Applied games

Background: Physical activity is linked to benefits such as increased physical fitness, cognition, emotional and social functioning, general health and well-being in older people. Some evidence suggests that this also applies to people living with dementia. However, it can be harder for them to perform physical activities, due to several barriers, such as issues with orientation and balance problems. A relatively new type of physical activity called exergaming may help them overcome these barriers. Exergaming is "physical exercise interactively combined with cognitive stimulation in a gaming environment". The aim of our study is to evaluate the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of exergaming compared to regular activities in people living with dementia, who attend day-care centres. Additionally, we want to investigate whether the exergaming activity for the person living with dementia, also (indirectly) affects the informal caregiver, as well as which facilitators and barriers to implementation of exergames for this target group exist. Methods: A cluster Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT), with economic and process evaluations alongside will be carried out. In the Netherlands, 24 day-care centres are randomized in the experimental or control group. The study group will consist of 224 dyads (community-dwelling participants with dementia and their informal caregivers), who are interviewed at baseline, and at 3 and 6 months of follow-up. The participant with dementia has to visit the day-care centre for at least two days per week, have a diagnosis of mild to moderate dementia and have an informal caregiver present, who is willing to participate. Societal cost data will be collected during interviews, using healthcare utilization diaries, and from day-care centres. The process evaluation will only involve the experimental group, and will include an online survey, qualitative interviews and focus groups. Discussion: This study will contribute to the evidence base that more effective exercise among people with dementia will result in positive effects on their wellbeing and quality of life. This will motivate people with dementia to be physically active. We also envision that there might be a positive effect on the burden of care experienced by their informal caregivers.

Educational games such as quizzes, quests, puzzles, mazes and logical problems may be modeled as multimedia board games. In the scope of the ADOPTA project1 being under development at the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics at Sofia University, a formal model for presentation of such educational board games was invented and elaborated. Educational games can be modeled as special board mini-games, with a board of any form and any types of positions. Over defined positions, figures (objects) with certain properties ...

2 of 2 DEMENTIA CARE AND PSYCHOSOCIAL FACTORS Conclusion: FindMyApps was experienced as a useful tool by most people with dementia/MCI and informal caregivers. Several adaptations to the trial protocol are recommended, to ensure robust outcomes in a definitive trial into its effectiveness.

Content: video 6 minutes 34 seconds Language: English Description: The results from Iteration 7 (see figure 8 pg. 43) is a digital prototype of the paper prototype of Iteration 7. APPENDIX R DesignState _7_Digital_1.2 Content: video 24 minutes 24 seconds Language: English Description: The results of Design State 7 play-test with co-designers. APPENDIX S DesignState _7_Digital_1.3 Content: video 1 minute 51 seconds Language: English Description: The results of a digital prototype for a mini-game for Design State 7. APPENDIX T DesignState_7_Social Content: video 4 minutes 15 seconds Language: English Description: The results of the digital hybrid that demonstrated and tested the social game mechanics.

The purpose of this quasiexperimental quantitative research study was to examine the extent to which students enrolled in a doctoral program at a Christian university located in the southwestern United consisted of 19 doctoral students (n = 19) from a Christian university. Participants completed the Selfgroups were compared. One group was given interventions in weeks 2 and 7. The second group was given

Playing style recognition is crucially important for style-based adaptation of digital games. Unlike traditional ways for measuring of styles by means of self-reports, automatic style estimation incorporated into a video game appears to be a more efficient and ecologically valid method. The article presents a model for in-game recognition of four playing styles (Competitor, Dreamer, Logician, and Strategist) based on the Kolb's experiential learning theory. The model applies multiple linear regression over task performance metrics as explanatory variables and coefficients found first by a heuristic approach relaying on experience and observation knowledge of domain experts and, next, estimated by the least squares method. Experiments with the model implemented within an affectively adaptive video game demonstrated the benefits of emotion-based dynamic difficulty adjustment over playing outcomes and proved its validity as an accurate instrument for automatic estimation of both the four playing styles and the learning styles of Honey and Mumford.

This chapter will situate academia in relation to serious games commercial production and contextual adoption, and vice-versa. As a researcher it is critical to recognize that academic research of serious games does not occur in a vacuum. Direct partnerships between universities and commercial organizations are increasingly common, as well as between research institutes and the contexts that their serious games are deployed in. Commercial production of serious games and their increased adoption in non-commercial contexts will influence academic research through emerging impact pathways and funding opportunities. Adding further complexity is the emergence of commercial organizations that undertake their own research, and research institutes that have in-house commercial arms. To conclude, we explore how these issues affect the individual researcher, and offer considerations for future academic and industry serious games projects.

INTRODUCTION Game jams encourage participants to define, explore, create, and disseminate games with respect to a pre-defined time-period and under specified constraints. Various methods and approaches have helped with establishing conventions, rules, and processes, and culture surrounding game jams, with practical guides for participants (Kaitila 2012) and organisers (Cornish et al. 2017) available. The popularity of game jams has resulted in an increased demand for game jams that explore a range of different topics, issues, and objectives through game development (Eberhardt 2016; Pirker et al. 2016). Stakeholders interested in ‘applied game jams’ have utilized traditional game jam formats to explore game development across various contexts, including health and wellbeing (Preston, 2014), community engagement (Decker et al. 2015), and social development (Myers et al. 2019). There is a perceived gap to establish a universal method with which to design, execute, and evaluate applied ...

This paper presents and discusses the online version of Quantum Game Jams, events where quantum physics related games are created. It consists of a two-part investigation into online Quantum Game Jams. The first part involves examining three events that took place between 2020 and 2021. The second part provides a detailed account of organising the Global Quantum Game Jam from 2021 to 2022, evaluating its outcomes based on participant feedback and experiences. Additionally, it examines the backgrounds of the participants in the global events of 2021 and 2022. Based on the findings, this paper proposes a set of guidelines for organising future online Quantum Game Jams, which can also be applicable to game jams and science game jams in general. CCS CONCEPTS • Applied computing → Computer games; • Software and its engineering → Interactive games; • Information systems → Social networking sites; • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing; Interaction design.

In May 2019, A Night in the Forum videogame was published in the Sony PlayStation store, for PS VR. It was the final result of the REVEAL EU project, whose goal was to identify strategies, features, and tools to develop educational titles in a more efficient, cost-effective, and valuable way, exploiting their educational, cognitive, and engaging potential for schools and cultural tourism. Environmental Narrative videogames was chosen as a genre suited for this purposes. This article presents how known issues in the production of videogames have been faced, the solutions identified, and results obtained.

Serious video games applied for learning purposes play a significant and important role for the modern technology enhanced education. The paper presents an educational 3D maze video game dedicated to the development of carpet fabrication in Bulgaria since 17 th century until modern days. The game was automatically generated by means of declarative description of the maze processed by an open software tool named Maze Builder and built on top of Unity game platform and specially designed for automatic generation and easy modification of maze video games. There are explained the maze game design process, the educational tasks embedded into the maze, and a practical experiment conducted with the generated game. The initial results obtained from these experiments are very positive and encouraging with regard of playability of such educational mazes and, as well, concerning their easy and straightforward generation by educators, who are not IT professionals.

V boji proti sedavému způsobu života vznikají nové nabídky pohybových aktivit a netradičních her, kterými se snaží ve společnosti motivovat větší množství lidí k aktivnímu trávení volného času a rozšířit nabídku pohybových aktivit pro osoby se specifickými potřebami. V rámci tohoto příspěvku byl proveden průzkum nabídky předmětů aplikovaných a netradičních her, pohybových aktivit a psychomotorických aktivit na 9 univerzitách, 9 veřejných vysokých školách (VŠ) v České republice pedagogického a sportovního či tělovýchovného směru. Hlavním cílem tohoto příspěvku je provést průzkum nabídky předmětu netradiční hry (NH) na VŠ. Z novelizace vysokoškolského i školského zákona vyplývá potřeba nabídnout studentům se specifickými potřebami na VŠ vhodné pohybové aktivity a také připravit budoucí pedagogy tělesné výchovy na inkluzivní vzdělávání žáků se specifickými vzdělávacími potřebami. Proto jsme si za dílčí cíl vytkli prozkoumat nabídky předmětů aplikovaných her (AH) a psychomotoriky. Nabídka netradičních her na zkoumaných univerzitách i VŠ je uspokojivá, i když se zde jen zřídkakdy objevila inovace předmětu NH. Nabídka AH nebo aplikované tělesné výchovy (ATV) se na některých pedagogických fakultách neobjevila vůbec v porovnání s fakultami zaměřenými na tělesnou výchovu (TV) a sport, kde se téměř u všech forma aplikovaných her či ATV vyučuje.

espanolSe describen las lineas de investigacion del grupo Mejora del Proceso Software y Metodos Formales de la Universidad de Cadiz, en relacion a las tecnologias del aprendizaje e informatica educativa EnglishResearch lines of the Software Process Improvement and Formal Methods research group of the University of Cadiz are described, in relation to learning technologies and computing in education.

In this paper, we present a new model to analyse therapeutic games. The goal of the model is to describe and analyse the relations between the three aspects of a therapeutic game: the player, the game, and the therapy. The model is intended to game designers. It is a tool to improve the communication between health experts and game designers, and to evaluate the game design coherency of therapeutic games. It also helps to analyse existing games to discover relevant features. The model is built with respect to existing serious game definitions and taxonomies, medical definitions, motivation theory, and game theory. We describe how the model was used to design le village aux oiseaux, a therapeutic game which goal is to train people with attention disabilities. In the last section, we present the results of analysis done with our model and discuss the model limits.

As part of a more general research, this paper presents a work in progress experiment for generating videogame mechanics and rules in a fully procedural way. A practical application of the detailed theoretical approach is also detailed as an experiment based on a genetic programming algorithm that allows to generate new video game specifications fulfilling the most important aspects highlighted by the game designers. To meet those requirements, we take advantage of the potential of the new features included in the last version of Xml-Based Video Game Description Language (XVGDL), termed XVGDL , and the corresponding advances in the XVGDL Game Engine (XGE). Taking advantage of both tools, the execution and the evaluation methods are about to be included in the experiment making the process to be performed without any human intervention. We expect to have new videogame specifications as the output of the process, created according initial requirements and designers' needs, with a minor effort of programming.

Games are increasingly used for purposes that stretch be-yond their primary strength as medium for entertainment.The interactive nature of games provide players with variousopportunity to deal with complex (societal) issues on a moreinvolved and personal level, far more than any other mediumaffords. As such it is not surprising to see that games offer agreat platform for persuading players to adopt a particularperspective on events that occur in the real, physical, world.Games for persuasion, or games for attitude-change, havebeen a topic of discussion over the past decade. Concretedesign strategies however, to analyze persuasive gameplayor guide the designer in embedding persuasive messages ingameplay, are scarce. As such, to advance the disciplinewe have set our focus on the development of strategies thataid the persuasive game design process. In this paper we de-scribe the Attitudinal Gameplay Model as foundation for thePersuasive Gameplay Experience. The model serves as anoverview...

The established (digital) leisure game industry is historically one dominated by large international hardware vendors (e.g. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo), major publishers and supported by a complex network of development studios, distributors and retailers. New modes of digital distribution and development practice are challenging this business model and the leisure games industry landscape is one experiencing rapid change. The established (digital) leisure games industry, at least anecdotally, appears reluctant to participate actively in the applied games sector (Stewart et al., 2013). There are a number of potential explanations as to why this may indeed be the case including ; A concentration on large-scale consolidation of their (proprietary) platforms, content, entertainment brand and credibility which arguably could be weakened by association with the conflicting notion of purposefulness (in applied games) in market niches without clear business models or quantifiable returns on investment. In contrast, the applied games industry exhibits the characteristics of an emerging, immature industry namely: weak interconnectedness, limited knowledge exchange, an absence of harmonising standards, limited specialisations, limited division of labour and arguably insufficient evidence of the products efficacies (Stewart et al., 2013; Garcia Sanchez, 2013) and could, arguably, be characterised as a dysfunctional market. To test these assertions the Realising an Applied Gaming Ecosystem (RAGE) project will develop a number of self contained gaming assets to be actively employed in the creation of a number of applied games to be implemented and evaluated as regional pilots across a variety of European educational, training and vocational contexts. RAGE is a European Commission Horizon 2020 project with twenty (pan European) partners from industry, research and education with the aim of developing, transforming and enriching advanced technologies from the leisure games industry into self-contained gaming assets (i.e. solutions showing economic value potential) that could support a variety of stakeholders including teachers, students, and, significantly, game studios interested in developing applied games. RAGE will provide these assets together with a large quantity of high-quality knowledge resources through a self-sustainable Ecosystem, a social space that connects research, the gaming industries, intermediaries, education providers, policy makers and end-users in order to stimulate the development and application of applied games in educational, training and vocational contexts.

Serious video games applied for learning purposes play a significant and important role for the modern technology enhanced education. The paper presents an educational 3D maze video game dedicated to the development of carpet fabrication in Bulgaria since 17 th century until modern days. The game was automatically generated by means of declarative description of the maze processed by an open software tool named Maze Builder and built on top of Unity game platform and specially designed for automatic generation and easy modification of maze video games. There are explained the maze game design process, the educational tasks embedded into the maze, and a practical experiment conducted with the generated game. The initial results obtained from these experiments are very positive and encouraging with regard of playability of such educational mazes and, as well, concerning their easy and straightforward generation by educators, who are not IT professionals.

INTRODUCTION Game jams encourage participants to define, explore, create, and disseminate games with respect to a pre-defined time-period and under specified constraints. Various methods and approaches have helped with establishing conventions, rules, and processes, and culture surrounding game jams, with practical guides for participants (Kaitila 2012) and organisers (Cornish et al. 2017) available. The popularity of game jams has resulted in an increased demand for game jams that explore a range of different topics, issues, and objectives through game development (Eberhardt 2016; Pirker et al. 2016). Stakeholders interested in ‘applied game jams’ have utilized traditional game jam formats to explore game development across various contexts, including health and wellbeing (Preston, 2014), community engagement (Decker et al. 2015), and social development (Myers et al. 2019). There is a perceived gap to establish a universal method with which to design, execute, and evaluate applied ...

This paper presents the RAGE marketplace portal (gamecomponents.eu), which is intended as a hot spot and neutral single point of access for serious game technologies. The portal aims at fostering collaborations and the exchange of technical artefacts and associated knowledge and resources between different stakeholders in the field of serious gaming (e.g. educators, developers, researchers, publishers, policy makers and end-users). After a brief introduction to the H2020 RAGE project, the flexible design of the marketplace portal and its underlying software repository are presented. A concise overview is given of the initial set of advanced game technology components created by RAGE, that are currently exposed in the portal. For empirical validation of these components, we have developed 7 serious games based on subsets of these components, which were then tested in educational practice with several hundreds of end-users. This game components portal want to be a neutral hub not dependent on any technology or provider and therefore it is open for new game technologies submissions. We envision this marketplace as a knowledge and game technologies hub to support and amplify serious game development.

In this paper, we present a new model to analyse therapeutic games. The goal of the model is to describe and analyse the relations between the three aspects of a therapeutic game: the player, the game, and the therapy. The model is intended to game designers. It is a tool to improve the communication between health experts and game designers, and to evaluate the game design coherency of therapeutic games. It also helps to analyse existing games to discover relevant features. The model is built with respect to existing serious game definitions and taxonomies, medical definitions, motivation theory, and game theory. We describe how the model was used to design le village aux oiseaux, a therapeutic game which goal is to train people with attention disabilities. In the last section, we present the results of analysis done with our model and discuss the model limits.

The design of an applied game is complicated by needing to balance its usefulness, game- play experience, and sustainability. In the applied design process, game designers occupy a pivotal position between game design knowledge, development team, co-designers, and players. From this complex web of interaction, the designer is still expected to invent a new game. From a design investigation perspective, there is an opportunity to expand our general knowledge of game design by exploring first-hand the design and development of an applied game. The aim of this practice-led PhD research was to design and develop a pervasive multi- player applied video game as a tool for psychiatric healthcare workers treating patients suffering from depression and psychosis. The applied game Moodbot was co-designed during an intensive iterative process with healthcare experts and patients from Altrecht Mental Healthcare Institute and developers from the HKU University of the Arts. The following exegesis...

Este artículo describe los objetivos y las principales tareas del proyecto TECNOPARLA dedicado al desarrollo de tecnologías avanzadas del habla en Catalán Palabras clave: tecnología del habla, reconocimiento del habla, conversión texto a voz, traducción automática, traducción oral

Background: Physical activity is linked to benefits such as increased physical fitness, cognition, emotional and social functioning, general health and well-being in older people. Some evidence suggests that this also applies to people living with dementia. However, it can be harder for them to perform physical activities, due to several barriers, such as issues with orientation and balance problems. A relatively new type of physical activity called exergaming may help them overcome these barriers. Exergaming is "physical exercise interactively combined with cognitive stimulation in a gaming environment". The aim of our study is to evaluate the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of exergaming compared to regular activities in people living with dementia, who attend day-care centres. Additionally, we want to investigate whether the exergaming activity for the person living with dementia, also (indirectly) affects the informal caregiver, as well as which facilitators and barriers to implementation of exergames for this target group exist. Methods: A cluster Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT), with economic and process evaluations alongside will be carried out. In the Netherlands, 24 day-care centres are randomized in the experimental or control group. The study group will consist of 224 dyads (community-dwelling participants with dementia and their informal caregivers), who are interviewed at baseline, and at 3 and 6 months of follow-up. The participant with dementia has to visit the day-care centre for at least two days per week, have a diagnosis of mild to moderate dementia and have an informal caregiver present, who is willing to participate. Societal cost data will be collected during interviews, using healthcare utilization diaries, and from day-care centres. The process evaluation will only involve the experimental group, and will include an online survey, qualitative interviews and focus groups. Discussion: This study will contribute to the evidence base that more effective exercise among people with dementia will result in positive effects on their wellbeing and quality of life. This will motivate people with dementia to be physically active. We also envision that there might be a positive effect on the burden of care experienced by their informal caregivers.

Playing style recognition is crucially important for style-based adaptation of digital games. Unlike traditional ways for measuring of styles by means of self-reports, automatic style estimation incorporated into a video game appears to be a more efficient and ecologically valid method. The article presents a model for in-game recognition of four playing styles (Competitor, Dreamer, Logician, and Strategist) based on the Kolb's experiential learning theory. The model applies multiple linear regression over task performance metrics as explanatory variables and coefficients found first by a heuristic approach relaying on experience and observation knowledge of domain experts and, next, estimated by the least squares method. Experiments with the model implemented within an affectively adaptive video game demonstrated the benefits of emotion-based dynamic difficulty adjustment over playing outcomes and proved its validity as an accurate instrument for automatic estimation of both the four playing styles and the learning styles of Honey and Mumford.

Serious video games applied for learning purposes play a significant and important role for the modern technology enhanced education. The paper presents an educational 3D maze video game dedicated to the development of carpet fabrication in Bulgaria since 17 th century until modern days. The game was automatically generated by means of declarative description of the maze processed by an open software tool named Maze Builder and built on top of Unity game platform and specially designed for automatic generation and easy modification of maze video games. There are explained the maze game design process, the educational tasks embedded into the maze, and a practical experiment conducted with the generated game. The initial results obtained from these experiments are very positive and encouraging with regard of playability of such educational mazes and, as well, concerning their easy and straightforward generation by educators, who are not IT professionals.

This paper presents the RAGE marketplace portal (gamecomponents.eu), which is intended as a hot spot and neutral single point of access for serious game technologies. The portal aims at fostering collaborations and the exchange of technical artefacts and associated knowledge and resources between different stakeholders in the field of serious gaming (e.g. educators, developers, researchers, publishers, policy makers and end-users). After a brief introduction to the H2020 RAGE project, the flexible design of the marketplace portal and its underlying software repository are presented. A concise overview is given of the initial set of advanced game technology components created by RAGE, that are currently exposed in the portal. For empirical validation of these components, we have developed 7 serious games based on subsets of these components, which were then tested in educational practice with several hundreds of end-users. This game components portal want to be a neutral hub not dependent on any technology or provider and therefore it is open for new game technologies submissions. We envision this marketplace as a knowledge and game technologies hub to support and amplify serious game development.

Digital games constitute a major emerging technology that is expected to enter mainstream educational use within a few years. The highly engaging and motivating character of such games bears great potential to support immersive, meaningful, and situated learning experiences. To seize this potential, meaningful quality and impact measurements are indispensible. Although there is a growing body of evidence on the efficacy of games for learning, evaluation is often poorly designed, incomplete, biased, if not entirely absent. Well-designed evaluations demonstrating the educational effect as well as the return on investment of serious games may foster broader adoption by educational institutions and training providers, and support the development of the serious game industry. The European project RAGE introduces a comprehensive and multi-perspective framework for serious game evaluation, which is presented in this paper.

Patterns embody repeating phenomena, and, as such, they are partly but not fully detachable from their context. ‘Design patterns’ and ‘pattern languages’ are established methods for working with patterns. They have been applied in architecture, software engineering, and other design fields, but have so far seen little application in the field of future studies. We reimagine futures discourse and anticipatory practices using pattern methods. We focus specifically on processes for coordinating distributed projects, integrating multiple voices, and on play that builds capability to face what’s yet to come. One of the advantages of the method as a whole is that it deals with local knowledge and does not subsume everything within one overall ‘global’ strategy, while nevertheless offering a way to communicate between contexts and disciplines.

The established (digital) leisure game industry is historically one dominated by large international hardware vendors (e.g. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo), major publishers and supported by a complex network of development studios, distributors and retailers. New modes of digital distribution and development practice are challenging this business model and the leisure games industry landscape is one experiencing rapid change. The established (digital) leisure games industry, at least anecdotally, appears reluctant to participate actively in the applied games sector (Stewart et al., 2013). There are a number of potential explanations as to why this may indeed be the case including ; A concentration on large-scale consolidation of their (proprietary) platforms, content, entertainment brand and credibility which arguably could be weakened by association with the conflicting notion of purposefulness (in applied games) in market niches without clear business models or quantifiable returns on investment. In contrast, the applied games industry exhibits the characteristics of an emerging, immature industry namely: weak interconnectedness, limited knowledge exchange, an absence of harmonising standards, limited specialisations, limited division of labour and arguably insufficient evidence of the products efficacies (Stewart et al., 2013; Garcia Sanchez, 2013) and could, arguably, be characterised as a dysfunctional market. To test these assertions the Realising an Applied Gaming Ecosystem (RAGE) project will develop a number of self contained gaming assets to be actively employed in the creation of a number of applied games to be implemented and evaluated as regional pilots across a variety of European educational, training and vocational contexts. RAGE is a European Commission Horizon 2020 project with twenty (pan European) partners from industry, research and education with the aim of developing, transforming and enriching advanced technologies from the leisure games industry into self-contained gaming assets (i.e. solutions showing economic value potential) that could support a variety of stakeholders including teachers, students, and, significantly, game studios interested in developing applied games. RAGE will provide these assets together with a large quantity of high-quality knowledge resources through a self-sustainable Ecosystem, a social space that connects research, the gaming industries, intermediaries, education providers, policy makers and end-users in order to stimulate the development and application of applied games in educational, training and vocational contexts.

Many research projects have assessed the possibility and effectiveness of implementing games as health interventions. Recent literature shows generally positive results in specific case studies. However we acknowledged that research projects in this field regularly seem to disregard the connection to possible effective game mechanics, design principles and behavior change theories to underpin such results. Evidently most of these studies were intended and designed solely as randomized controlled trials (rct’s) to validate effectiveness of health interventions. We propose a theoretical framework to assess whether and on what grounds certain behavioral effects may be attributed to particular game mechanics and game play aspects. Our model is founded on the Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion (ELM), which is quite appropriate to guide the evaluation structure for interventions that either aim at short term or long term attitude and behavior change. The scope of the research fram...

Playing style recognition is crucially important for style-based adaptation of digital games. Unlike traditional ways for measuring of styles by means of self-reports, automatic style estimation incorporated into a video game appears to be a more efficient and ecologically valid method. The article presents a model for in-game recognition of four playing styles (Competitor, Dreamer, Logician, and Strategist) based on the Kolb's experiential learning theory. The model applies multiple linear regression over task performance metrics as explanatory variables and coefficients found first by a heuristic approach relaying on experience and observation knowledge of domain experts and, next, estimated by the least squares method. Experiments with the model implemented within an affectively adaptive video game demonstrated the benefits of emotion-based dynamic difficulty adjustment over playing outcomes and proved its validity as an accurate instrument for automatic estimation of both the four playing styles and the learning styles of Honey and Mumford.

This paper investigates the usability of the RAGE component-based software architecture (RCSA). This architecture was designed to support serious game development by enabling cross-platform reuse of game software components. While the architecture has been technically validated elsewhere, this paper studies the perceived usefulness and ease of use of the architecture in practice. An extensive questionnaire based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was administered to 23 software and game developers that have been creating RCSA-compliant game components or integrating these in actual serious games. The results show that developers are generally positive about the usability of the architecture and that the architecture helps them to do a better job in less time. It turns out that developers effectively use all communication modes that are offered by the architecture, most frequently those based on the component´s APIs and the bridge pattern. Some issues were reported, but could be easily addressed. Most developers reported that they have well understood the effectiveness of the architecture and indicated to keep using the architecture in future projects. The outcomes of this study show that the architecture opens up new opportunities to the cross-platform reuse of advanced game functionalities in serious game projects, to reduce production efforts and to advance the domain of serious games at large.

The use of serious games in cognitive rehabilitation would be invaluable to the rehabilitation process and provide advantages that may not be available in conventional rehabilitation. Although many recent game-based interventions for cognitive rehabilitation have been reported in the literature, not much knowledge is available on the best approach to developing usable games for individuals with cognitive disabilities. Therefore, Design Science approach was adopted to find a solution to this problem. This paper explores an existing Design Science framework and methodology, which are then combined and reduced into one single framework. This paper further examines how this framework can be used as a means to develop an artefact that can be used as a guideline in developing serious games for cognitive rehabilitation. The Design Science paradigm works well for the development of serious game for cognitive rehabilitation. This paper concludes with a discussion of the research contributions.

Background Physical activity is linked to benefits such as increased physical fitness, cognition, emotional and social functioning, general health and well-being in older people. Some evidence suggests that this also applies to people living with dementia. However, it can be harder for them to perform physical activities, due to several barriers, such as issues with orientation and balance problems. A relatively new type of physical activity called exergaming may help them overcome these barriers. Exergaming is "physical exercise interactively combined with cognitive stimulation in a gaming environment". The aim of our study is to evaluate the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of exergaming compared to regular activities in people living with dementia, who attend day-care centres. Additionally, we want to investigate whether the exergaming activity for the person living with dementia, also (indirectly) affects the informal caregiver, as well as which facilitators and ba...

This paper presents the RAGE marketplace portal (gamecomponents.eu), which is intended as a hot spot and neutral single point of access for serious game technologies. The portal aims at fostering collaborations and the exchange of technical artefacts and associated knowledge and resources between different stakeholders in the field of serious gaming (e.g. educators, developers, researchers, publishers, policy makers and end-users). After a brief introduction to the H2020 RAGE project, the flexible design of the marketplace portal and its underlying software repository are presented. A concise overview is given of the initial set of advanced game technology components created by RAGE, that are currently exposed in the portal. For empirical validation of these components, we have developed 7 serious games based on subsets of these components, which were then tested in educational practice with several hundreds of end-users. This game components portal want to be a neutral hub not depe...

Playing style recognition is crucially important for style-based adaptation of digital games. Unlike traditional ways for measuring of styles by means of self-reports, automatic style estimation incorporated into a video game appears to be a more efficient and ecologically valid method. The article presents a model for in-game recognition of four playing styles (Competitor, Dreamer, Logician, and Strategist) based on the Kolb's experiential learning theory. The model applies multiple linear regression over task performance metrics as explanatory variables and coefficients found first by a heuristic approach relaying on experience and observation knowledge of domain experts and, next, estimated by the least squares method. Experiments with the model implemented within an affectively adaptive video game demonstrated the benefits of emotion-based dynamic difficulty adjustment over playing outcomes and proved its validity as an accurate instrument for automatic estimation of both the four playing styles and the learning styles of Honey and Mumford.

In recent years, researchers have reported positive outcomes and effects from applying computer games to the educational process. The preconditions for an effective game-based learning process include the presence of high learning interest and the desire to study hard. Therefore, educational video game design has to tailor gameplay to the style of the playing learner, i.e. to the psycho-cognitive abilities, attitudes, and skills of the individual player, in order to foster the player's motivation and creativity. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to draw a parallel between learning styles and styles of playing video games, and to investigate the correlations between these types of constructs. The article presents a new family of playing styles based on Kolb's experiential learning theory that is appropriate to be used for educational video games. This family is composed of four playing styles: Competitor, Dreamer, Logician, and Strategist, and corresponds to Honey and Mum...

Contemporary methods of preserving cultural heritage rely highly on digitization and archiving as foundations for developing various virtual heritage applications. During last two decades, video games proved to be an interactive visual media able to incorporate virtual heritage in amazing and highly appealing ways. At the same time, each video game represents a valuable artifact reflecting technological, socioeconomic and historical issues of its creation. Therefore, video games are an essential and integrated part of modern cultural heritage and themselves need preservation efforts. The present paper discusses video games as a modern tool for presenting cultural heritage by integrating art, storytelling and digital technology. It focuses on both entertainment games and serious games for cultural heritage and provides some illustrative examples of such games with discussing their approach and novelty. On the other hand, video games are viewed as interactive artifacts that are a valu...

Puzzles are popular learning instruments and teachers easily adopt them in class, raising students' motivation and engagement. Furthermore, puzzle-based learning has many advantages for developing complex transversal skills. Therefore, the APOGEE (smArt adaPtive videO GamEs for Education) research project exploits puzzles as building blocks for supporting teachers to generate personalized and adaptable rich educational maze video games. The present study aims to explore puzzles-based learning strategies for constructing personalized and adaptable educational video maze games within the APOGEE video game platform. The paper proposes a model for adapting puzzle games both to the educational context and to the end-user profile. First, an overview of the puzzles and puzzle-based learning concepts is made, leading to a model of educational puzzles-games taxonomy. Then, there is suggested a taxonomy of puzzle games based on five criteria for their classification. The next part explores the development process of APOGEE puzzle games, including tailoring to the player/learner profile considering learning context and end-user profile. In the end, selected ten types of educational APOGEE puzzles are defined regarding their abilities for personalization and adaptation. Finally, the authors reflect on the main strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for applying APOGEE video games in class and their role as a student-focused education instrument.

This paper presents the RAGE marketplace portal (gamecomponents.eu), which is intended as a hot spot and neutral single point of access for serious game technologies. The portal aims at fostering collaborations and the exchange of technical artefacts and associated knowledge and resources between different stakeholders in the field of serious gaming (e.g. educators, developers, researchers, publishers, policy makers and end-users). After a brief introduction to the H2020 RAGE project, the flexible design of the marketplace portal and its underlying software repository are presented. A concise overview is given of the initial set of advanced game technology components created by RAGE, that are currently exposed in the portal. For empirical validation of these components, we have developed 7 serious games based on subsets of these components, which were then tested in educational practice with several hundreds of end-users. This game components portal want to be a neutral hub not depe...

The use of serious games in cognitive rehabilitation would be invaluable to the rehabilitation process and provide advantages that may not be available in conventional rehabilitation. Although many recent game-based interventions for cognitive rehabilitation have been reported in the literature, not much knowledge is available on the best approach to developing usable games for individuals with cognitive disabilities. Therefore, Design Science approach was adopted to find a solution to this problem. This paper explores an existing Design Science framework and methodology, which are then combined and reduced into one single framework. This paper further examines how this framework can be used as a means to develop an artefact that can be used as a guideline in developing serious games for cognitive rehabilitation. The Design Science paradigm works well for the development of serious game for cognitive rehabilitation. This paper concludes with a discussion of the research contributions.

This paper presents the RAGE marketplace portal (gamecomponents.eu), which is intended as a hot spot and neutral single point of access for serious game technologies. The portal aims at fostering collaborations and the exchange of technical artefacts and associated knowledge and resources between different stakeholders in the field of serious gaming (e.g. educators, developers, researchers, publishers, policy makers and end-users). After a brief introduction to the H2020 RAGE project, the flexible design of the marketplace portal and its underlying software repository are presented. A concise overview is given of the initial set of advanced game technology components created by RAGE, that are currently exposed in the portal. For empirical validation of these components, we have developed 7 serious games based on subsets of these components, which were then tested in educational practice with several hundreds of end-users. This game components portal want to be a neutral hub not depe...

This paper presents the RAGE marketplace portal (gamecomponents.eu), which is intended as a hot spot and neutral single point of access for serious game technologies. The portal aims at fostering collaborations and the exchange of technical artefacts and associated knowledge and resources between different stakeholders in the field of serious gaming (e.g. educators, developers, researchers, publishers, policy makers and end-users). After a brief introduction to the H2020 RAGE project, the flexible design of the marketplace portal and its underlying software repository are presented. A concise overview is given of the initial set of advanced game technology components created by RAGE, that are currently exposed in the portal. For empirical validation of these components, we have developed 7 serious games based on subsets of these components, which were then tested in educational practice with several hundreds of end-users. This game components portal want to be a neutral hub not depe...