Högskolan i Skövde

This work-in-progress paper presents the design and development of a serious game aimed at supporting auditory rehabilitation for cochlear implant users. While cochlear implants effectively restore access to sound, many users experience challenges with pitch discrimination and listening in noisy environments. Traditional rehabilitation methods are often speech-focused and clinic-based, which may limit user engagement and training frequency. To address these limitations, this study explores the application of technical ear training, a methodology from audio engineering education, as a foundation for interactive, game-based auditory training.

Following a design science research approach, the project involves iterative prototyping and participatory design with cochlear implant users and rehabilitation professionals. The resulting game integrates technical ear training-based listening tasks, such as timbre recognition, pitch discrimination, and audio effect identification, into multiple gameplay modes. Emphasis was placed on player experience, gradual difficulty progression, and meaningful audiovisual feedback.

Findings from the design process highlight the importance of aligning gameplay mechanics with auditory training goals, accommodating variability in cochlear implant hearing, and addressing technical constraints such as audio latency. The prototype explores a language-independent and engaging complement to traditional rehabilitation. Future work will evaluate the prototype with CI users in a rehabilitation context.

Automated testing is well established in software engineering but rarely supported in game design tools. This paper presents an automated testing module for a visual scripting tool used to design narrative-driven point-and-click games, combining model-based testing using Extended Finite State Machines (EFSMs) with LLM-based analysis of playthrough scripts. We evaluate the system on games produced in a game design course, demonstrating that complete EFSM traversal was achieved for 15 out of 23 games within practical computational bounds. LLM-based batch queries, such as automated age rating estimation, show potential for helping teachers rapidly characterise student work. The results indicate that even simple automated testing can reduce the mechanical burden on teachers, freeing supervision time for higher-level design feedback. Ongoing work is focused on evaluating broader integration into educational practice.

Introduction: Professional support is known to promote parents' transition to parenthood, however, there is a need for continued development in parental support to meet parents' needs and support them in their couple relationship. In Scandinavia a digital parental support tool, Interplay, has been developed for parents to use in their relationship during the transition to parenthood. However, research is needed on how a digital support tool such as Interplay can be included in care and professional support for parents. Therefore, the current study aims to explore how professionals perceive Interplay as a digital support tool for parents' couple relationship and parenting.

Methods: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 professionals who had used Interplay. The professionals were working with parental support in Swedish antenatal care, child health care and family counselling. Data were analyzed using phenomenographic analysis method.

Results: The results are presented in two descriptive categories: A complementary interactive parental support tool and May facilitate parental transition and be valuable to include in care.

Conclusion: Interplay has the potential to be a valuable complement to existing parental support, as it could function as a modern tool that can be used by both parents together in their everyday lives to communicate on topics related to their relationship and parenting. It would be valuable to include Interplay in care as it could be combined with professional expertise, which may lead to enhanced parental support.

Background: Parental transition means a change in the parents’ couple relationship as the baby becomes the focus, thereby affecting the parents’ communication and intimacy. Such a transition may either strengthen or strain the relationship. As becoming parents poses new challenges to the parental couple, the objective of this Swedish study was to explore how parents perceive Interplay, a digital support tool for their couple relationship and parenting.

Methods: Swedish expectant and new parents were offered the digital support tool ‘Interplay’ (in Swedish: Samspel), which they played mutually with their partner for minimum two weeks. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 expectant and 10 new parents, and the data were analysed using the phenomenographic method.

Results: The results are presented in three descriptive categories: An opportunity to shed light on the couple’s relationship and shared parenting; Reflections about yourself and your partner; The design, sense of trust, interest and willingness to play.

Conclusion: Interplay was perceived by the parents as supporting them in their couple relationships and shared parenting. The parents described that Interplay functioned as a catalyst for communication and reflection within the parenting couple, which broadened the parents’ perspective. Nevertheless, parents varied in their perceptions on whether Interplay was sufficiently developed to be implemented within healthcare and offered to parents. The current study contributes knowledge on how parents perceive that a digital tool, can be designed to support them in their couple relationship and parenting during the transition to parenthood.

Trial registration: The research project is registered (02/10/2020) within the ISRCTN, with ID: ISRCTN18017741.

A cochlear implant (CI) is an electronic device designed to assist individuals who are deaf or hard-of-hearing. It captures sound through a microphone and transmits it to electrodes, which directly stimulate the auditory nerve, bypassing the damaged areas of the ear. Although considered a very successful intervention, there is large variability in the outcomes of cochlear implantation. Patient- reported issues include difficulties hearing speech in noisy environments, disappointment in sound quality and difficulties appreciating music. A period of aural rehabilitation usually follows implantation, where patients see audiologists and speech language pathologists. There is evidence supporting the use of auditory training, actively practicing listening tasks, mainly focused on speech, at a clinic or at home. One such task, often suggested by audiologists and speech language pathologists is computer-based auditory training. There are a number of game-like computer programs and apps that are recommended to patients, most of which similarly focus on speech. In recent years there has been some research on serious games specifically aimed at CI-rehabilitation. This paper presents a literature review of studies using games for auditory training in CI-rehabilitation. The aim of this paper is to investigate how the reviewed studies relate to established game design knowledge, including how they evaluate player experience. The results reveal a gap, indicating that game design as a concept is rarely reported on, and the evaluation of player experience is seldom based on established instruments. While this study focuses on a specific and cohesive research community, it highlights the need for improved standards in the utilization and reporting of game design in such studies. We propose a set of guidelines for reporting on medical studies involving games. 

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 study investigates the prospect of integrating sustainability issues into game development education by reporting experiences from two Nordic Alliance for Sustainability in Gaming (NASG) events. The paper highlights the importance of offering a social, creative environment in which the process of jamming is emphasized over results. We unpack the potential of game jams to be used for teaching subjects other than game development itself, particularly in relation to complex, anxiety provoking topics such as sustainability. Based on data consisting of participant reflections on their own moods and gained insights throughout the course of the jam, the research reveals a clear change in attitudes among the participants as they move on in their creative process. The study concludes that game jams, as activities defined by high levels of creativity and social engagement, is a powerful educational tool for approaching heavy topics while still letting participants cope with, and even empower them to address such complex issues.

This article examines level design processes and challenges at professional game stu- dios. Thematic analysis of data, recorded through field studies and semi-structured interviews, identify four key themes: level design as an interdisciplinary effort; who is the level designer; the role of narrative in level design; and challenges of managing creativity in the level design process. Results indicate that while the role called level designer is often assigned to specific disciplines, the process of level design is usually highly interdisciplinary. Furthermore, this interdisciplinary collaboration requires management to maintain both creativity and efficient pipelines, by distributing owner- ship and facilitating communication and planning. The level design process seems par- ticularly vulnerable to suboptimal interdisciplinary communication and planning, due to significant reliance on narrative design, game design, art, sound design, and tool development. While this article addresses level design specifically, most observations are comparable to previous findings on game development in general.

Games as a service is similar to software as a service, which provides players with game content on a continuous monetization model. Game revenue forecast is vital to game developers to make the right business decisions, such as determining the marketing budget, controlling the development cost, and setting up benchmarks for evaluating game publishing performance. How to make the revenue forecast and integrate it with the game publishing process is hard for small and medium-sized independent (indie) game developers. This includes all steps of the process, from forecasting to decision-making based on the results. This paper provides a data-driven method that uses the mobile game revenue forecast based on different time-series prediction models to drive the game publishing. We demonstrate how to use the data-driven method to guide an indie game studio to forecast revenue and then set the revenue forecast as the internal benchmark to drive game publishing. In practice, we involve a real game project from an indie game studio and provide guidance for one of their casual game projects. Then, based on the revenue forecast, we discuss how to set the revenue forecast as an internal benchmark and drive the actions for mobile game publishing. Finally, we make a conclusion on how our data-driven method can be used to drive mobile game publishing and also discuss future research work.