on data from the current state of game production, a proposed taxonomy for tools in game development is presented. A distinction is made between user facing tools and product facing tools. A defining characteristic of the production pipeline and game engines is their plasticity. One of the conclusions is that a “game engine” as a single entity containing the whole game production pipeline is not desirable due to the large number of competences and needs involved in a game development project.
This paper describes the development of a computer game for enhanced visitor experiences of an adventure tour, in which the game is integrated. The game project was run 2011-2013 and included the development of an arcade style two player cooperative computer game, game controls, graphics, sound and music. The adventure tour takes place in an old military fortress where visitors participate in searching for gold that has been stolen. The tour starts with a 3D movie that provides the plot and introduces hero and villain characters. The story is then carried forth by a game master who brings the visitors on a tour along the fortress’ vaults, during which they also play the computer game. The adventure tour is structured by a semi-fictional framing story that interweaves history, physical environment, and hero and villain characters. To withhold interdependency in the overall design of the adventure tour and the game, Caillois’s (1958/2001) taxonomy for games was chosen as a basis, combined with narrative key elements carried across the adventure tour. The game was also designed to accord with the embodied nature of human activity, allowing players to engage their whole bodies in the gameplay. Initial game evaluation results indicate the game contributes to an enhanced visitor experience of the adventure tour.