Showing papers in "Entertainment Computing in 2017"

TL;DR: The results of this survey show the direction of Maker Movement research during recent years and the most common technologies, subjects, evaluation methods, and pedagogical designs.

TL;DR: An in-the-wild week-long study that implements Maker activities designed with 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade teachers during science classes, highlighting issues that may inform future directions in the investigation of Making as entertainment technologies in education.

TL;DR: It was showed that older adult respondents generally indicated a preference for games that were easy to learn and play, but also challenging, with puzzle & strategy games being the most popular.

TL;DR: This paper presents a dynamic difficulty adjustment mechanism for MOBA games to create a computer controlled opponent that adapts dynamically to the player performance, trying to offer the player a better game experience.

TL;DR: A systematic analysis of literature is performed to enhance knowledge about how to adapt flow heuristics to a video game context and define a flow framework for game AI.

TL;DR: LAGARTO, an authoring tool for building location-based mobile games enhanced with augmented reality capabilities, is presented, a subclass of pervasive games in which the gameplay progresses according to the location of players.

TL;DR: It was found that familiar control schemes that coupled control of the camera view and steering the avatar, had no dead zone, and allowed players to use the mouse to control all in-game functions were preferred and resulted in the best performance and immersion scores.

TL;DR: One of the stages from the interactive ALICE installation was used to investigate immersiveness and its contributing factors in a between-group design with a special focus on the effects of interactivity, and the feedback and feedforward stimuli of the environment on the users’ experiences.

TL;DR: A new methodology for developing educational games based on graphical notations and divided in six phases, which seeks a balance between the overall and the detailed view required to create the game.

TL;DR: This paper presents an approach to automate quality assurance tasks, which are still done mainly manually by human beta testers due to the specific peculiarities of videogames.

TL;DR: Collecting learning evidence via rigorous multidimensional and multidisciplinary case studies will allow us to better understand and improve the value of making and the role of the various digital and physical spaces.

TL;DR: The proposed evaluation method was able to support real experiment by proving the accuracy of the 3D gaze tracking system with average Euclidean error less than 1 cm, and can be implemented when space of experiment room is limited by adjusting the distance of virtual plane programmatically.

TL;DR: The design, development, and evaluation of a serious game that gamifies the Apollo lunar exploration missions are presented and show the success of fostering great user engagement in STEM learning.

TL;DR: A holistic framework that covers every aspect of video game development is proposed and is applied to Duke Nukem Forever, a video game that was released in 2011 after fifteen years of development.

TL;DR: This paper investigates the gameplay behaviors of 25 players across three types of exploration games by collecting in-game data, think-aloud data, questionnaire responses and post-game interview data, and uses thematic analysis to analyze the data and map out four player exploration archetypes (PEAs): Wanderers, Seers, Pathers and Targeters.

TL;DR: Results showed that a transmedia storytelling system might help fostering historical consciousness, as it is able to intercept the attention of younger generations, and engaged different audiences and increased the users’ interest about history.

TL;DR: The role of an external observer that tries to predict who is going to win from the events occurring during the game, using influence maps, and concludes that the system reaches a level of precision similar to the human judges.

TL;DR: The results indicate that the MDA framework can be used as a guideline for the development of new DF systems, enabling game designers to create better products.

TL;DR: A serious game application to help users move toward a better and healthier body position, by learning proper postures and performing stretches in real-time, and showing that users not only perceived the importance and usefulness of the application, but also expressed a positive experience with regard to practicing the exercises.

TL;DR: Towi game platform draws inspiration from tests such as the Backward Digit Span, Visual Search and Labyrinths, to build a set of tasks based on relatable activities and circumstances, indicating the gaming platform has potential as a neuropsychological screening tool.

TL;DR: A game-engine plug-in for efficient development of a format of investigation in SGs that is designed in order to support discovery-learning in information-rich virtual environments and argues that the same approach could be employed to other game formats, especially in the emerging context of developing games as services.

TL;DR: A framework to expand the design language used to articulate form properties and types of feedback that happen between children’s actions and the intended functionality of maker technologies is presented.

TL;DR: It is shown that nudges are highly effective in games where players are not strongly incented to work hard, and that, even in high-energy games, adding negative consequences to the nudges, creating “shoves”, maintains the nudge’ power.

TL;DR: An experiment investigating four control modes based on the use of device tilt in conjunction with touch control in mobile “dual-analog” games indicates that while touch-based controls offered the best performance, tilt-based movement control was comparable.

TL;DR: Three different evaluation functions have been proposed and it is shown that a victory-based fitness, which prioritises the number of victories, contributes to generate better bots, on average, than other functions based on other numerical aspects of the battles.

TL;DR: The role of personality in player-centered game design has been explored in this paper, where the authors demonstrate that serious games can be made more motivating and performance-oriented by appropriately chosen reward contingencies based on player personality.

TL;DR: The methods of the OSS computer game applications demonstrate an acceptable level of quality in the three criteria of correctness, reliability and maintainability from the set of six factors of ISO 9126 model.

TL;DR: This work proposes an adaptive and semiautomatic methodology, which allows to transfer facial expressions from a face mesh to another, aiming to speed the process of generating facial animation for interactive applications.

TL;DR: Results of an experiment suggest participants felt stronger negative emotions when playing a bloody game with headphones off, and frustration was related to cognitive elaboration whereas fear and anxiety were not.

TL;DR: It was concluded that, assuming a role in the game, the players established an enunciation process of logical problems – puzzles and the development of epistemological games in 3D has revealed itself as a possibility for us to start new paradigms in the production of mathematical knowledge upon the logical and mathematical reasoning that surpasses the authors' personal experiences.