Entertainment Computing

Role-play can be a powerful educational tool, especially when dealing with social or ethical issues. However, while other types of educational activity have been routinely technology-enhanced for some time, the specific problem of supporting educational role-play with technology has only begun to be tackled recently. Within the eCIRCUS project we have designed a framework for technology-enhanced role-play with the aim of educating adolescents about intercultural empathy. This work was influenced by related fields such as intelligent virtual agents, interactive narrative and pervasive games. In this paper, we will describe the different components of our role-play technology by means of a prototype implementation of this technology, the ORIENT showcase. Furthermore we will present results of our evaluation of ORIENT.

This paper explores the use of 2D cellular automata (CA) to generate 3D terrains through a simple additive approach. Experimenting with multiple CA transition rules produced aesthetically interesting, navigable landscapes, suggesting applicability for terrain generation in games.

There are many ways in which digital games can present players with comic situations. They often contain jokes, funny dialogue, and ridiculous situations that provoke laughter. As an interactive experience, however, digital gameplay also presents possibilities for comedy that are not directly caused by the content presented in games, but are rather inherent to the way(s) players experience and relate to this content. In this chapter, I  discuss the comic potential that originates in the way players of digital games take on the dual position of being at once internal to the gameworld via fictional proxy and external to it as the actual person who is playing. I will describe how the comic attitude, as it has been discussed within the philosophy of humour, is intricately related to the dual position that players of digital games take on and how gameplay always entails the possibility of turning players into both a comic object and a laughing subject.

For published chapter, see https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-88338-6_2

In this paper we treat the theme of "the future of narrative." In examining how a computer can inspire with humor and wisdom, we studied the hidden relationships and contextual emergence of language. Pursuing a vision of the future where people will have conversations with robots, we not only display the results visually, but also have a robot agent convey inspiration and emotional content to users.

In the context of video games, dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) offers a dynamic solution to match the in-game difficulty to the player's needs. In this study, we aimed to assess the added value of pupillometry features in the context of DDA and player experience modeling to predict experienced difficulty. A user study was conducted, during which participants played nine rounds of Pac-Man at different difficulties and for which gameplay-, game context-and pupillometry data were gathered together with participants' responses regarding game experience. Multiple random forest classifiers were trained on different feature subsets, with and without pupillometry features, to predict experienced difficulty. We found that the addition of pupillometry features did not lead to a performance improvement of the classifiers. This finding was supported by the results of our data analysis; only for the distributions of two of the four pupillometry features significant differences were found for the lowest and some of the other levels of self-reported experienced challenge. No convincing inverted u-curve was found to describe the relation between pupil size and experienced difficulty. A cautious inverted u-curve was found for pupil size with respect to the ingame difficulty. Based on our results we question whether pupillometry, as objective measure, is informative in the prediction of the subjective perception of difficulty. We propose future directions with respect to pupillometry features, the prediction of experienced difficulty and the prediction of the optimal load, together with a follow up study for which the constructed dataset can be reused.

The paper discusses adoption of Serious Games (SGs) for supporting development of an entrepreneurial mindset in university students of technical and scientific universities. The paper relies on the authors experience in the eSG project, which aims at introducing students, mainly through practice, to basic concepts of entrepreneurship and company management. In the framework of the project, courses have been designed and carried out in three different countries: Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. The paper discusses the main requirements for the courses and presents a table template, based on state of the art models for entrepreneurship education, that we have used for the scouting of the most suited SGs and defining the most appropriate mix for their use in the courses, keeping into account targeted competences and skills, usability and pedagogical effectiveness. Using the template, the paper draws a comprehensive overview of relevant SGs available on the market and identifies, through an expert analysis, key benefits and issues concerning their adoption in teaching entrepreneurship for the target students. Finally, the paper critically analyzes the state of the art, indicating directions for future research that should lead to development of more effective SGs for entrepreneurship education.

Control devices are an important variable of interest in studies of frustration, aggression, presence and engagement with video games. Findings have been mixed, depending on controller type and associated actions within games. In this study we look at hypothesized outcomes, from the perspective of conceptual models and mental models, in frustration, engagement and performance while playing a driving simulation using two controllers that are based on different conceptual models and have been available for differing amounts of time. Recognizing that conceptual models are exogenous as a part of the device design and mental models operate endogenously to access design features, it was found in this study that there was no difference in frustration or engagement on the basis of conceptual models while performance was better with the older, less-natural, standard-controller. Findings supported the importance of mental models that have developed over time through gaming experience. Frustration, engagement and performance have relationships in this data demonstrating the Conceptual & Mental Models in Operation. 2 role and development of mental models. Conceptual models need to be understood in terms of mental models in the study of the effects of video game play and it is suggested that frustration may have a stronger connection to expectation than other technological factors in game play.

This paper reports on an experiment that investigates the effect of interacting with a personality-driven embodied conversational agent (ECA) on the perceived social presence and game experience of people in a VR social simulator. Furthermore, the dynamics between the different metrics of game experience and social presence of people are explored to determine which game experience metrics are the strongest predictors of perceived social presence in this context. A personality-based emotional model is used for personifying the employed ECA, which governs the manifestation of its non-verbal behaviors. Three experimental conditions manipulating the existence and intensity of non-verbal behaviors exhibited by the ECA were used to investigate the effect of this proposed approach. The results of the experiment with 41 participants indicate that people who were exposed to an extrovert ECA experienced significantly higher levels of behavioral involvement as part of their social presence compared to the other conditions. These results suggest that incorporating personality by means of non-verbal behavior in the emotional model of an ECA influences users perceived feeling of social presence. Furthermore, our results reveal that there is a bidirectional relationship between game experience metrics and perceived social presence of people as each predict the other.

The DreamThrower is a novel technology that explores virtually creating, throwing and catching dreams. It detects users' dream state by measuring rapid eye movement. Once the dream state is detected, sound and light stimuli is played to alter the dream. Users report on their dream, and they can send the stimuli that they have used to another person via an on-line website. A working prototype accurately detects REM sleep. Based on results from the first experiment with three subjects, light and environmental sounds such as a jungle and ocean were found to have little influence on dreams. The second experiment with five subjects found that voice sound stimulus could influence dreams in one case. Interestingly, our subjects felt that the DreamThrower system would be a fun gaming experience and many said that they would share their dreams for a collaborative gaming experience. User engagement with the social network may be sufficient to alter dreams. Two studies with different stimuli showed some evidence that dreams can be altered.

Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) players maintain consistent views of the positions of each other by periodically exchanging messages. Besides the fact that these messages can suffer delays that cause rendering inconsistencies, they also represent an overhead on the network. This overhead can be significant, as the number of MMOG players is very large, but reducing the number of messages is not trivial. The classic strategy to predict movement avoiding message exchange is based on the Dead Reckoning algorithm, which has several limitations. Other strategies have been proposed more recently that improve the results, but rely on expert knowledge. In this work we propose Smart Reckoning, a movement prediction strategy based on machine learning. The strategy consists of two phases. In the first phase, a learning model classifies whether the classical Dead Reckoning algorithm is able to predict the new avatar position correctly or not. In case the conclusion is negative, another learning model is used to predict the new direction. The proposed strategy was applied to the World of Warcraft game. The learning models were implemented with the Weka tool using real game trace data, and results are presented for the accuracy of multiple algorithms.

Personality dimensions are associated with preferences for various recreational activities. The present study examined whether personality dimensions differed in their associations with preferences for particular aspects of gaming experiences. We examined the unique associations that personality dimensions had with gaming preferences reported by 359 community members who were active gamers. The basic personality dimensions captured by the HEXACO model of personality were found to be associated with gaming preferences. For example, extraversion was found to have a moderate association with the socializer gaming preference (i.e., enjoyed interacting with others while playing) and a weak association with the daredevil gaming preference (i.e., enjoyed the thrill of taking risks in games). Discussion focuses on the implications of these results for understanding the connection between personality and preferences for gaming experiences.

Serious games have been used to aid the understanding of concepts that are taught in theoretical classes. However, mistakes made by players may result in failure to complete the game objectives. These mistakes, which are usually difficult to spot or reproduce in subsequent trials, directly jeopardize the learning capabilities of the serious games and are usually avoided by the established gameplay. In order to solve this issue, this paper introduces a new concept: provenance in games, which is used to analyze collected data and provide a feedback to the player allowing him to understand and analyze the effects of the decisions he made. To do so, we present a framework that records all useful gameplay data and provides this data to further analysis. We also instantiated this framework in a Software Engineering game as a proof of concept, which allows the player to identify his mistakes and learn through them.

Among different reasons that can lead a player to stop playing a game, frustration due to challenges that do not fit to their skills may be one of the most critical. Besides that, the players' skills improve along the time, and the previously selected difficulty level may become inappropriate due to the player's improvement. This can result on decreasing the motivation for the player retention, as they could get bored because of the easy challenges or frustrated due to the harsh difficulty. In this paper, we propose a new approach based on gathered provenance data for dynamically tuning the game's challenge according to the current player skills. To do so, we developed BinG, a framework responsible for collecting and processing data provenance, allowing for the development of different balancing models to be used externally by the game. BinG uses the concept of logical programming to deliver facts and rules observed during a game session, allowing querying over the database to understand what happened. Additionally, we conducted a study using a game developed in-house and a dynamic balancing model customized to that game through BinG. This study was performed with five volunteers, who played the game using the default balancing and our dynamic balancing. Through this experiment, we showed a performance discrepancy reduction of almost 50% for the most skilled player in relation to the less skillful player when using dynamic balancing.

Success in Game Analytics tasks demands developers to identify what is happening in a game (an effect) and track its causes. Thus, game provenance graph tools have been proposed to capture cause-and-effect relationships. However, as a downside gathering provenance still may demand huge coding efforts for long-range relationships. In this dissertation, we contributed with a framework named PingUMiL for automatic edge detection using graph representation learning, aiming at alleviating the coding effort. We evaluated the generalization capacity of PingUMiL when learning from similar games and compared its performance to classical machine learning methods. The experiments conducted on two racing games show that PingUMiL (1) outperforms classical machine learning, (2) can be used for inference in unobserved data and (3) enhances detection cross games.

This paper presents a wearable motion capture (MoCap)-based serious game (SG) for physical rehabilitation and evaluates its user experience. Conventional physical rehabilitation relies on professional trainers, equipment, and facilities, which are time-consuming and expensive for users. It often reduces the users’ motivation to perform exercises. It can be difficult for users to continue their physical rehabilitation through the conventional model. However, recent studies demonstrate that serious games have the potential to improve the effectiveness of rehabilitation training through a more engaged and immersive game design. Most of those studies focus on technology and the development of a specific MoCap sensor-based SG design for users with motor deficiencies, rather than emphasizing the users’ experience impacting the effect of performance in physical rehabilitation. This study developed a prototype of a physical rehabilitation exercise game that considers user experience. This game employs a wearable inertial MoCap sensor enabling users
to interact intuitively with the game to promote physical activities for health. We analyze and discuss user satisfaction and game experience through user experience questionnaires. The results suggest that most users were satisfied with the SG-based rehabilitation, and found the game was enjoyable and engaging. Based on the implications, we discuss possible future research to improve user experience of the highly accurate
real-time MoCap-based serious game. This can enable users with motor disabilities to undertake physical exercises in a home environment.

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There are several transporter is presented in films. This research aims to realize such transporter by using Mixed Reality (MR) technology. In this paper, the authors introduce a framework of "A Distributed MR Transporter" and following two essential technologies to realize it; 1) The coherency control protocol named "Duplication-Selection-Protocol" for comfortable and joyful collaboration in shared MR space, 2) "Ponch-3D" to acquire and reconstruct remote real space as a simplified 3D model. The proposed framework and technologies can be applicable for several practical applications.

Challenges in video games tend to be created in a ’one challenge for all players’ fashion, which creates different experiences for different players given that they do not all possess the same skills required to overcome said challenges. Some games offer the choice between a few difficulty settings like the well known easy, normal and hard format. But what if instead of one difficulty for everyone or making the player choose the difficulty he wants, the game could adjust its challenges to suit each player in a way that would make the experience felt by all players similar? Based on a previous work [1] that proved that, for the game used, such a model increased both time spent playing and number of times the game was replayed, when comparing an adaptive model with a conventional way of creating challenges, the work presented in this document investigated how the adaptation of the challenges affected the experience of the player where both versions of the game used the same method to ...

In the maritime industry, it is of vital importance that personnel onboard ships are familiarized with the ship's layout, along with safety equipment and processes for safeguarding of the individual seafarer and the ship's crew. In fact, international maritime regulations require that all personnel employed or engaged on a seagoing ship receive proper familiarization training. However, several studies have identified lack of familiarization as a contributing factor to maritime incidents. There are several challenges associated with the current familiarization practices, namely cost, difficulty in optimizing planning, variation in practices in familiarization and the experience of the facilitator of familiarization process. This paper presents a study consisted of 58 students comparing traditional and virtual familiarization. The study found that there were no significant differences between real and virtual familiarization, and some support for differences between the familiarization conditions for single waypoints. Individual differences are clearly more important than the mode of familiarization.

The 2D Poincare' plot of HRV signal reflects the effect of different external stimuli on ANS. The classification is generally done by fitting an 'ellipse' on the dense region of the constructed Poincare' plot of HRV signal. However 2D Poincare' plot sometimes fails to describe the proper behavior of the system. One such example is 2D Poincare' plot of HRV signal in pre-music and on-music condition. In fact 2D Poincare' plots in pre and on-music condition look almost similar for few subjects. So a proper classification tool is sought for. In this article, multi fractal DFA analysis has been applied to properly distinguish the pre-music and on-music state of some normal healthy subjects.

This article is made publicly available in the institutional repository of Wageningen University and Research, under the terms of article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, also known as the Amendment Taverne. This has been done with explicit consent by the author. Article 25fa states that the author of a short scientific work funded either wholly or partially by Dutch public funds is entitled to make that work publicly available for no consideration following a reasonable period of time after the work was first published, provided that clear reference is made to the source of the first publication of the work. This publication is distributed under The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) 'Article 25fa implementation' project. In this project research outputs of researchers employed by Dutch Universities that comply with the legal requirements of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act are distributed online and free of cost or other barriers in institutional repositories. Research outputs are distributed six months after their first online publication in the original published version and with proper attribution to the source of the original publication.

Game development is an interdisciplinary concept that embraces software engineering, business, management, and artistic disciplines. This research facilitates a better understanding of the business dimension of digital games. The main objective of this research is to investigate empirically the effect of business factors on the performance of digital games in the market and to answer the research questions asked in this study. Game development organizations are facing high pressure and competition in the digital game industry. Business has become a crucial dimension, especially for game development organizations. The main contribution of this paper is to investigate empirically the influence of key business factors on the business performance of games. This is the first study in the domain of game development that demonstrates the interrelationship between key business factors and game performance in the market. The results of the study provide evidence that game development organizations must deal with multiple business key factors to remain competitive and handle the high pressure in the digital game industry. Furthermore, the results of the study support the theoretical assertion that key business factors play an important role in game business performance.

In this paper we report on a study conducted in 2007 and 2008 looking at the media use habits of 27 families in the Greater London area. The project builds on previous work studying media use within a similar group in 2006. The study investigated attitudes towards different types of media and the role Television (TV) currently plays and could play within the home environment. To facilitate the study we rapidly prototyped an experimental home media device and asked participants to use and respond to it. We explored issues of interactional simplicity and sharing media using a TV and employed the experimental device as a focal point for discussion and the generation of new ideas. Our key findings indicate a strong desire for services which support media presentation and consumption through the TV (combined with a suitable control device) and cater for social interaction within the home such as sharing photos and videos with other household members. In addition we found a strong user preference for services that offer fast and immediate access to specialised online activities, such as quick checks of e-mail accounts and social networking services.

Evaluating fun and usability in computer games with children Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, op gezag van de Rector Magnificus, prof.dr.ir. C.J. van Duijn, voor een commissie aangewezen door het College voor Promoties in het openbaar te verdedigen op donderdag 9 februari 2006 om 16.00 uur door Wolmet Barendregt geboren te Purmerend Dit proefschrift is goedgekeurd door de promotoren: prof.dr. D.G. Bouwhuis en prof.dr. H. de Ridder Copromotor: dr.ir. M.M. Bekker 8.3.6 How will we organise the data analysis?.

In this paper, we report on an experiment to monitor the user attention in a serious game called Le Village aux Oiseaux (The Birds' Village). The main motivation of this study stems from the importance of dynamically adapting scenario and challenges to the skills of each player. The solution we developed is a real-time, non-invasive visual attention monitoring method, using an evaluation of the reaction time in an open and continuous space. Our results provide information that can be useful to manage automatically each game session. It can be of benet to game designers as well, allowing them to use this information to improve gameplay, manage the diculty of game environments, and optimize positioning of visual resources on screen.

Large-scale immersion domes are specialized embodiments of spatial augmented reality, allowing large groups to be immersed in real-time animated or cinematic virtual worlds with strong sense-of-presence.  Also called fulldome theaters, these spaces currently serve as giant screen cinemas, planetariums, themed entertainment attractions and immersive classrooms. This chapter presents case studies for emerging applications of digital domes, reviews dome theater design basics and suggests that these venues are on track to become mainstream arts and entertainment centers delivering global impact at scale. Standard venue designs will be necessary to realize the full potential of an immersive media arts and entertainment distribution network. This chapter provides rationale for standardization of immersion domes for multi-use events spaces, immersive cinemas and live performing arts theaters.

The paper discusses adoption of Serious Games (SGs) for supporting development of an entrepreneurial mindset in university students of technical and scientific universities. The paper relies on the authors experience in the eSG project, which aims at introducing students, mainly through practice, to basic concepts of entrepreneurship and company management. In the framework of the project, courses have been designed and carried out in three different countries: Italy, Spain and the Netherlands. The paper discusses the main requirements for the courses and presents a table template, based on state of the art models for entrepreneurship education, that we have used for the scouting of the most suited SGs and defining the most appropriate mix for their use in the courses, keeping into account targeted competences and skills, usability and pedagogical effectiveness. Using the template, the paper draws a comprehensive overview of relevant SGs available on the market and identifies, through an expert analysis, key benefits and issues concerning their adoption in teaching entrepreneurship for the target students. Finally, the paper critically analyzes the state of the art, indicating directions for future research that should lead to development of more effective SGs for entrepreneurship education.

Terrain generation is a fundamental requirement of many computer graphics simulations, including computer games, flight simulators and environments in feature films. There has been a considerable amount of research in this domain, which ranges between fully automated and semi-automated methods. Voxel representations of 3D terrains can create rich features that are not found in other forms of terrain generation techniques, such as caves and overhangs. In this article, we introduce a semi-automated method of generating features for volumetric terrains using a rule-based procedural generation system. Features are generated by selecting subsets of a voxel grid as input symbols to a grammar, composed of user-created operators. This results in overhangs and caves generated from a set of simple rules. The feature generation runs on the CPU and the GPU is utilised to extract a robust mesh from the volumetric dataset.

Casual creators are creativity support tools intended to be fun and easy to use for exploratory creation. We have built casual creators called fluidic game designers, which support exploratory game design directly on mobile devices. These work by encoding games in a parameterised design space and enabling player/designers to create new games by varying the parameters in a design interface and seeing changes in their design instantly. A question largely unanswered by existing work is how to choose a suitable parameter space. We describe a methodology for specifying and implementing parameterised design spaces for casual creators, a context that requires balancing a large and expressive space against a manageable and fun user interface. This methodology was derived through investigating and generalising how the parameter spaces for three fluidic games were conceived. It suggests an iterative process whereby parameters are sourced in seven different ways, within a dynamic of incrementa...

Since the invention, the mobile phone is becoming more and more popular to lead the communication sector and it has been the spirit of personal communication from the beginning of 80s. Furthermore, developing countries which have always been on the search for affordable communication solutions found mobile communication the most popular method. Low cost communication, infrastructure, and maintenance are some of the key reasons that make mobile technologies popular in developing countries. Statistics depict that the usage of short messages is one of the main communication method in developing countries and most of the organizations are using SMS (Short Message Service) as a tool to assist people, especially in African and Asian continents. Sri Lanka, as a developing country, has a unique culture which has emerged scaling many centuries, mixing with various neighboring cultures. Recently the western cultural influence has dramatically changed the various cultural aspects of the urban population. The rapid economic growth, the changes in agriculture based economic environment, advances in communication and media, and globalization trends has transformed the cultural experiences of Sri Lankans. Taking into account the speedy progress of the mobile technology, especially the SMS, the evolution of the Sri Lankan way of living which has absorbed the culture that has developed with the use of mobiles, and the long literary history where poetry had played a major role in communication,

In the modern era of computing and mobile technology, the human lifestyle is affected by technology, and people are adopting habits that promote sedentary behaviour, including watching TV, playing video games, using computers, and mobile phones, leading to increased periods when people are not actively engaging in physical activity. The combination of Virtual reality and Exergame has been recently introduced and used, and this is a combination that this paper takes an interest in. This research paper shows the design and development of the Happy Child exergame, which, along with the design, the cost of the device has been taken into consideration to be more accessible to the public. Happy Child consists of a mobile application (APP), an Arduino board as the main processor which, with the two types of sensors (Accelerometer and temperature), will send the user data and the players BMI to the user personal computer and after playing each designed game which uses Unity to develop send back to Arduino and store on using the mobile phone. Happy child Design shows the successful implementation and its ability to use as the Exergame to increase people's activity.

While humor exists in some shape or form in many video games, unlike in film and literature, comedy is not considered an established genre of its own in video games. One of the challenges in defining what constitutes comedy in video games, however, is in identifying the elements that contribute to such comedy, particularly with the inclusion of interactively as a fundamental aspect of video games. In this paper, we use the concept of ludonarrative-i.e., ludic (gameplay-related) and narrative (story-related) elements-as the basis for analyzing comedy in video games. We categorize the existing methods of incorporating comedy into ludonarrative elements of video games into three primary and five secondary methods, which we refer to as comic enhancers. We also illustrate the use of these methods through examples of existing video games, and provide a summary of our analyses and their implications.

In this paper, we present an interactive system that allows people to enjoy an entertaining experience with traditional Chinese culture. We have created a mobile application called iSage Confucius, which can be used to chat with a virtual Confucius, the famous philosopher in Ancient China. By presenting age-old values and concepts in a new medium, we hope that to spark interest in Confucian culture among a younger generation and help revive a valuable traditional culture in the modern world.

What do experts do in court? Experts testify about both facts and opinions. Normal (lay) witness can only testify to facts about which they have direct knowledge. How do experts communicate their testimony? • Talking • Using diagrams • Now, using simulations What are the problems? "Too" persuasive-in jurors' memories fact and simulation may be confused.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a progressive neurological disorder and the second most common age-related neurodegenerative disease after Alzheimer's disease. The primary symptoms of the disease are associated with the loss of motor skills affecting patients' movement and coordination and disrupting their daily life. Unfortunately, such motor symptoms cannot be fully relieved by therapeutic options. On the other hand, studies have shown that regular training and exercising can prove neuroprotective in PD patients helping them maintain independent longer. Based on recent studies stating that computer-based physical therapy games can be used as an option for facilitating PD rehabilitation exercise programs, we present the development of a body motion based videogame, using the Kinect sensor, targeted for PD patients. We tested twelve patients with advanced forms of PD motor symptoms (UPDRS motor score>20) and six initial stage PD patients (UPDRS motor score<20). All participants underwent an (UPDRS) motor skills pretest and afterwards performed three training sessions. In this paper, we will present part of our research aiming to analyze the movement patterns of PD patients in order to detect statistical significant differences between groups of different impairment level based on their UPDRS motor score and their performance. Consequently, we adopt a deep learning approach by analyzing the recorded human skeleton sequences for predicting the players' level of motor skills decline. Such methods and data can serve as preliminary evidence for further larger and controlled studies to propose such an exergame that can independently detect and adapt its difficulty level to better match players' ability providing a more targeted and personalized rehabilitation option.

Entrepreneurs need to develop a range of skills to be successful, including skills in decision making, risk management, problem solving, communication, and teamwork. Games and simulations are increasingly being used in both academia and business to encourage such skills development. This paper describes a business simulation module whereby postgraduate students use a game to simulate managing and operating a business. The game replicates real-world scenarios, thereby providing an innovative and contextualized learning environment. This paper presents extracts from students’ reflective essays, which describe various learning outcomes. The paper concludes with some guidelines for teachers considering integrating game-based learning into their curricula to facilitate skills development, as well as recommendations for future research.

In this paper, we discuss the interest and the need to evaluate the difficulty of single player video games. We first show the importance of difficulty, drawing from semiotics to explain the link between tensionresolution cycles and challenge with the player's enjoyment. Then, we report related work on automatic gameplay analysis. We show through a simple experimentation that automatic video game analysis is both practicable and can lead to interesting results. We argue that automatic analysis tools are limited if they do not consider difficulty from the player point of view. The last two sections provide a player and Game Design oriented definition of the challenge and difficulty notions in games. As a consequence we derive the property that must fulfil a measurable definition of difficulty.

In this article, we investigate the child's experience of fun and learning within curriculumintegrated Maker activities in the elementary school classroom. Little is currently understood as to how Making makes learning fun, particularly in formal educational contexts. We conducted an in-the-wild week-long study that implements Maker activities designed with 3 rd , 4 th , and 5 th grade teachers during science classes. Qualitative video-based analysis of the sessions for six students and analysis of all the students' self-reports were performed to derive an understanding of the determinants of fun and learning in the children's experiences. We highlight issues that may inform future directions in the investigation of Making as entertainment technologies in education.

We present a novel multi-robot system capable of performing cheerleader dances. Our team of seven robots are constructed from very simple LEGO Mindstorms kits, yet still monitor their own synchronisation automatically in real time. We describe how we use a scripting language to abstract the overall control into a set of higher-order functions, and to produce fault tolerancy. In addition to demonstrating the practical application of focusing on the fundamentals of multi-robot systems, we plan to use our cheerleaders to investigate the research issues that lie at the interface of robotics, external world events, human observers, and entertainment.

The younger generations are very focused on what surrounds them and on what happens to their friends, but they are hardly interested in written-based historical contents. This creates a loss of cultural heritage passed down for generations. In the attempt of preserving memories and of intercepting the attention of the new generations, in this paper we propose a transmedia storytelling system that uses private film memories and modern communication technologies to tell the story of our past. In particular, the system allows people to explore the city through the eyes of amateur film sequences while walking in city streets: we use an archive of more than 500 h of movies shot by private citizens from 1940 to 1989 and we develop a mobile application that links film memories to city places. Through an experimental assessment, we observed that the system engaged different audiences and increased the users' interest about history; in particular, young people, who said to be not interested in history, admitted that the system increased their interest about historical contents. In general, the obtained results showed that a transmedia storytelling system might help fostering historical consciousness, as it is able to intercept the attention of younger generations.

Rakuchu Rakugai-zu is a screen painting illustrating in and around Kyoto created from the beginning of 16th century until 17th century. As in the Funaki Version of Rakuchu Rakugai-zu everyday lives of over 2,000 people in Kyoto are vividly painted, the painting is a good material to learn their customs in early 17th century in Kyoto. However, it is difficult to understand the details of the painting, if background information is not provided. How to document such information and how to provide people such information would be crucial for the future of museums. To cope with this, we are carrying out a project to develop the interactive Rakuchu Rakugai-zu, Funaki Version. Firstly, we digitize the painting with ultra-high resolution. Secondly, using historical books regarding the customs of that era., we identify clothes and behaviors of each person in the painting and linked them to the person in the painting. Thirdly, we develop the technology to provide such information interactively using text or voice. Fourthly, we develop present Funaki Version including various manga characters so that we can compare old and present customs of people. Integrating these contents and technologies we are now developing the interactive Rakuchu Rakugaizu, Funaki Version.