FDG

This paper presents the findings of two case studies concentrating on the learning experiences of disadvantaged middle school children participating in The Science and Art of Game Design (SAGD) and Globaloria, learning environments intended to teach ...

As games grow in complexity, gameplay needs to provide players with powerful means of managing this complexity. One approach is to give automation tools to players. In this paper, we analyze an in-game automation tool, the Foldit cookbook, for the ...

Conflict is an unavoidable feature of life, but the development of conflict resolution management skills can facilitate the parties involved in resolving their conflicts in a positive manner. The goal of our research is to develop a serious game in ...

This paper describes the results of a comparative study carried out in a Singapore High School to test four versions of our game for learning, to investigate the effectiveness of puzzle and narrative-based games in engaging students, how the games ...

Secondary game objectives, optional challenges that players can choose to pursue or ignore, are a fundamental element of game design. Still, little is known about how secondary objectives affect player behavior. It is commonly believed that secondary ...

In this paper, we describe a design methodology that we have termed Minimalist Game Design. Minimalist games have small rulesets, narrow decision spaces, and abstract audiovisual representations, yet they do not compromise on depth of play or ...

Computer role-playing games (CRPGs) are a genre of games that aims at providing similar gaming experience as paper and pen role-playing games. Personalized player experience is one main factor when capturing and maintaining interest of the player. ...

Multi-player games played outdoors on smartphones can be designed to improve players' health by requiring vigorous physical activity in an interesting and challenging natural environment, while still providing engaging virtual elements and enabling ...

Frustration, in small, calibrated doses, can be integral to an enjoyable game experience, but it is a very delicate balance: just a slightly excessive amount of frustration could compel players to terminate prematurely the experience. Another factor ...

Visual data mining is a powerful technique allowing game designers to analyze player behavior. Playtracer, a new method for visually analyzing play traces, is a generalized heatmap that applies to any game with discrete state spaces. Unfortunately, due ...

Designing video game scenarios that will stimulate the player with an engaging and properly paced level of difficulty is a non-trivial issue, one which can fundamentally impact the playability and popularity of a game. World of Warcraft, like many ...

This paper describes a machine learning approach to classifying the activities of players in games. Instances of activities generally are not identical because they play out in different contexts, so the challenge is to extract the "essences" of ...

In this paper, we present a data-driven technique for designing models of user behavior. Previously, player models were designed using user surveys, small-scale observation experiments, or knowledge engineering. These methods generally produced ...

The state-of-the-art in software engineering for game engines, recommends the use of a component-based software architecture for managing the entities in a game. A component-based architecture facilitates the definition of new types of entities as ...

In a three-dimensional virtual environment, aspects such as narrative and interaction largely depend on the placement and animation of the virtual camera. Therefore, virtual camera control plays a critical role in player experience and, thereby, in the ...

Newsgames and artgames, two genres in which designers wish to communicate messages to players, often deploy procedural representation. Understanding these proceduralist games requires special attention to a game's processes as well as how these interact ...

Three measures drawn from space syntax are proposed as means of describing game spaces with a view to a morphological critical analysis. These measures are: core integration and segregation, isovist area, and visibility/accessibility discrepancy (VAD). ...

Abstracting the fictional world to essential components is one of the first steps to design the system of a game. The amount of detail with which the fictional world is implemented as the system determines the level of abstraction of the simulation of ...

BeadLoom Game (BLG) is an educational puzzle game designed to teach students basic Cartesian coordinates, iteration, and layering. Although this game has been proven to be successful at teaching students these concepts, many participants reported ...

Gesture-based interaction adds a new level of immersion to video games, but players who are blind are unable to play them as games use visual cues to indicate what gesture to provide and when. Though visual cues can be substituted with audio or haptic ...

Many users with severe motor impairments, such as quadriplegics, interact with computers using an indirect selection technique called switch access scanning. Switch scanning allows for iteratively selecting an input from a set of input options using a ...

In the last decade, online video games in persistent virtual worlds have gained increasing popularity. Since some portion of the player population possesses a disability of some sort, as more players join in to play online games, the number of players ...

Visual cues are typically used in video games to indicate to the player what input to provide and when. Cues represented in multiple modalities that are presented simultaneously can be detected at lower thresholds, faster and more accurately than when ...

World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massively multiplayer online game (MMO) supporting complex social interactions among over 12 million players. While the "lone gamer" stereotype still persists, there is little data on gaming with other players with whom one ...

We analyze mechanisms of player retention and commitment in massively multiplayer online games. Our ground assumptions on player retention are based on a marketing model of customer retention and commitment. To measure the influence of gameplay, in-game ...

This paper analyzes the social mechanics in top social games. It identifies several mechanisms by which social games encourage sociality: the friend bar, gifting, visiting, challenge/competition, and communication. Different implementations of these ...

Although there has been research suggesting that people will treat computers socially and even consider computers as team-mates, there does not seem to have been any research looking specifically at how the perception of team-mate identity affects game ...

When compared to the depiction of external actions, modern computer games have developed very limited means of conveying game characters' inner activities. In this paper, we focus on different narrative perspectives and the ways in which they enable us ...

Curveship, a Python framework for developing interactive fiction (IF) with narrative style, is described. The system simulates a world with locations, characters, and objects, providing the typical facilities of an IF development system. To these it ...

The development of physical interactive games demands extensive knowledge in engineering, computer science and gaming. In this paper we describe how the Modular Interactive Tiles System (MITS) can be a valuable tool for introducing students to ...