Information Systems and Technologies

Maximizing player enjoyment in computer games is one of the most popular issues in game design. Different components of game fun have been determined by researchers in the past, but this article will focus on game challenges, difficulty levels, and their effects on player enjoyment. Various different genres exist in the computer gaming world, but it is important to note that roleplaying games provide diverse gaming challenges uniformly in their structure and require special attention in terms of player enjoyment. This study will focus on lessons learned from computer roleplaying games (CRPGs), giving examples from the best practices of the industry.

Computer-based and Web-based learning have been dramatically decreasing the costs of personnel training. With their increased popularity, virtual worlds and games open up possibilities for simultaneous learning on multiple levels; players may learn from contextual information embedded in the narrative of the game and through the risks, benefits, costs, outcomes, and rewards of alternative strategies that result from fast-paced decision making. Such dynamics also contribute to building relationships and sharing/delegating authority with others, in other words acquiring leadership skills. With its emphasis on leadership skills in virtual teams, this paper introduces main findings of several studies on leadership in multiplayer online environments including commercial online games. These studies main focus was on leadership styles in online environments.

In this paper we attempt to clarify the popular term 'interactivity' within the context of computer games by classifying it into three categories: personal interactivity, social interactivity and environmental interactivity. Each category of interactivity contains five subcategories and success stories from popular computer games are given for each section to highlight the depth and quality of interaction the selected games provide.

A report on gamedev-oriented higher education in four countries, based on reciprocal study visits to Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz (Poland), Charles University in Prague (Czechia), University of Jyväskylä in Jyväskylä (Finland), and Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul (Turkey). It is an overview of curricula, learning outcomes, collaboration with the game industry, and prospects for development for each institution. It also outlines the country-specific contexts of the national higher-ed system, the game industry, and gamedev organisations and communities.

This study reviews published scientific literature on the use of heuristics for evaluating player experience to (a) identify the potential contribution of the application of heuristics for assessing player experience, (b) present the status of playability heuristics evaluation procedures for evaluating player experience, and (c) define future research perspectives. By searching online bibliographic databases, 44 relevant articles were selected and included in the study. The aim, methodology, proposed heuristics and conclusions were studied separately for each article. The study indicated that a large variety of approaches on evaluating the experience of video games using heuristics were presented. Because of this, it is not possible to identify a generally accepted approach while studying evaluation of video games. This study intends to present and clarify a much-needed holistic point of view in terms of using heuristics for evaluating player experience because of the current dispersed state of the literature and interlaced heuristic evaluation approaches. The review study indicated that most of the articles presented new heuristics, either by iteratively improving the existing approaches or forming new ones. It is usually suggested that the presented sets of heuristics have been viable in general for assessing some aspects regarding the gaming experience. However, the heuristic approaches have neither proven to be including the experience in its entirety nor empirically tested adequately for validation to provide a possible de facto basis for further research. The implications of the articles were also studied for providing a common ground for future research in the field of heuristics evaluation of video games.

This paper is concerned with the following: (1) the applicability of Propp's morphology to game stories; (2) the identification of the required changes in the original framework to analyze game stories on an act/mission level; (3) the discovery of the logical sequence of story functions that form story patterns; (4) and the identification of commonly repeated story patterns as well as the cultural differences between American and Japanese game stories. The scope of this study is limited to Role-Playing Games (RPG); believing that the narrative value of RPGs coupled with the freedom of choice they offer, make this genre more suitable for a structural study of game narrative. To focus on the cultural differences and to identify repeating story patterns, three RPGs from the east and three RPGs from the west are selected. Each game's overall story is broken down into acts and then each act is mapped to Proppian functions.