Program

Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out: Connected Learning and Play in a Digital Age

Early Registration Check-In

Registration Check-In and Continental Breakfast

Conference Welcome

Design, Learning, and Experience

Learning Learning Games: How to Effectively Teach New Game Mechanics

Multiple Media, Third Spaces, & Magic

Television, Games, and Mathematics: Effects of Children's Interactions with Multiple Media (Top Paper Award)
By: Sandra Crespo, Vince Melfi, Shalom Fisch, Richard Lesh and Elizabeth Motoki

Past research has shown that educational media, such as a television series or interactive games, can promote significant learning. Today, however, it is quite common for producers to create several interconnected media, such as a television show and an associated web site, under the assumption that multiple platforms elicit greater learning than a single medium would. The research reported below used Cyberchase media as the setting in which to investigate the effectiveness of multiple media as a tool for mathematical learning for elementary school children. The study included both a naturalistic phase, which mirrored children's typical use of the media, and an experimental phase, which allows for causal inference to be drawn about their learning outcomes.

Museum Games and the Third Space
By: Elizabeth Goins

This paper proposes the application of third space theory to museum games in order to create a model that will fulfill museum mission statements and engage the players in rich learning zones. In order to explain the integration of the model into the museum game it is necessary to review the history of the museum, museum education and third space theory. An example of third space theory to a Facebook game application prototype, myMuseum, will be reviewed. The objectives of myMuseum are to raise cultural competencies so that visitors can engage more fully with museum artifacts, and change the player's behavior from passive consumption to active creation of artifact meaning.

Magic: The Gathering in material and virtual space: An ethnographic approach toward understanding players who dislike online play
By: Aaron Trammell

This paper explores the results of a qualitative study on how Magic: The Gathering (M:TG) players perceive the use-value of simulated play environments. It is important to cultivate a thick description of how player communities evaluate, utilize and understand the games they play. Understanding the cultural protocols surrounding player communities allows game designers to develop games better suited to integrating player interests with pedagogical goals. This study utilizes ethnographic methods to understand the reasons why players choose to use or ignore Magic Online, an almost perfect simulation of the offline, tabletop card game. Simulated cards, spaces and rooms present the only major differences in play between the two environments. By exploring whether practice at Magic Online is understood by player communities to improve gameplay in an offline environment, this study hopes to discern: 1) How players believe that skills translate from Magic Online to an offline environment, 2) what reasons players cite when validating or invalidating online play, and 3) the use-value players attribute to virtual skill sets.

Puzzle Design for Educators and Game Developers

• Communal puzzle-solving: All the attendants will play an adventure game together.


• Insight Thinking: a brief re-cap of the principles introduced in the paper, and how they relate to the game played by the attendants.


• Group puzzle-solving: Attendants will split into groups of 2-3 and solve different sets of puzzles (non-digital this time). Afterwhich, attendants will discuss what makes a good puzzle, and what kinds of thinking the attendants resorted to when solving the puzzles assigned.

Games-Based Affinity Spaces: Connecting Youth to 21st Century Writing Practices

The Science of Rehabilitation

Implementing neuroplasticity principled training paradigms with rhythmic exer-games for all ages and disease processes
By: Shaw Bronner, Adam Noah and Atsumichi Tachnibana

The use of new technology such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allows us to understand how brain structure alters with training due to neural plasticity. The types and modalities of sensory feedback a player utilizes when learning to play a game may ultimately influence more than their game score. Proprioceptive (position and force), auditory, and visual feedback are integrated by players using multiple neural networks in the brain. As players develop the ability to effectively process these multimodal stimuli they may actually be expanding connectivity or promoting plasticity in their brain. Comparisons of brain activity while playing DDR with and without music suggest that rhythmic exer-games tap into common innate neural substrates for music and language processing, enhancing the effectiveness of multimodal training. Pre and post training fMRI scans will be used to discuss these changes in neural activity.

Neural feedforward and feedback mechanisms of meaningful game play
By: Adam Noah, Shaw Bronner and Atsumichi Tachibana

Gamers employ a wide variety of sensory modalities to hone skills when learning to play games. Auditory, visual, and tactile cues may provide players feedback necessary to perfect fine motor performance necessary to achieve higher skills. Feedforward cuing also likely plays an important role in training of motor skills. Examples of feedforward mechanisms are: familiarity with physics of first person shooters (predicting differences in trajectories of rocket launchers versus sniper rifles), or working knowledge of the particular turns within an individual circuit on a race simulator. Rhythmic games like Rock Band and Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) integrate visual, auditory, and tactile feedback with feedforward information of the beat of the song into the design of game play. We are particularly interested in how the balance of feedback and feedforward information can influence meaningful play with respect to neural mechanisms of motor learning and game skill development. Our hypothesis was that rhythmic games provide players enhanced knowledge of timing of when to press buttons in a game as a result of feedforward information from the song rhythm. We hypothesized that players will perform better, recruiting modified neural networks, when playing with rhythm versus no rhythm.

Fifteen healthy, young subjects played a modified version of DDR while undergoing a functional MRI (fMRI) scan. Gameplay was modified so that there were only left and right arrows within "dance" sequences, and a compatible two button foot pad was built to minimize motion artifact. Subjects were scanned as they played two conditions: regular DDR and DDR without rhythm (audio off).

Gamers performed better (gamescore) with audio than without audio. A large amount of neural activity was present in motor association areas and working memory areas of the cortex including parietal association, premotor, and prefrontal in gameplay, both with and without audio. Conjunction analysis of both conditions found the largest areas of common activation were in superior parietal gyrus, motor, prefrontal, and premotor cortex, and thalamus. Gameplay with audio revealed increased activation in temporal lobe and superior prefrontal cortex. Gameplay without audio revealed increases to brainstem, insula, premotor, and prefrontal cortex.

It is possible that shared networks active in playing the game with and without audio represent neural pathways involved in specific sensory-motor control, in which temporal and spatial accuracy of button pressing is part of the goal. These networks are diversely distributed and may not function in isolation. Rhythm information may provide players enhanced information, processed by different neural pathways, and may underlie differences in gamescores. Previous studies further support this idea and argue that networks active with rhythmic stimuli may represent top-down (e.g. feedforward) neural processing. External visual cueing has been previously shown to activate bottom-up pathways involving the insula, similar to activity we found in gameplay without audio. Finally, differences in scores and feedforward neural activity may represent an interesting mechanism of meaningful play within rhythmic games. Understanding how players improve performance in the presence of combined feedback and feedforward information should be taken into consideration for development of other game genres.

Game-based motor rehabilitation: Moving beyond the Wii
By: Belinda Lange

Many clinics are adopting the use of these off-the-shelf devices for exercise, social interaction and entertainment. However, many of the games provide significant barriers for people with different injuries and levels of ability. These barriers include game-play that is too fast or requires the player to perform movements that are prohibitive to therapy goals, feedback that is not in line with therapy outcomes (game score that does not represent the functional outcome goals) or demeaning for the player (providing feedback that the user failed the task or they are 'unbalanced' can reduce motivation).

This talk will present and discuss existing literature supporting the use of video games as rehabilitation tools. The talk will outline a potential direction of Game-Based Motor Rehabilitation research and development. The focus of this research and development concept is three-fold: 1) Assess the usability of off-the-shelf games and consoles within a range of user populations; 2) Using this feedback, re-purpose or develop low-cost interaction devices that are appropriate for use within the rehabilitation setting; 3) Design, develop and test games specifically focused on rehabilitation tasks. A range of examples from each will be presented and discussed. The presentation will aim to demonstrate support for the development of specific tailored rehabilitation games. The key advantage of designing rehabilitation games over existing off-the-shelf games is to provide the therapist and/or patient with the ability to alter elements of game play in order to individualize treatment tasks for specific users and expand the use of these tasks to a wider range of level of abilities.

Lunch (on your own)

Failure, Fun and Learning: Iterative Rapid Prototyping, Engagement and Educational Games

Design research methods for serious games

Bringing Families Closer - Designing a Game for a Complex Social Situation
By: Amani Naseem and Ida Marie Toft

This paper describes the design process of the Location Based Mobile game (LBMG) KENARDUMA that tackles the problem of loneliness among Danish teenagers. This article demonstrates a research through design process. Research of the families everyday situation is drawn in to make a game that is relevant to the issue. Examination of design assumptions, ideologies and framing and reframing of the design situation allows for a versatile design process. The issue addressed is This paper describes the design process of the Location Based Mobile game (LBMG) KENARDUMA that tackles the problem of loneliness among Danish teenagers. The paper demonstrates a research through design process. This paper draws on literature and methods from design practice, HCI and interaction design to develop a game that is relevant to the problem addressed. The problem is considered complicated, heterogeneous and indefinable and using a transdisciplinary approach, knowledge from various fields are drawn in to explore disparate aspects of the design situation. Qualitative interviews were used to gain an understanding of the lived and felt experiences of the people and the everyday life situations where problems occur. The situation and future possibilities are further explored through design practices of framing and reframing, and through critical examinations of the concepts and their relevance to the situation, a parallel understanding of the concept and the design situation is developed. As qualitative interviews are data based research and open for interpretation and new understandings, the data contributed to an advancement of this process of framing and reframing.

We suggest that when designing games relevant to complex social problems, it can be advantageous to bring in stories from lived and felt experiences to get a broad understanding of the situation within which the problem occurs. We further recommend letting this knowledge inform a critical examination of the properties and ideologies inherent in the platform and technology the game is based on. This can open up for an exploration for spaces of playful moments as well as an investigation of how games can relate to the issues that people experience in their everyday life.

Worked Examples and Playpower.org: Proposed Methods for Video Game Design Research
By: Derek Lomas and Kishan Patel

Playpower.org is an open-source community that makes learning games for 8-bit TV-connected computers, which are commonly sold in developing countries for approximately $10. First described at the 2008 Meaningful Play conference, Playpower.org has subsequently received support from the MacArthur Foundation to build a development environment for the $10 computer and host a series of international workshops.

Over the past year, we have conducted learning game design workshops in India, Brazil and New York City, in order to introduce the platform and its potential to regional development communities. This paper reports on 3 game designs that emerged from one such workshop, held in Hyderabad, India in December 2009.

Leading Change - Managing Pace LEGO Workshop

Educational Game Design for Everyone: Successes, Challenges and Insights of using Game Design as Pedagogy within Formal and Informal Learning Setting

Body-Centered Interaction

Body Centred Interaction: Meaningful Design and Aesthetic Distance
By: Mitu Khandaker

If we accept that video games are a form of art (Costikyan, 1994), then it is proposed that the concept of "aesthetic distance" should also apply to them; this is a literary term, defined by Encyclopedia Britannica as "the frame of reference that an artist creates by the use of technical devices in and around the work of art to differentiate it psychologically from reality" (2010). In other words, the aesthetic distance is the degree of separation required in order for a player to be able to be able to appreciate and critically evaluate a game as art.

This discussion explores this notion of aesthetic distance as it applies to video games, particularly in the context of innovations in controller technology, and the increasing trend toward interfaces which increasingly engage our bodily proprioceptive systems (our sense of the different parts of our body in relation to one another). This is a paradigm defined by Slater & Usoh (1994) as "Body Centred Interaction." That is, interaction techniques that match bodily proprioceptive and sensory data; in other words, the action you perform is the action you expect to see on the screen. Body Centred Interaction therefore includes gestural and kinesthetic control mechanisms, such as the Nintendo Wii, PlayStation Move, and Xbox Kinect, which have become increasingly notable for their commercial interest. Though the concept of gestural interfaces is not at all new (earlier examples include the Nintendo Power Glove (Date), the Sega Activator (Date), and so on), these previous examples were notably commercial failures. However, due to improvements in sensor technology being able to more accurately reflect a player's real-life bodily input within a game, novel interfaces of all types are becoming more prevalent.

This discussion draws upon not only interaction design and psychology, but also cognitive science, aesthetic theory, and moral philosophy. Subsequently, this discussion seeks to encourage consideration of the implications this may have upon game design, both in considering ethical issues, and in terms of positive, new possibilities.

Gaming in Physical Liberation: Three Case Studies
By: John Eulenberg and Chelsea Marks

This paper looks at three nonspeaking individuals who are using games to develop skills needed for the operation of augmentative communication devices. Each person has severe physical and/or cognitive limitations which have restricted the mode of input which he or she has been able to use in a practical way. The therapy team for each person has introduced a game that challenges that user to use a hitherto untapped input modality.

In the first case study, a game with stimulating reinforcement serves to awaken a minimal response in the user that may lead to a practical scanning device. In the second case, a person already using a scanning system is now mastering direct selection techniques using movements he never before tapped in a systematic way for communication. The third individual has been restricted to single-switch scanning for over a decade. He is now playing a game using his foot and toe movement to create coded patterns. This is seen as leading to a more efficient way for him to operate systems for communication and environmental control.

In all three cases, gaming is called upon to facilitate a transition toward more efficient control and greater personal freedom.

Kodu in the Classroom: How the creative problem solving of building games fits into elementary and middle school curricula

Player Literacy, player biographies, & player criticism

Calling on Your Peers: Collective Information Literacy in World of Warcraft
By: Crystle Martin and Constance Steinkuehler

Literacy learning is a naturally occurring and pervasive part of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) and virtual worlds (Gee, 2003; Steinkuehler, 2007, Black & Steinkuehler, 2009). Sophisticated practices using science literacy (Steinkuehler & Duncan, 2009) and advanced reading comprehension (Steinkuehler, Compton-Lilly, & King, 2009) have been documented outside of school and other traditional learning spaces, in online discussion forums and fandom texts related to games like World of Warcraft (WoW). These communities function as participatory cultures (Jenkins, 2006), with community members producing and consuming information in a way similar to that described by Levy's (1997) collective intelligence theory. Levy describes collective intelligence as the process of everyone putting forth the knowledge they have so that every member of the community can access the knowledge of the community at large. This is seen not only in written documentation of participation of the community of an MMO like a wiki, in the case of WoW a wiki like wowhead.com but also in in-game chat. The in-game chat produces a call-and-response pattern that employs information literacy skills, i.e. a player realizes they have an information need and seeks the information by asking the community who then respond with the answer. These communities in and around MMOs also function as communities of practice as described by Lave and Wenger (1991), they offer information to members and use apprenticing to help new members learn the standards and practices (Steinkuehler, 2004).

With the vast amount of diverse information circulating and changing within these spaces, it seems an obvious choice to observe these communities and analyze their information literacy practices. Traditional information literacy theories and standards were designed to account for information literacy practices within formal learning environments (AASL, 1998; ACRL, 2000). Most traditional models for information literacy include a five step process: 1) seeking information, 2) evaluating information, 3) interpreting information, 4) synthesizing information, and 5) disseminating information. However, these models are unable to account for some of the most basic practices found therein. This is due to the fact that the tradition models focus on formal educational settings using institutionally created information resources being sought and found by a single person on a solitary journey, with the output of their search usually ending in a paper. A contemporary framework for information literacy skills is needed that incorporates the collaborative nature of communities like WoW, as well as information literacy's connection to other 21st century skills. Using examples culled from eight months of online ethnographic data (Steinkuehler and King, 2009), we have examined the information literacy practices that arise in the in-game chat of WoW. In this paper we specifically focus on the call-and-response seeking and disseminating that occurs within the chat log, and how these situations demonstrate information literacy skills as well as expertise in the community. The importance of evaluating the practices of communities like those in WoW has been discussed by Gee (2003). We can discover much about learning by observing naturalistic occurrence of activities. In the case of information literacy, observing the natural occurrence of these skills in collaborative space made it obvious that the boys in the study were using these skills and that the way the skills were being used in collaborative spaces was different than that of existing standards and theories.

Playful Learning Experiences. Meaningful learning patterns in players' biographies (Top Paper Award)
By: Konstantin Mitgutsch

Player use digital games as intermediate playgrounds for their interests, passions, values and beliefs. Computer games entertain us, please our needs, challenge our abilities, make us engage with other players and provide us with novel experiences. But, do mediated experiences achieved in digital games, transform the way we understand ourselves and others? Are computer games tools for meaningful transformation? Today we have evidence that players learn through play, but we lack data on how players learn in meaningful ways. To answer these questions, the following paper outlines research that focuses on deep, meaningful and circular learning in games. It develops basic theoretical assumption on playful learning experiences and gives insights in novel findings based on a narrative study on learning biographies in games. It will be shown how today's generation experiences deep and meaningful learning in their playful biographies. Finally, it will argued that meaningful learning patterns are related to specific biographical settings and that their transformation appears an crucial educational task.

Let's Play: Vernacular Video Game Criticism and the Composition Classroom
By: Kevin Rutherford

Remixing has long been a hallmark of Internet culture, and more recently that spirit has been co-opted into gaming culture via efforts like Little Big Planet, Spore, and developer recognition of active modding communities. The "Let's Play" genre of videos, consisting of a screen recording (or image capture) of a video game alongside an ongoing narration/explication/commentary, are yet another iteration of remixing media content. However, LPs also have the potential to be a form of vernacular critique and an inlet to learning via video games.

This paper, drawing from research in introductory composition courses and interviews with members of LP communities, makes three claims about LP videos: they are an important cultural touchstone in gauging interest and involvement in video games through direct fan response; they resituate critical work partially outside a classroom space and acknowledge the power of vernacular rhetoric and vernacular criticism; and they encourage students to adopt more expansive views of the role of composition in negotiating semiotic systems.

Hermit Crab Game Design

Alternate Reality Games: Interdisciplinary Designers, Designing Interactions

Intrinsic Motivation, Exercise, and Exergaming

Defining Exergames & Exergaming
By: Yoonsin Oh and Stephen Yang

With growing interest in exergames research, various terms and definition have introduced to describe exergames. The authors reviewed current literature to understand the inconsistencies and gaps between fields. We found patterns between health-related researchers and non-health related researcher's terms and definitions. Exergame was the most frequently used term, but the combination of exercise and videogames could cause confusion since the term exercise is limited to a particular condition. The authors propose to redefine exergames as a combination of exertion and video games including strength training, balance, and flexibility activities. Exergaming is playing exergames or any other video games to promote physical activity.

Developing a Video Game to Increase Intrinsic Motivation to Exercise
By: Wei Peng, Brian Winn, Karin Pfeiffer, Julia Crouse and Jih-Hsuan Tammy Lin

This study sought to understand how to design an exergame to increase motivation for physical activity with regard to college students. The current research reports the findings of the initial phase of developing the exergame grounded in Self-Determination Theory. Two rounds of formative evaluation studies were conducted. In the first round, four focus groups were conducted to gain insights from the target population about their reception of the proposed exergame concept. In the second round, participants as a group played the game prototype that was developed based on the first round focus groups and provide feedback and suggestions in a focus group format. In addition, four participants played the game with a device that recorded their energy expenditure during game play on an individual basis and were interviewed after game play using the same questions used in the focus groups. The two rounds of formative evaluation confirmed many of the proposed design features. The design team also obtained valuable suggestions from the focus group participants on how to improve usability and playability of the game.

World of Workout: Towards pervasive, intrinsically motivated, mobile exergaming
By: Katelyn Doran, Shaun Pickford, Cory Austin, Tory Walker and Tiffany Barnes

Obesity and lack of exercise are growing problems in western countries, particularly among children and teens. In an effort to be part of the solution, we have created World of Workout, a mobile, pervasive game with functions similar to that of a pedometer. However, unlike a simple pedometer application, World of Workout takes place within a game environment with its own challenges and goals. The game environment is modeled after RPG games, due to the high levels of intrinsic motivation found in games of this genre. In this paper, we present the prototype design for World of Workout as well as pilot study results. Our initial study demonstrates the effectiveness of the game in raising user heart rates, highlights features of game playability, and also allowed for user feedback. These initial results provide a proof of concept for the World of Workout design, indicating that the game has significant merit.

Our motivation for the creation of World of Workout is based on the steady increase of health complications from sedentary lifestyles, such as depression, obesity, and anxiety disorders in recent years. The prevalence of technology and modern conveniences, while making many aspects of daily life significantly easier, have also lead to significant declines in true social interaction and physical activity. Often bearing a large share of the blame are video games, which have traditionally required that players remain seated and inactive during the entirety of play.

However, the emergence of mobile gaming has allowed users to play games during their daily activities. Gaming is no longer restricted to the domain of a desk chair or living room; games are accessible while travelling, running errands, and even while working out. Pervasive games have taken mobile technologies a step further by making those daily activities a part of the game. Exergaming has also changed the way people interact with video games by turning physical activity into a core game play mechanic. Through combining mobile, pervasive, and exercise games we, as developers, are able to create games which require physical activity but can also be easily integrated into the busy lives lead by today's video game consumers.

With successful combination of previous game designs, we have created a first step towards a dual purpose, mobile, and pervasive application that is both a game and tool in one. World of Workout allows users to track their daily activity, but it goes a step further in that the game provides a basis for being more active. Similar success can be seen in the Wii Fit, an exercise tool that has game elements. However, unlike the Wii Fit and similar console-based exergames, World of Workout is a smart phone application which can run during the user's daily activities. World of Workout also features a leveling structure, goals, awards, and a plot to encourage players to increase their daily activity in order to gain achievements and unlock new features. It is our hope that this design, in addition to assisting players with maintaining a healthy lifestyle, can serve to inspire developers to create similar games on a wide variety of platforms.

What Will Great Serious Games Look Like?

Dinner Break (on your own)

Conference Reception, Game Exhibition, and Poster Session

• the latest research findings presented in the conference poster session
• an exhibition of industry and academia created games
• a great time to mix and mingle with your fellow conference attendees

Poster Presentations

"No Noobs Plz": The Role of Salient Group Identities on Interaction in World of Warcraft
By: Jessica Vitak

The poster presents a study that takes a first step at establishing how various players employ the public chat channel within World of Warcraft (WoW) to interact, and specifically to ask and answer game-related questions.

Assessment of learning gains after a gameplay in a prototype chemistry video game
By: Kermin Joel Martinez-Hernandez, Dustin S. Hillman, Carlos R. Morales and Gabriela C. Weaver

The current student generation demands different ways for learning in interactive and authentic environments. However, although the research community is aware of this, not much has been done to catch up with their learning demands. Computer-based video games can help to minimize these learning demands because it provides immersiveness, interactivity, and meaningful learner-centered experience However, many researchers criticize the lack of comparison between immersive games with other teaching methods. In order to provide sound empirical research to field, our group has developed a prototype chemistry-based computer game to examine its use as a learning tool. The game includes a mixed genre of a first-person game embedded with action-adventure and puzzle components. We assess student learning gains and understanding of chemistry concepts after gameplay intervention in a comparison study with passive (lecture group) vs. active (video game group) environments. A purposeful sample of 40 students participated in the study, 22 were in the video game group and 18 were in the lecture group for an intervention of about 30 minutes. Students' learning gains and understanding of chemistry concepts were assessed through pre- and post open-ended content surveys and individual semi-structured interviews for each intervention. Our results showed that our video game can be used as a learning tool and students suggested that it can be useful as a class supplement. The video game intervention was as effective as the lecture format in delivering the chemistry content knowledge to the students. This poster will present the study results and educational implications.

Cognitive Load and the Role of Fidelity in Training Games: Lessons Learned from the Bullseye Trainer
By: Katelyn Procci, Lucas Blair and Clint Bowers

The Bullseye Trainer is a lightweight flash game whose purpose is to train US Navy recruits how to navigate the interior of a naval ship. Using it as an applied example, we consider the role of physical and cognitive fidelity in training games and explore the tipping point of effective game design between the two types of fidelity based on cognitive load theory. There is a challenge for game designers to provide adequate fidelity required for training, without investing resources that are not required. In this case, we found that translating a 3D training problem to a 2D serious game did not result in performance gains. For visuospatial tasks such as navigation, it may be critical that the cognitive processes are modeled within the game as well as supported with visual representations to serve as meaningful context instead of having players rely on their own self-constructed schemas.

Cognitive Processing Effects of Dance Video Game Training in Healthy Adults
By: Zawadi Williams-murray, Sabrina Ali, Adam Noah, Shaw Bronner and Atsumichi tachibana

Playing action video games appears to increase the speed of cognitive processing in multiple ways. Less information is available about the effect of exer-games on cognitive function. We hypothesized that Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) training improves executive control tasks including selective attention, response inhibition, interference control, and speeded responding, tested using the Stroop Test.

Seven healthy adults trained on DDR for 30 hours. Subjects were tested utilizing a computerized Stroop test, pre and post training. Comparisons of Stroop scores were made with paired t tests (p < 0.05). Early and late DDR gamescores were calculated to determine the effectiveness of game training. Pearson Product Moment correlations were made between gamescores and Stroop times.

There was 12% (p = 0.02) improvement in color-match and 18% (p = 0.057) in word-match task. Correlations of gamescores to word-match were r = -0.70. These results suggest that DDR training contributed to improved executive control mechanisms as reflected in improved Stroop scores. Greater aerobic fitness has been associated with better performance on Stroop tests in children and older adults, but no relationship was observed in young adults. However, these results indirectly contradict those findings, as healthy adults demonstrated Stroop improvements. In another study, we measured changes in aerobic capacity and energy expenditure post DDR training and showed marked improvements, demonstrating the aerobic benefit of playing DDR.

Improvements in executive control and visual selective attention, combined with perceptual processing speed, reaction time, and aerobic conditioning have important implications for individuals with physical and cognitive disabilities.

Cultural Differences in Social Game Play
By: D. Yvette Wohn

A series of T-tests based on a survey (N=176) of Facebook game players showed significant differences between Asians and Caucasians in play motivation, perceptions of gifting and the extent to which the players engage in visual customization.

Designing for the Moral Economy of Co-Creation and Games
By: Dave Jones

One of the discussions of games emerging from Cultural Studies corners centers on "co-creation," or instances in which players within the game community take on roles of designing, developing, and testing game content. Players often receive little in return for their work, while also signing over any rights for much of the intellectual property they help create. One perspective situates co-creation as a system of unfair labor practices in which developers exploit players' affinities and expertise with media experiences (Terranova, 2000 & 2004; Kuchlick, 2005). Others view co-creation as a "co-evolution" of "economic and cultural factors" situated in a "dynamic open relationship" that is "based on extrinsically-motivated exchange relations and culturally-shaped intrinsically-motivated production relations" (Banks & Potts, 2010, p. 260). Green and Jenkins (2009) inject the notion of a "moral economy" that assembles media corporations, content creators, audiences, and technologies into mutually constructed, if fragile, creative relationships that "require trust" (p. 218) amidst "the social expectations, emotional investments, and cultural transactions that create a shared understanding between all participants within an economic exchange" (p. 214).

Using actor-network theory as presented in Latour (1999), Law (1999), and Potts (2009), I propose a method for first tracing the co-creative networks assembled from the game developers, players, and technologies linked together in co- creative ecosystem surrounding Little Big Planet (Media Molecule, 2008). After mapping the network, I use the concepts of operations actions from activity theory (Kaptelinen and Nardi, 2006; Spinuzzi, 2008) to conceptualize methods of designing for the moral economy of Little Big Planet's actor-network.

Effects of dance video game training on single and dual task reaction times in healthy adults
By: Sabrina Ali, Zawadi Williams-Murray, Shaw Bronner, Adam Noah and Atsumichi Tachibana

Playing action video games appears to increase speed of cognitive processing with subsequent faster reaction times. It is unknown whether exer-games have the same effect on lower extremity reaction time (RT) tests.

Eight healthy adults trained on DDR for 30 hours. Subjects were tested pre and post training with single and dual RT tests. Participants stood on a force platform and stepped in reaction to an audio cue as quickly as possible. The dual task required the participant to react to an audio cue while simultaneously reading aloud. Timing required for subjects to initiate weight shift for stepping in anterior or posterior directions were calculated. Pre and post-test results were compared using paired t tests (p < 0.05). Early and late DDR game scores were calculated to determine effectiveness of game training.

Subjects showed a significant improvement in all tests post training. Forward and backward stepping single RT resulted in 24% and 21% improvement (p<0.01) respectively. Forward and backward stepping dual RT resulted in 15.4% and 20% improvement (p<0.05) respectively. Subjects' game-scores increased significantly by a mean of 55.2%.

Dual tasks involving both motoric and cognitive processing increase cognitive load.
Improved ability to step quickly in real-world conditions can determine whether a fall occurs; particularly in elderly or disabled individuals. Therefore, it is important to determine whether regular exercise improves the speed of stepping and what type of exercise is most effective. These results demonstrate that DDR can substantially improve lower extremity dual-task processing skills in healthy adults.

Exploring the effects of different uses of a physics puzzle game on students initial conceptions about the concept of force
By: Francois Boucher-genesse, Patrice Potvin and Martin Riopel

Many educators suggest a qualitative and conceptual approach to understand Newtonian physics, which does not start with mathematical formulas, but rather with experiences, laboratories and demonstrations focused on students' conceptions. A few researchers specifically studied the impact of video games on Newtonian Physics instruction through empirical means. These studies showed that games have some potential, but the number of participants was usually not large enough to do a satisfying assessment of the effect on learning, and the scope of each game was limited.

Mecanika is a free web-based game in which students have to use their intuition and Newtonian concepts to solve physics puzzles. In Mecanika, players gather energy stars with small collector robots. The players create a path of localized impulsions, forces zones and circular movement zones to lead the collectors properly to the stars. Mecanika allows players to gradually travel from a world which seemingly reacts like the world around them (simulated with the Box2D physics library), to an ideal world teachers frequently use to explain Newton laws, and where friction and gravity are ignored. Mecanika is designed for 3 to 5 hours of gameplay.

A two months research will take place in early 2011 to measure the game's impact on students' misconceptions as measured by the Force Concept Inventory test. The FCI will be used to probe students' (N=75) conceptions before, right after, and one month after instruction using the video game, and will compare the results to those of a control group.

Exploring the Role of Identity in the Design of A Serious Game
By: Micah Modell and Rodney D. Myers

The purpose of this study is to explore how one educational game designer at a large Midwestern state university designed a live, multiplayer game for a student-run conference. The designer's goals were to increase participation, interaction, and survey completion at the conference and to raise awareness of the composition of the academic dossier . In particular, this study seeks to determine how and to what extent the concepts of role-play and learner identity-shift influenced design decisions by applying Gee's lenses of identity for research in education (Gee, 2001).

iNursing RN: Respiratory Distress -- Interactive Courseware for Registered Nursing
By: Marjorie Zielke, Judy Leflore and Gary Hardee

iNursing RN: Respiratory Distress is a 3-D, game-based, simulation that incorporates videogame design elements to allow nursing students to practice applying knowledge in a virtual clinical setting.

Kodu Club at Kentwood Public Schools
By: Derek Braman, Dion Price, Scott Quibell and Derek Braman

Kodu Club is an afterschool technology program run at Explorer Elementary in Kentwood, MI. The program is a program in which students use the game design program from Microsoft called Kodu. This program is proving to be a significant way to open the doors the possibilities of a future interest in programming and even game design. An interesting pattern has developed in the two years that the Kodu club has been running: there are a high percentage of girls interested in Kodu and game programming. The first year yielded a 44% participation rate of fourth and fifth grade girls while the second and most recent year grew to a percentage of 50%. Exactly why girls are becoming more and more interested in Kodu isn't quite yet clear yet; however it is very encouraging and exciting. This isn't to say that boys aren't interested either. There has been a "first come - first serve" routine in handing in permission slips to be able to participate in each session. In each session, the slots fill up in less than 24 hours of sending home information and permission slips usually with a waiting list longer than the actual participants in the program.

Match making: An examination of discrepancy in ability as a moderator of motivation gains in partnered exercise video games
By: Brandon Irwin, Deborah Feltz and Norbert Kerr

This study examined the Koehler motivation gain effect (KE) in exergame tasks using virtual partners. The KE occurs when an inferior team member performs a taxing task better in a team situation than one would expect from knowledge of his/her performance individually. The effect is hypothesized to be most potent when one's partner is moderately more capable in ability and in conjunctive task conditions where the group's potential productivity is equal to the productivity of its least capable member. However these conditions not been examined in exercise tasks. This study was designed to determine whether, under conjunctive task conditions, people's motivation in health games can be improved using a virtual partner under differing ability conditions.

Mobile game teaches kids to avoid landmines: Notes from Cambodia
By: Corey Bohil, Charles Owen, Frank Biocca, Neil Owen and Dan Shillair

We recently developed a landmine-risk education game for play on the One Laptop per Child Program's XO laptop (i.e., the $100 laptop). The game is designed to be played by children in war torn countries, teaching them to recognize and avoid environmental indicators that often co-occur with the presence of landmines or other unexploded remnants of war (e.g., barbed wire, abandoned vehicles). The $100 laptop was designed specifically for use by children in developing countries, and it is increasingly finding deployment for educational use throughout the world. The first version of our game has been customized for use in Cambodia (images, audio narration), and we recently completed a usability/field test there with members of the intended user population (children near the age of 10). We expected to find that the interactivity of the game would improve learning over standard photo-based approaches to mine-risk education. We found that children enjoyed playing the game, were quick to learn, and had a tendency to spontaneously play the game in groups. There was also evidence of efficacy with respect to learning to spot and avoid indicators of danger. We will present these and other findings from our field study, and consider implications for developing games for mobile embedded education.

Narcissus and the Mythology of the Avatar: Character Creation as a Mirror of Self-Concept
By: Antonia Szymanski and Richard Elswick

Avatars are now common in most on-line games. They are in the largest games on the market, such as Farmville and Second Life. How much is understood by game developers choices in the Avatar system as well as the players' choices for their avatars? Using psychosocial theories researchers may shed light on character choice preferences in games and thus provide new dimensions for character creation. Game developers may provide a new paradigm by which researchers can investigate the psychological functioning of individuals through examining choices made in character creation. Specifically, the attributes individuals choose for their characters may reflect different dimensions of self-concept of the creator.

Marsh, Smith and Barnes (1983) describe self-concept as the beliefs that individuals hold of themselves in different domains such as academic, social, and physical. These beliefs may influence students' willingness to participate in classroom discussions due to increased or reduced feelings of adequacy compared to peers. Therefore, understanding students' self- concepts and designing instructional technology to minimize isolationist behaviors of negative self-concept is important to providing meaningful learning environments that meet students' psychological needs.

We seek to understand how the creation of a personal representative reflects the psychological state of self-concept of the individual. Therefore, the main research question under investigation is: How do choices in avatar creation relate to self-concept? This poster will present a thorough review of the existing literature on relationships between student's choices and psychological functioning.

Repeatable Twinkling Touch Makes All Differences : Implication of Natural Embodied Action for Serious Game Designing
By: Woori Kim

Touches change the game world with rapid speed and enormous numbers in terms of economical and social effect. Repeated touch action based games and services(eg. twitter and god finger) generate enormous interactions between people. Some technological researches about the embodied experience of people found that 1/3 of second is suitable time for natural matching of our body movement and the computer's cognitive system. Touch based games including repeatable touch actions are obtaining the arousal from users because of its natural reaction system and simple interaction ways. Those kind of interaction can be explained by experiential feed back and reaction times in terms of embodiment. This research aims to try to explain the reason why many people play those games with the understanding of embodied action and find a possibility to apply these implications for the more popular serious game design.

Testing an Online Gme to Teach Academic Research Skills
By: Karen Markey and Chris Leeder

This poster presents findings from the alpha testing of BiblioBouts, an online social game to teach college students academic research skills. BiblioBouts is a collection of mini-games or "bouts" which show students that library research is not a single task, but a set of discrete skills that are interrelated. Each bout defines a specific subset of research skills, helping students structure their overall research process. At the same time, players compete against each other to gain points and win the game. The final outcome is a bibliography on the student's research topic. The alpha version of BiblioBouts was deployed and evaluated in 13 classes at 4 universities in fall 2009 & winter 2010, using multi-methodological evaluation: pre- and post-game surveys, focus group interviews and online diary forms. Outcomes of testing and subsequent re-designs to the game interfaces are presented.

The Curious Case of Osy Osmosis: The Uncomfortable Balance Between Game Design and Education
By: Casey O'Donnell

This poster presents information based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork gathered during the design and development of "Osy", a game developed developed cooperatively between game developers, scientists, educators, and funded by a $1.3 Million dollar National Institute of Health (NIH) grant. "Osy" was the first game developed as part of a project that had already developed several immersive 3D simulations. The poster examines the shift in understanding the role that game mechanics came to play as interdisciplinary boundary objects (Leigh Star and Griesemer 1989) facilitating discussions between content experts and game designers. By fore-fronting game mechanics, more meaningful, and ultimately more enjoyable play experiences were constructed to engage students in "stealth learning" efforts. The author posits a new possible space for game development that brings together designers and scientists to create games that are simultaneously fun/engaging and educational. Games constructed with this method provide new opportunities to experiment with designs and technologies that might otherwise be set aside for more tried and true methods. Osy began with the questions: "Is there a game in osmosis?" "Can we make a core mechanic out of that?" Osy occupies this strange new space and the presentation discusses its design and development as well as the "faultlines" (Traweek 2000) encountered during the development process. Osy is particularly compelling, given the success the project has had in engaging students in meaningful play experiences. The game's construction has brought together a highly diverse and interdisciplinary team focused on the creation of meaningful play experiences at the interface between teachers and standards based learning, which creates particular difficulties for designers, developers, and educators hoping to address these new educational possibilities.

The Wellness Partners collaboration: Intervention and study design from scratch
By: Marientina Gotsis, Maryalice Jordan-Marsh, William Graner, Jamie Antonisse, Diana Hughes, Donna Spruijt-Metz, Hua Wang and Thomas Valente

Multidisciplinary projects between creative and scientific disciplines commonly face project funding sources that enforce an implicit hierarchy of importance in roles, budget, inspiration, methodology and outcomes. In the blossoming field of games for health, who is the chicken and who is the egg? Designers or scientists? Experts from either side are often treated as follows in grant proposals and budgets: "insert yourself and what you do here". This can be result of restricted timelines and budgets. True collaboration to reach convergence costs extra money and time. Herein we present a post-mortem of the Wellness Partners (WP) collaboration funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Pioneer portfolio.

The WP team sought to blur the lines of disciplines as much as possible and was given a generous opportunity to "play" together in order to find answers to some of our questions. The grant title "Effectiveness of Social Mobile Networked Games in Promoting Active Lifestyles for Wellness" was from its inception ambitious in scope yet coy in what it promised to be able to answer. The freshly convened WP team attempted to design organically a grant, a study and an intervention. Almost three years later, the project is bearing fruit. The aim of the WP study was to assess the effectiveness of a social web-based game as a lifestyle change intervention in private networks of families and friends. Parallel design of the intervention and the study from the beginning was an exercise of our own team's self-efficacy, efficiency and social support. We outline the inception of intervention and study parameters and how they evolved together, as well as how we tried to preserve the integrity of hypotheses and research questions.

We sought to empower adults to meet their lifestyle change goals, independent of their gender and generation characteristics, using a combination of social games for the web. We investigated the feasibility of a cross-gender, intergenerational social web-based game for lifestyle change and ways in which players respond socially to the game play experience. We designed a web-based interactive intervention that was piloted at the University of Southern California on 54 groups of 154 participants of friends and families. Groups were randomly assigned to one of two versions of the intervention for 5 weeks and then switched to the other condition for another 5 weeks. Participants in condition A were given points for self-reporting physical activity or setbacks. Points could be redeemed for activities for a virtual animated character, which resulted in memories. Some activities resulted in gifts that could be sent to others within the group. Participants in condition B did not receive points for self-reporting physical activity or setbacks and the interface did not include the animated character. Participants in both conditions could see each other's reporting, activity status and send messages within the group. Although most participants thought the WP application had good potential and their overall experience was positive, they also pointed out many features and functionalities that they had expected or hoped to enjoy.

Exhibited Games

A House in California
By: Jake Elliott

'A House in California' is a surreal, narrative game about four characters who bring a house to life. These four characters are based on relatives of mine (two grandmothers and two great-grandmothers). Within the game, the player guides the four characters to engage with environments and activities drawn from a combination of memory, research, poetry, and fantasy.

Aesthetically, the game draws inspiration from 'Mystery House', developed in 1980 by Roberta and Ken Williams. 'Mystery House' is a murder mystery that drives its characters progressively deeper into the titular house by offering the player material verbs such as "go", "open", and "take". 'A House in California' inverts these qualities of materiality and violent murder into a peaceful but surreal character study which draws the player into the inner lives of its four characters through verbs like "remember", "learn" and "play".

Afterland (student-created game)
By: Konstantin Mitgutsch, Mathew Weise, Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab Summer Game Project in 2010

Afterland is a side-scrolling 2D platformer that immerses the player in a world out of time. You play as a reclusive forest-dweller with a penchant for collecting. One day, in his wanderings, he discovers an ancient parchment that he can barely decipher, a remnant of the past. Inspired by his discovery, he seeks to fill his house with the fascinating artifacts that have captured his imagination. Can you help him to find fulfillment and inner peace?

Argument Wars
By: Filament Games

Argument Wars is a game designed to highlight the role of argumentation and reasoning in civic engagement. Step into the shoes of a lawyer and participate in trials ripped straight out of the history books. In order to win points with the judge, you must analyze your arguments and evidence carefully and be prepared to not only back up yours claims, but to pop your opponent's bubble when they make a misstep. Can you tip the scales of justice in your favor?

At-Risk
By: Kognito Interactive, Mental Health Assoc. of NYC

At-Risk is an interactive, game-based simulation that prepares university faculty to effectively identify, approach and refer to counseling students exhibiting signs of mental distress including depression, anxiety and thoughts of suicide. Players take on the role of a professor concerned with several of his students.

CombiForm (student-created game)
By: Edmond Yee, Andy Uehara

Combiform is a new and unique experimental video game project that stresses the importance of physical interactions among players. In particular, multiple players may physically combine their game controllers, thereby creating a collective and collaborative gaming interface. This physical combining and de-combining mechanic opens up a new level of interaction that has never been explored in the video gaming world.

Contemporary video games have a convention of focusing player to player interactions within the virtual world. Massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) are capable of supporting over thousands of players in a single virtual environment. However, these games have completely removed the fun and pleasure that one experiences when other players are physicially present.

Taking the Nintendo Wii as an example; it is a known fact that playing the Wii alone or with others online would not be nearly as enjoyable as playing it with someone locally. Here, one of the key aspects lost when playing online is the performative aspect of games. Players play differently in the presence of others. They exaggerate movements, showing emotions with their actions. In addition, observers also contribute to the experience by giving feedback to the players. All these interactions and feedbacks make up the performative aspect of games. Playing games with the physical presence of others is simply an extremely fun and rewarding social performance. Combiform is the very first attempt to further enhance this social performance by incorporating a novel gaming interface with the combine mechanics that emphasizes compelling collaborative physical interactions.

Critical Gameplay: Healer
By: Lindsay Grace

Healer is a top down unshooter. Healer inverts our typical relationship to violence as players. Instead of offering the opportunity to re-experience an historical event of violence, the player is given the opportunity to undo them. In Healer, the player must extract bullets from dead victims to undo the tragedy of historical massacres. The soldiers that committed these massacres are still lurking, so the player must work to keep the recently revived alive. The player can put themselves between the bullet and the target or strategize to reverse the tragedy. In its first 10 minutes of gameplay, the player extracts bullets from victims of the highly controversial Nanking Massacre in China.

Critical Gameplay: Levity
By: Lindsay Grace

A game in which the collection mechanic hinders the player. Unlike many games which encourage players to collect items, anything the player collects weighs them down. Levity is a platformer in which player jump and walk speed are decreased as the player collects items. Each level emphasizes a single concept as described in the segue screens – “Do not let the things you collect weigh heavy on you”, “If these things weigh you down, give them away”,” Practice the art of letting go, find lightness in giving “ etc. Players can convert what they have collected to charity, by giving their collected items, but the weight of having collected is never completely removed. The game is designed as an active revolt to collection values, emphasizing ant- consumptive use.

Critical Gameplay: Wait (student-created game)
By: Lindsay Grace

Wait, a simple game where the player is encouraged to refrain from acting on the world. As the player moves the world disappears, but when the player waits, the world becomes more interesting. The majesty is found in the slow, controlled effort. Players are awarded points when the little things in life reveal themselves.

DealerTown Ford (student-created game)
By: Jon Moore, Marie Lazar, Jason Maynard, Jordan Ajlouni, Adam Breece, Chris Cornish, Sean Strasberger, and Brian Winn (advisor)

DealerTown Ford is a web-based game created by SpartaSoft, Michigan State University's student game developers organization. The game is the winning entry in Ford Credit's Winning At Money Challenge. In MSU's DealerTown Ford, the player runs his or her own dealership, from picking what cars go on the lot to picking up trash that blows into the parking lot. The player earns dealer points by negotiating appropriate financing terms for virtual customers based on their credit score, vehicle savings and vehicle budget. With the dealer points, the player can upgrade their dealership and add additional cars to their lot. Through play, the player not only grows their dealership, but also learns the details of vehicle financing and the importance of maintaining good credit.

Do I Have A Right?
By: Filament Games

Do I Have a Right? explores the Bill of Rights in the context of operating and growing a Constitutional law firm from obscure to distinguished status. Hire lawyers with special talents and areas of expertise and assign them to distraught clients with legal quandaries of varying validity. Wield the Bill of Rights like a high power microscope, examine a variety of fun and quirky legal cases, and ultimately become a prestigious purveyor of expert legal advice.

EcoDefenders
By: Filament Games

Design an invasive species and observe it infiltrate an ecosystem in attempt to eliminate a rival creature!

Elude
By: Doris C. Rusch and team BirdyInc.

Life is a never-ending struggle, full of rising and falling moods. Elude mirrors this struggle against the rising tide of depression, and the search for a path to happiness. Yet happiness remains elusive. Again and again, losing passion for anything in life, you plunge into depression. Only by continually calling out to the world can you find experiences that resonate, allowing you to ascend into happiness.

For people who have never experienced it before, depression is difficult to understand. It is not simply sadness, as many may think; it is more akin to an all-encompassing hopelessness, a failure to connect to or derive meaning from the outside world. By tapping into the experiential aspects of the video game medium, Elude's metaphorical model for depression serves to bring awareness to the realities of depression by creating empathy with those who live with depression every day.

Interestingly enough, the word "Elude" originates from the Latin word "e-ludere" which means "away from" and is itself derived from the "ludo" with the meanings "to play" and "to trick."

Energy City
By: Filament Games

Craft an urban energy portfolio that balances economic, social, and environmental issues...all while negotiating with stakeholders and generating enough power to support a growing population. Do you have what it takes to successfully lead a city toward a sustainable energy future?

Graph Games
By: Charles Cusack, Jeff Largent, Ryan Alfuth, Matt Jara, Dan Simpson

Graph Games is a suite of online casual games that make use of human computation to help solve several NP-complete graph problems. These problems are very difficult for computers to solve efficiently because they rapidly become computationally infeasible as their size increases. However, humans possess intelligent decision-making abilities that computers do not, so they can solve these problems more resourcefully than computers.

Graph Games seeks to harness these abilities to increase the body of knowledge about solving NP-complete problem by presenting problems in the form of puzzle-like games. Graph Games currently consists of three families of games, each being comprised of several types of puzzles based on related problems. Pebble It helps solve graph pebbling problems. Graph pebbling problems involve the placement and/or movement of resources (called pebbles) under certain constraints. Power Graph puzzles are based on the vertex cover and dominating set problems. These problems require finding minimal subsets of the vertices of the graph that are adjacent to all edges or vertices in the graph. In these puzzles, players must activate as few power stations as possible to provide energy to an entire power grid. Finally, Portal Lord is based on the problem of graph bandwidth. In this game, players must build stabilizers on portals and assign addresses to them in such a way that the addresses of adjacent nodes are as close together as possible. We believe that by using this platform, ordinary gamers will contribute valuable insights to researchers working to solve NP-complete problems.

Kitchen Disasters (student-created game)
By: Charles Roman, Gyoung Kim, Jason Brown, Kevin Henley, Rosalie Blank, Saikat Mandal, and Brian Winn (advisor)

In Kitchen Disasters, you play the role of an aspiring restaurant manager trying to advance from a small sandwich shop up to a 5-star gourmet restaurant while dealing with several food safety challenges that stand in your path.

The goal of Kitchen Disasters is to educate and inform players about proper food handling, preparation, storage and disposal techniques as well as the importance of overall cleanliness in food safety. Players learn how to properly handle, store and prepare food and the necessary conditions to prevent problems such as spoiling, bacteria growth, cross contamination and pests. By demonstrating the importance of proper food safety the game also helps players develop a healthy attitude towards safe practices.

Learning takes place in the game through a constructivist approach. Players manage the restaurant and as food safety or management issues occur they have to address them. The way the player reacts to the situation will determine what happens in the game. If a food safety issue arises, the player will be shown the effects that the issue had on the restaurant. For example, if the trash does not get taken out flies will appear around the garbage can. The player learns to avoid the food safety issues by figuring out how to take care or prevent them in the future.

Mathemagic
By: Daniel Parks

Mathemagic is a game in which players explore the concepts of multiplication, subtraction, addition, and subtraction. The player is asked to transform expressions into a specified form using machines that represent the arithmetic operators. The expressions are composed of

Mecanika
By: François Boucher-Genesse (MA student / game designer / programmer, University of Quebec in Montreal), Martin Riopel & Patrice Potvin (Teachers, University of Quebec in Montreal), Creo (company - visuals)

Mecanika is a free web-based game, inspired by World of Goo and The Lemmings, in which students have to use their intuition and Newtonian concepts to solve physics puzzles. In Mecanika, players manage space janitors in order to collect stars with small collector robots. The players create a path of localized impulsions, forces zones and circular movement zones to lead the collectors properly to the stars. Mecanika allows players to gradually travel from a world which seemingly reacts like the world around them (simulated with the Box2D physics library) to an ideal world teachers frequently use to explain Newton laws, and where friction and gravity are ignored.

The game is formatted in a way that makes it easy for teachers to use it as homework, allowing students to play with the concepts before they are discussed in the classroom. Teachers also have access to a detailed guide which helps them understand how to use some levels as examples in the classroom. Mecanika is designed for a 3 to 5 hours of gameplay (with 52 puzzles). It is developed as a joint initiative between the Université du Québec à Montréal and CREO, a multimedia company based in Montreal, and will be published as part of the www.gameforscience.ca virtual world. It will be completed in September, allowing the presentation of a finalized product at the Meaningful Play 2010 conference.

Most levels in Mecanika are designed to trigger common misconceptions in physics. For example, right after the player gets in space (without gravity), he has to use downward impulsion robots to reach a star placed below. The collectors have an initial horizontal velocity. Most players will rely on the concept that the last force to act imposes the trajectory, and will therefore place the downward pointing impulse robot right on top of the star. By experimenting around they will intuitively understand that the last impulse doesn’t entirely dictate the trajectory. This is a simple example; the game later gets students to play with robots that force circular movements, to traverse zones at a specific speed, to traverse special zones only using a specific number of active forces, etc.

MiniMonos
By: Melissa Clark-Reynolds, Greg Montgomery, Deb Todd

MiniMonos.com is a virtual world and social network for children, focused on sustainability, generosity, community and fun -- think Club Penguin meets An Inconvenient Truth. Children create free monkey avatars that they can use to explore, interact and play games on MiniMonos Island. MiniMonos encourages children to become socially and environmentally responsible while having a great time with their friends.

Olympus
By: Brian Winn, Adam Rademacher, Marie Lazar, Jon Moore, Shawn Adams, Adam Starks, Jason Maynard, Jordan Ajlouni, Daniel Alexander II, Michael Hilliker, Daniel Shillair, Bethany Strandbergh, David Phillips

You are a young adult in Ancient Greece, where athletes are celebrated as heroes, the citizenry struggle to form the foundations of politics, philosophy, science, and the arts, and the stability of the society is always threatened by the childish and maniacal ways of the feuding gods.

Olympus is a fantasy role-playing game that allows you to immerse yourself in this wondrous time of history and myth. Rise through the ranks of the citizenry, honing your skills and abilities by competing in athletic events. Then put these skills to the test as you face challenges from the warring minions of the gods across the Greek Isles. Ultimately, you will have to face the gods themselves on Mount Olympus. Will your skills and abilities be enough to protect your home and preserve the democratic society you have grown to love?

Olympus enhances the typical role-playing experience by getting you off the couch and engaged in the game. Through the use of unique input devices, the virtual actions of your avatar in the game world are driven by your corresponding physical actions in the real world. You will succeed in Olympus only through perseverance, sweat, and calories burned!

Poverty Is Not a Game (PING): a Serious Game about the Experience of Being Poor
By: Wim Wouters, Jeroen Van Raevels, Jan Van Looy, Frederik De Grove

PING is 3D adventure game in which the player takes the identity of one of two youngsters, Sophia or Jim, who find themselves in a difficult situation. Sophia comes from a poor family and now that her grandma has moved to a home, she has to start taking care of herself. Jim fell out with his parents and decided to sell his motorbike and move out to the big city. The game involves finding your way around in PING city, find a place to live, work, education and perhaps even the partner of your dreams. The game can be played online in browser or standalone. The target audience is teenagers. The target context is school, as an introduction to a lesson about poverty.

Spectre
By: Jamie Antonisse, Sean Bouchard, Asher Vollmer, Sam Farmer, Bill Graner, Chris Baily, Daniel Ponce, Kim Cagney, Mike Rossmassler

On a quiet winter night, Joseph Wheeler stares up into the snow and tries to recall the nine moments that shaped his 73 years of life. Travel through Joseph Wheeler's memory and relive those nine moments, choosing how his life will be remembered.

Spectre is a recombinant narrative platformer, a game that tells the story of an individual's life. The landscape before you is not a physical world, but 73 years' worth of Joseph's memory: moments of joy and fear, light and darkness. As you navigate through his specific recollections, similarly themed events will glow bright. If you succeed in these moments of play and follow a glowing path, you will find a theme uniting his experience, and uncover a little more of his fading memory. If not, your nightly story will end in confusion.

With over a hundred memories linked to fifty-two different ending themes, there are many possible narratives to discover in Spectre. Each session of play represents one fifteen-minute summary of Joseph Wheeler's past, one piece of a life-long puzzle. Different stories will highlight different facets of his experience and personality, leaving the player with a compelling, if never entirely complete, impression of the man, his place in the world, and what he sees when he stares upwards into the endlessly falling snow.

The Cat And The Coup
By: Peter Brinson, Kurosh ValaNejad

The Cat and the Coup is a documentary game in which you play the cat of Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, the first democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran. During the summer of 1953, the CIA engineered a coup to bring about his downfall. As a player, you coax Mossadegh back through significant events of his life by knocking objects off of shelves, scattering his papers, jumping on his lap and scratching him.

Undercover UXO
By: Corey Bohil, Charles Owen, Frank Biocca, Neil Owen, Dan Shillair

serious game that teaches kids in war torn countries to avoid landmines. played on the $100 laptop. We presented a prototype of the game 2 years ago. This year, we'd like to present a significantly revised version of the game that is ready for deployment.

Yet One Word (student-created game)
By: Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab

Yet One Word is a metaphorical interpretation of thematic elements from Sophocles classic Theban play Oedipus at Colonus. The game invites players to reflect on personal experiences as a means of empowerment along a path toward redemption and absolution.

Registration Check-In and Continental Breakfast

Games that Move Us: Designing More Powerful Emotional and Social Play Experiences

Come Closer: What We've Learned About Creating Powerful Player Experiences

Gaming & Climate Change: 3 diverse lenses

What Erotic Tetris Has to Teach Serious Games About Being Serious? Design implications of an experiential ontology of game content
By: Olli Tapio Leino

Building phenomenological insights on the constitution of experienced significance within computer game play, derived from the author's earlier research on Tetris variations with explicit content, this paper presents a comparative close-playing analysis of a number of casual games about climate change. In this analysis, differences emerge between the means by which the games make their contents appear as significant to the players. These differences may have implications to the design of serious games: aligning the actual gameplay and the intended message can assist in safeguarding against players' transgressive interpretations.

Challenging Games or Digital Textbooks? Content analysis of message structure and learning principles in serious games
By: Yu-hao Lee

Previous studies on game-based learning have proposed many factors that make video games good learning tools. This study uses content analysis to assess whether these theories are applied to the designs of web-based games for learning. The samples for this study are 90 pro-environmental video games randomly sample from the internet. Results from this study showed that despite the assumptions that video games are different from textbook in presenting knowledge not as fact, but as interactive problems to solve. This study found that a majority (47.13%) of the games presented their educational messages in a mixture of facts and open-ended problems. The games also incorporated different degrees of learning principles suggested by previous studies into their design. This study argues that we might be able to predict the learning potential of a serious game by measuring the way intended messages are structured in game instructions.

Communities & social gaming

Computer Visualizations of Social Learning Affinity Spaces in "Sploder"
By: Alex Games and Chandan Sarkar

This talk has two goals. First, we want to demonstrate the ways in which computer visualizations can serve as aides in hypothesis generation about the relationships between social networking and social learning dynamics taking place within online communities centered on game design, as well as aides to explain these relationships based on community data. Second we wish to exemplify these uses in the context of an ongoing study where we use both visualizations, interview data, and discourse analysis, to examine these relationships in Sploder (www.sploder.com) , an informal online computer game design community for children. Using a mixture of public quantitative and qualitative data collected from the Sploder site and through interviews with it's site administrator, we mixed computer visualizations using NodeXL and Discourse Analyses to triangulate preliminary insights about the presence of affinity spaces centered on game design in the Sploder Community. We then show how similar triangulations can be used to gain insights about the forms or social organization that shape learning dynamics within affinity spaces in the Sploder Community.

Tabletop gaming among strangers in public places: Forecasting who will play and why
By: Becky Scott, Shasha Zhang, Carrie Heeter and Chandan Sarkar

Our research seeks to identify and understand likely users for "Coffee House Classics." These hypothetical electronic, tabletop gaming systems would offer slower-paced old-time games, such as checkers, chess, Scrabble, and Uno. Players would be people who frequent a public location and have time to devote to gameplay. Patrons could play with friends sitting at the same table, or use local WIFI to find playing partners in the same location. Strangers playing together could do so from their own table, communicating only via the game, or they could locate each other and move to the same table.

Who Spends Money on Virtual Items
By: D. Yvette Wohn and Eun-Kyung Na

In this paper, we look at how social interaction in a virtual world is associated with spending of real money to buy virtual goods, based on log data from a social gaming service for children. Time spent on the game, length of membership, and number of virtual items owned by the player were all positively associated with spending of real money. Reciprocal factors, such as giving and receiving virtual gifts, were positive indicators of spending of real money. Number of friends, however, had no significant effect on money-spending. Also, players who owned more free items provided by the game system spent were inclined to spend less money. Comparing spenders with non-spenders, spenders had significantly more friends and spent more time on the SNS.

Mapping the Sandbox: Freedom and Boundaries in Player Choices

Video Game Violence: Is There a Role for it in Meaningful Play?

• Can violence play a positive role in serious and/or entertainment games? When is violence appropriate and/or necessary for a serious game?
• Are the ESRB content descriptors (fantasy violence, cartoon violence, intense violence, sexual violence, violence, violent references, blood, animated blood, blood and gore) appropriate and appropriately used?
• What advice can/should players be given about violence in games? What advice should parents be given?
• What can game designers do to lessen any potentially negative effects of violence in games?
• What additional questions could researchers address for the benefit of game designers? For the benefit of parents?
• Has this discussion changed your views about violence in games in any way?

Lunch (on your own)

Navigating the Wilderness of Educational Entertainment: Design Challenges in Man vs. Wild: The Game

Optimizing Emotion, Believability, & Choice

Optimizing the Psychological Benefits of Choice: Information Transparency & Heuristic Use in Game Environments (Top Paper Award)
By: James Cummings and Travis Ross

This paper suggests that the paradox of choice can be resolved in game environments by promoting heuristics-based decision-making, thereby maintaining player freedom while also avoiding the potential negative consequences of excessive deliberation. To do this, the informational cues relevant to such decisions must be made transparent, allowing players to employ fast and frugal tools from the brain's adaptive toolbox to make the same optimal choices that they might otherwise make after extended deliberation. Developers can design for such transparency not only by creating choice experiences in which options can be assessed and compared through clear metrics and attributes, but also by designing social systems in which the choices and successes of others can be easily identified and used for informing one's own future decisions.

The Art of Nailing Pudding To The Wall - Strategies on Modeling Abstract Concepts in Games
By: Doris Carmen Rusch

Exploring and tapping games' potential as deep and though-provoking conceptual tools requires experimentation. One thing I like to experiment with is basing games on abstract ideas such as responsibility, dignity or optimism. Basing games on such intangible concepts, however, is a lot like nailing pudding to the wall. The idea of "love", for example, is hard to grasp. What are its elements? Its mechanisms? And which concept of love are we talking about anyway?

Through my reflective design practice at MIT and complementary research e.g. on metaphors, system theory and the psychology of play and agency, I managed to devise three strategies that facilitate the process of basing games on abstract concepts. Hoping that these strategies will prove useful to fellow designers and inspire games tackling thought-provoking ideas, I want to share them in my presentation:

1. Tangibility: this strategy addresses the need to lend some substance to ephemeral ideas, to make the abstract concrete. I will discuss the use of metaphors for this purpose and provide examples for how abstract ideas come to live and start to exhibit a behavior when transformed into physical representations in the analog prototyping phase.

2. Procedurality: this strategy deals with exploring the systemic nature of an abstract concept before one worries about turning it into a game. It addresses the problem that if one tries to make a game too soon, before the concept has been sufficiently explored and grasped, there is a danger that one ends up modeling something else entirely from what one set out to model originally. By way of examples I will explain the difference between capturing the systemic nature of the concept that shall be modeled and the process of turning it into a game.

3. Play: this strategy emphasizes the importance of play in the design process. It particularly addresses the step between identifying the systemic nature of an abstract idea and turning it into a playable game. While "procedurality" helps to determine what shall be modeled (the source system), "play" is necessary to figure out "how" it shall be modeled. One and the same source system when interacted with from a different perspective will evoke a very different gameplay experience. The difference between the "what" and the "how" is comparable to the difference between "plot" and "story" in narrative media. "Play" - in the more mechanical sense - is the space available between the two and "play" in the practical sense helps us to figure out what the do with that space.

What Do You Mean by Believable Characters? : The Effect of the Character Newness, Rating and Evilness on the Perception of the Character Believability
By: Michael Lee and Carrie Heeter

Computer scientists working on Artificial Intelligence have recognized the importance of believable characters. Studies on the character believability have been relatively rare, and the definition of believability has different meaning in different disciplines. A multi-disciplinary literature review explores various qualities of computer characters. Different scholars and practitioners have described five believability attributes.

For the test of those five attributes, eight NPCs were chosen for the study based on game quality (high and low Metacritic scores), modernity (games released before and after 2006) and game function (good guy or bad guy). The believability of each character was surveyed with an online survey by research subjects recruited from a sophomore level introductory digital media course at a large Midwestern university. Within the survey, participants were shown a one to two minute video of each NPC interacting with a player; participants then answered believability questions about the NPC they had just seen. Role-play gaming experience and demographics were also measured. ANOVA analysis of the results suggested that NPCs from newer and/or high rated games were perceived to be more believable than characters from older or lower rated games. NPCs from newer and/or higher rated games were also found to be more enjoyable than characters from older or lower rated games.

From Research to Practice: Digital Media and Games as Meaningful Tools for Learning

Taboo: Are there areas in which meaningful play must not, cannot tread?

• Where do audiences draw the line between game appropriate and game inappropriate subjects?
• What subjects seem game ready, but are noticeably absent in the contemporary game space?
• What games have failed under the pressure of their topics?
• What cultural factors dominate these limits and how do those limits coincide with complimentary media? Does the fact that players enact content instead of simply watch content contribute to the controversial elements of some video games?"
• What game topics seem consistently taboo across cultures? How do these taboo areas coincide to specific demographic patterns?
• Is there, or should there be, an ethics to game design?

Motivation and Rewards in Serious Games: Impacts on Player Engagement, Learning, and Behavior Change

Fighting Childhood Obesity Through the Use of Technology - Changing the Evil Reputation of "Screen Time"

Learning by Making Games

Examining the evolution in the Game Design and Computer Science Discourse practices of Middle School Students in the Globaloria Learning Environment
By: Alex Games

This paper presents the findings of an study that examined the evolution of children's thinking and discursive practices within computer science and computer game design in the context of Globaloria, an innovative learning platform and curriculum invented by the World Wide Workshop Foundation (www.WorldWideWorkshop.org). Globaloria aims to advance Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics knowledge and skills among middle and high school children and teachers, by teaching them to design their own educational simulations, animations and computer games using the Adobe Flash Authoring environment.

In recent years, a flurry of research has emerged that has examined the potential that videogame design can bring as a learning environments suited to the demands that the 21st century society places on learners (Gee, 2003; Hayes and Games, 2008; Games and Squire, in Press; Harel Caperton, 2010). This area of research has been motivated in large part by the recent expansion that the game industry has experienced, and that has transformed it into a leading provider of entertainment worldwide, with multibillion sales a year. Educational researchers interested in harnessing the strong engagement that games elicit from players into scholastic pursuits, have shown initial evidence that games can only help children learn important concepts in areas such as computer science and mathematics (Kafai, 1995; Clark, et. al., 2009; Shaffer, 2006; Kelleher, Pausch, Kiesler, 2007). More generally, this research has shown evidence that games can be some of the best instantiations of learning environments that embody situated learning theory (Gee, 2003), and can help their players develop learning skills and habits of mind that are better suited for the demands of today's knowledge economy (Games, 2008, 2010; Shaffer, 2006; Squire, 2006; Steinkuehler, 2005).

This study relies on a qualitative methodology that combines case studies (Stake 1995) and discourse analyses (Gee, 2005), to produce a rich description of the learning ecologies of three Globaloria classrooms in Texas and West Virginia. Using an approach which triangulates evidence from the language, design activities, and game artifacts produced by children, the study supports claims about the evolution of their thinking and use of the discourses of computer game design and computer science (defined as the specialized ways of doing, thinking, producing, and communicating of computer scientists and game designers) as key tools that learner's learn to appropriate within a process of meaning articulation analogous to verbal conversation (Games, 2010).

Findings suggest that as with previous research with game design for learning (Games, 2008; Kafai, 2006), Globaloria offers multiple opportunities for learners to enter the discourse of computer science, mathematics and engineering by scaffolding their learning process through a Web 2.0 technology supported approach that stresses game design projects as a way of beginning to learn with "the end in mind" (Wiggns and McTighe, 2005). It discusses the implications of this for the development of habits of mind central to the STEM disciplines, and discusses both the successes and challenges of implementing it in different educational settings. It finalizes with a discussion of heir implications for the development of a robust theory of educational game design.

Service Learning and Computer Games
By: Bruce Maxim, Matthew Sable, Margaret Turton and John Cristianio

This paper describes use of industry-based capstone design courses to provide service learning opportunities to students. In this type of course, students work as members of small teams to complete software development projects. These projects proceed from requirements gathering, to analysis, design, implementation, and delivery of products to real-world clients. In recent years, several of these projects have involved the development of serious games for real-world clients in the non-profit sector. Serious games and simulations can be good candidates for student projects that provide opportunities to manage projects with real-world development constraints and deadlines. These projects can help students learn how to use their roles as computing professionals to address community needs. Initial student survey data indicates satisfaction with the service learning experience.

Adventure Games, Role Play, & Forced Play

Impacts of Forced Serious Game Play on Vulnerable Subgroups (Top Paper Award)
By: Carrie Heeter, Yu-Hao Lee, Brian Magerko and Ben Medler

We have written about hypothetical ways that vulnerable subgroups of players might face disadvantaged compared to other players when assigned to play a serious game (Magerko, Heeter, & Medler, 2010). In this manuscript we report on a large-scale study in which we measure how three vulnerable subgroups of players (non-gamers, reluctant players, and females) approach and play serious games. This study explores forced play with four different online casual games that were chosen because they represented a variety of genre and serious game design intentions.

Our research strongly suggests that the most important threat to a serious game having its intended impact is when players dislike the game and would not play it on their own, if not assigned to do so. Serious games are likely to be least effective for players who dislike a game and most effective for those who like the game. Non-gamers were at a serious disadvantage as far as performance. To the extent that getting the intended impact from a serious game depends upon playing well, non-gamers were mostly left behind. Non-gamers experienced similar amounts of positive affect but more negative affect in two of the four games, which might be expected to interfere with learning or cognitive benefits. Males tended to seek more difficult challenges in games than females did. Performance was rarely different by gender. Affect was only different for one of the games. The optimal amount of challenge may be the most important gender difference to consider when designing serious games.

Adventure Games Design: Insight and Sense-making
By: Clara Fernandez Vara and Scot Osterweil

This paper aims at understanding how adventure games can support educational goals by understanding the foundations of their design, and what how inherent properties lend themselves to specific types of learning. The potential of adventure games as educational tools has been repeatedly discussed from the standpoint of education (Cavallari et al., 1992), usually focusing on the narrative framing that adventure games provide (Dickey, 2006), but not on their specific design conventions. Understanding adventure games entails understanding how their design helps the player learn.

Role Player's Perspectives on Learning
By: David Simkins

This study includes interviews and analysis of audio recorded game play of participants in Live Action Role Playing (LARP) events. The interviews asked why the players play the games they play, what they believe they learned from their game play, and how they see the games they have played affecting their life to date. The interviews were semi-structured (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002) and were thematically coded. This study is part of a larger study of role playing communities currently in its sixth year, and the researcher had the opportunity to use previous examples from the participant's game play as a form of stimulated recall (Marland, 1984) to help prompt deeper and more concrete exploration of the effects of games with the participants during the interviews.

Growing the Game Industry in Michigan: Two Years Later

Assessing Games for Health

Assessing At-Risk: Strategies for evaluating a training simulation-based game for suicide prevention
By: Ron Goldman

One of the biggest challenges facing serious-game developers is providing empirical evidence that their game can influence players' skills, knowledge, and behavior. Without concrete results, many will continue to view the use of games for health (or other serious endeavors) as more "buzz" than substance. This presentation will describe practical strategies used for conducting efficacy research - including successful techniques, process and funding - used to evaluate At-Risk, a suicide prevention training simulation designed to prepare university faculty to identify and refer to counseling students experiencing psychological distress. The presentation will demonstrate how this approach can be adapted for evaluating the outcomes of other games and reducing the misconception that empirical studies are highly complex and unachievable for game developers.

Life and Death in the Age of Malaria: A risk-reduction game for study abroad students
By: Laurie Hartjes

In this presentation, I will describe the development and evaluation of a game designed to educate study abroad students about malaria risk-reduction. Lessons learned will be offered along with study results. Three prototypes were created and rejected based on iterative user testing before arriving at a version that was engaging and intuitive enough to play-to-completion without incentive. Game evaluation focused on best practices for the delivery of explanatory feedback within the context of an educational game. Player engagement was critical as it was the only incentive to complete the study protocol. Students at seven campuses in the Midwestern U.S. were recruited to participate, and 482 students completed the study protocol. Three versions of the game were used to compare feedback strategies: no pop-up explanatory feedback, player-controlled (discretionary) explanatory feedback, and automated (every time) explanatory feedback. One third of the students who clicked on the link to access the study protocol completed it. Of these students 32% reported prior travel to a malaria endemic region, 5% didn't know if they'd visited an endemic region, and 64% plan to travel to an endemic region in the future. The overall mean time duration to complete game activities was 18.0 minutes, although mean completion time was significantly longer (20.3 minutes) in the automated group (F=6.1, p<0.002). Primary outcome measures were pre/post knowledge gain and satisfaction with the gaming experience. Only the automated explanatory feedback condition produced a significantly higher mean score for knowledge gain as compared to the other conditions (F=6.5, p<0.01). Differences in knowledge gain between game conditions was small (partial eta squared=0.026); however, there was a large effect size (0.767) for the pre to post increase in knowledge scores across all conditions, demonstrating a strong overall learning effect (m=7 pre and m=14 post; t=39, p<0.001). Malaria risk perception ratings increased significantly following the game intervention regardless of assigned condition (likelihood t=3.1, p<0.01; worry t=3.5, p<0.001). Open-text comments were generally positive for 60% (informative, fun, engaging); negative for 33% (too long, repetitive, technical problems), and 7% were valence neutral. There were no differences in player satisfaction between conditions. Game satisfaction was rated as 'very' to 'extremely' satisfying by 65% of participants. In the context of this genre of educational game, learning can be supported by providing explanatory feedback with each decision without diminishing player satisfaction. Research is needed to examine the association between knowledge gain and risk-reduction behavior during actual exposure to health threats.

A Mobile Game Aiming to Evoke Arousal Effects of Nicotine
By: Jessica Mezei, Azadeh Jamaian, Pazit Levitan, Jessica Hammer and Charles Kinzer

Although tobacco use may have decreased, it remains the leading cause of preventable death in the United States (RWJ Foundation, 2009). Among adult smokers, 70% report that they want to quit completely, and more than 40% try to quit each year (World Health Organization, 2008). New behavioral approaches may be helpful to address this pervasive problem and we ask if such an approach could be a mobile game.

Finding the Feeling: Experimental Development @thatgamecompany

Robin co-organizes the annual Experimental Gameplay Sessions and teaches each year at the 2-day Game Design Workshop tutorial session. She has worked with the IGDA Education SIG since its inception, and is finishing a PhD in AI at Northwestern University. In all of these efforts, Robin works to promote the visibility of women, independent and international developers... and to encourage the concrete, directed analysis of games and game design.

MSU Ten Years of Game's Happy Hour Gathering

Registration Check-In and Continental Breakfast

The Intellectual Life of Online Play

Chasing Art: The History and Promise of a Word

Serious game design case studies

System Design Evolution of The Prepared Partner: How a Labor and Childbirth Game Came to Term
By: Alexandra Holloway and Sri Kurniawan

How do you help a woman in labor? The Prepared Partner is an educational video game about labor and childbirth, intended to teach mothers, birth partners, and everybody else about different natural ways to help a woman in labor. In the game, the player sees up to 50 non-pharmacological pain relief, comfort, and relaxation methods that he or she can suggest to the mother --- and can help her have a satisfying birth. We present a partial taxonomy of childbirth in video games, and a discussion on skill selection and its effect on agency as motivation for the system. Through iterations of design decisions involving specialists across several vastly different fields, we present a simple way to model a woman in labor. We show that frequent interdisciplinary collaboration was key in making The Prepared Partner an educational game; that the review and re-assessment considered the system as a game, as an application, as a user interface, and as a mathematical model of a laboring woman. The overwhelming majority of positive survey responses speaks to the success of The Prepared Partner as an enjoyable learning aid. We attribute its success to the close ties we had to both the childbirth professionals and the usability and game design experts during all stages of design and development of The Prepared Partner.

Developing a Face-to-Face Highly Creative Play Experience
By: Benjamin Miller

Through the development and extensive playtesting of Move It!, a mobile game that encourages face-to-face social interaction and highly creative gameplay, my team has created a game that highlights the potential for meaningful play found in videogames that support these forms of interactions. Within the context of this paper I define "meaningful play" as play that improves the lives of the participants outside the context of the videogame experience. "Highly creative" is defined as creative activities that involve the act of creation or innovation in open systems. The first half of the paper describes the declining state of face-to-face interactions and creativity exhibited in US society, how videogames, specifically street games, currently support face-to-face interactions, and I define the lack of meaningful creative play found in many current videogames using the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking. This provides context for an in-depth discussion of the unique characteristics and successful aspects of Move It!. The paper concludes with a review of the major lessons my team and I have learned through the development of Move It! and a brief description of future work. I hope the paper will encourage others to create videogames that focus on supporting face-to-face, highly creative interactions between players.

'I play, therefore I learn?' Measuring the Evolution of Perceived Learning and Game Experience in the Design Flow of a Serious Game
By: Frederik De Grove, Jan Van Looy, Cedric Courtois and Lieven De Marez

This article explores how the serious game Poverty Is Not a Game (PING) is experienced by high school students in its subsequent design stages. We first focus on the multifaceted construct of game experience and how it is related to serious games. To measure game experience we use the Game Experience Questionnaire and add a perceived learning scale to account for the specificity of serious games in a classroom. Next, the data obtained from testing PING in 22 classrooms are analyzed. Results suggest that the evolution in the different design stages of the game is not just an issue of game experience, but also of usability. Furthermore, little evidence is found indicating that the learning experience changed positively during the different test phases. However, findings show a strong effect of the game experience on perceived learning while the game experience also varies significantly between different classrooms.

Ethical Reflection in Games

Videogames and the Ethics of Care (Top Paper Award)
By: John Murphy and Jose Zagal

Videogames have the potential to create ethical experiences and encourage ethical reflection. Usually, discussions of this potential are understood in the context of the dominant moral theories: utilitarianism and Kantianism. It has been argued by feminist moral philosophers that a complete moral theory needs to include the concept of an ethics of care. We utilize the ethics of care as an alternative lens through which to examine the ethical frameworks and experiences offered by videogames. We illustrate how this sort of analysis can provide insights by examining the videogames Little King's Story and Animal Crossing: City Folk from the perspective of care ethics. We show how Little King's Story's fictive context, gameplay, and asymmetrical power relationships encourage the player to care for the citizens of his kingdom. In Animal Crossing: City Folk the player is a member of a small social network that encourages her to care for her neighbors as part of a larger interconnected social ecosystem. Both games result in the player feeling an emotional attachment to the game's characters, and the value placed in these relationships becomes the motivation for further ethical player behavior. We conclude by discussing some of the challenges and limitations of a care ethics perspective and outline a series of future research questions that should be explored.

First Person Victim - Using Tragedy and Engagement to Create Awareness about the Consequences of War
By: Henrik Schoenau-Fog, Luis Emilio Bruni, Faysal Fuad Khalil and Jawid Faizi

What will you do when an air strike is announced, the attack is targeting your hometown, and you can hear the bombers coming nearer? How will you find your loved ones in the carnage after the explosions? What would it be like to be on the other side of the guns pointed at you by the invaders? What happens when we turn the roles around and the "First Person Shooter" becomes a "First Person Victim" experience?

Scientific and psychological studies claim a variety of triggers in video games with violent content may promote aggression. To oppose the violent behavior of players in these games, this paper will describe how the sources of aggression and first person shooter conventions have been exploited in the "First Person Victim" experience to create awareness about the consequences of war for civilians. The paper will also explain how our "Interactive Dramatic Experience Model" organizes the various events of the experience and mediates an emergent narrative by the use of the first person shooter form. The theme is communicated through the use of tragedy, and turns the roles around to let the participants encounter a realistic war-scenario while being confronted with ethical issues, by enacting the experience of being a victim of war. An evaluation of the implemented experience indicated that the participants were engaged in the experience, despite the tragic theme, and that they were able to acquire an understanding of the theme being mediated.

Constructive Carnage - Violent Gameplay as Affective Ethical Instruction
By: M.-Niclas Heckner

Violent video games are under constant attack for their alleged effects on non-virtual social interaction. This paper considers violent gameplay a possible scenario for the proposal and negotiation for a distinct set of ethically instructive strategies. In an analysis of the controversial level "No Russian" from the 2009 Video Game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, I show that by breaking genre conventions, this game takes its players out of the pleasurable experience of virtual shooters and forces them to reflect both on the ethical implications of violence as a means of maintaining public safety on the one hand, and on the fictional status of game violence on the other.

Teaching Meaning: The Challenge (or lack thereof) of Encouraging Student Designers/Developers to Make Meaningful Play

• How do educators make developing an educational or persuasive game as exciting as making the next Halo?
• How can educators turn the passions of their students toward the benefits of games that do more than entertain?
• What do curricula that make successful meaningful play have in common?

Games for Rehabilitation: How do we find the balance between play and therapy?

The Rapid Rise (and Fall?) of Games for Girls: A Handheld Case Study

Problem solving games

Online Games as Social-Computational Systems for Solving NP-complete Problems
By: Charles Cusack, Jeff Largent, Ryan Alfuth and Kimberly Klask

This paper discusses the applicability of human computing games to solving instances of NP-complete problems, a collection of problems that cannot currently be efficiently solved with computers. The idea is to leverage the diversity offered by a large group of humans--that is, utilize the different skills humans have that computers don't as well as the different perspectives of the individuals who plays the games. To explore this possibility, we created Pebble It, a suite of games that can be used to solve instances of problems related to a mathematical concept called graph pebbling. Several examples are presented that demonstrate the benefits of this approach to problem solving. We conclude by discussing how these games can link players and researchers to form a social-computational system that can strengthen research--sometimes in unexpected ways.

Enhancing Performance in the "Force Concept Inventory" Test Using Homework Gameplay While Involving Physics Teachers in the Level Design Process: Spacefart
By: Patrice Potvin, Martin Riopel, Julien Mercier, Patrick Charland, Alexandre Ayotte and Francois Boucher-Genesse

It is now very well recognized that students have difficulties learning physics because of the existence of initial non-scientific naive conceptions that interfere with learning (Duit & Treagust, 2003). Many tools have been developed to enable teachers and researchers to diagnose these conceptions in specific domains and to make students modify them toward more scientific mental models or schemas (DiSessa, 2006). Among these tools, a very well known and many times validated test, the "force concept inventory" (FCI), has been developed to assess conceptual development of the concept of force (Hestenes, Wells, & Swackhammer, 1992). Computer games have also been proposed, among others, as interesting tools for science education. In the last few years, we have developed an -amusing- simulation game, called "SpaceFart" (SF), that addresses conceptual and intuitive understanding of basic mechanics (kinematics and dynamics). SF is an online flash application where a creature (a "spacewhale") must travel through mazes with possibly moving walls, gravity, and other types of constraints. The trajectory of the "spacewhale" has to be "pre-programmed" through a "flight plan" that constrains reflection, forces explicit prediction, links intuitive/qualitative understanding with mathematical formulations through simple counting operations. The level design process can be carried by educators, granting them an active role in the pedagogical use of the application. Designed sequences can also be proposed as homework for students that can be carried out at home and automatically emailed to the teacher when done.

Scotty in the Engine Room - A Game to Help Learn Digital System Design
By: Peter Jamieson

Engineering education uses games and competition including events such as robotic competitions, egg drops, pumpkin launches, and paper airplane design to help educate students in design projects. In electrical and computer engineering, robotic competitions tend to dominate the landscape in the form of robot soccer and autonomous vehicle navigation. Though these activities are great for pushing an engineer to greater levels of skill and knowledge they require, for the most part, at least two or three years of education (with the exception of Lego Mindstorm robotics). In this work, I have created a game framework in digital hardware that will allow second year students to experience competitive engineering hardware design and real-time problem solving using a StarTrek model where the engineer solves problems in and for battle. This game includes digital hardware design on a development board, which controls a team's space ship to battle an opposing ship. The goals of this framework are to improve the success rate of student projects in the second year and to provide additional learning benefits.

Zombies vs. Knaves: Playing Games in Cultural Institutions

Social Responsibility: Musings on Harnessing the Power of Social Games for Good

Second Life: Innovative Simulation Development...Making it REAL!

Lunch provided by Health Games Research

Looking Outside In: LEGO and the Evolution of Play

Conference Closing and Game Awards