Program

Early Registration Check-In

Registration Check-In and Continental Breakfast

Conference Welcome

Using Meaningful Play to Impact New Technology Applications

Dr. Jacquelyn Ford Morie is widely known for using technology such as Virtual Reality (VR) to deliver meaningful experiences that enrich people's lives. Starting in 1990, she developed multi-sensory techniques for VR that can predictably elicit emotional responses from participants, for example inventing a scent collar that can deliver scents to a participant within an immersive experience. She is also active in online 3D virtual worlds (social VR) and through her company All These Worlds, LLC, has been bringing her techniques to such worlds for Mindfulness applications, storytelling and stress relief for veterans and soldiers. Along with SIFT (Smart Information Flow Technologies), she has created a virtual world ecosystem called ANSIBLE for NASA designed to provide psychological benefits for future astronauts who will undertake extremely long isolated missions to Mars. ANSIBLE is currently being tested in an analog facility called HISEAS in Hawaii, where a team of six scientists is sequestered for a full year to simulate the conditions of isolation on Mars, including communications delays.

Dr. Morie's other research interests include how space, identity and play in virtual worlds can positively affect our human nature, and she has presented this work at conferences worldwide. She has appeared in 2 films: The Mindfulness Movie (2013) and Dsknectd (2013) as herself. Her newest startup, The Augmented Traveler, is focused on bringing a product to market that will enhance the way people experience travel to all corners of the world.

The Nature and Boundaries of Play Science

Dr. Stuart Brown

Trained in general and internal medicine, psychiatry and clinical research, he first discovered the importance of play by discerning its absence in a carefully studied group of homicidal young males, beginning with the University of Texas Tower mass murderer, Charles Whitman. He later became founding Clinical Director and Chief of Psychiatry at Mercy Hospital and Medical Center and an Associate Professor at UCSD in San Diego, California. Over the course of his clinical career, he interviewed thousands of people to capture their play profiles. His cataloging of their profiles demonstrated the active presence of play in the accomplishments of the very successful and also identified negative consequences that inevitably accumulate in a play-deprived life.

As he ended his clinical career, he believed that play could be the key to discovering the giftedness that is in everyone, but he realized that identifying the importance of play hadn't really fully revealed what play is. So, in 1989 upon leaving clinical medicine, he decided to pursue play in greater depth.

He was surprised that much of the play-related research he reviewed was fragmented and lacked quantitative confirmation of factors readily observed clinically. A science and evidence-based way of understanding and suggesting how to improve play hygiene was and still is lacking. He turned to animal play research to gain insights into human play.

With the support of the National Geographic Society and Jane Goodall, he observed animal play in the wild. He became acquainted with the premier animal play experts in the world, and began to see play as a long evolved behavior important for the well being and survival of animals. He subsequently came to understand that humans are uniquely designed by nature to enjoy and participate in play throughout life.

Design and Play Together

This game is not for me: Non-participation in EVE Online
By: Kelly Bergstrom

When not played for profit (e.g. professional e-sports, competitive tournaments, goldfarming, etc.) digital games are typically considered to be leisure activities. This in turn usually leads to playing or not playing typically being viewed as an autonomous choice motivated by individual preferences for how one spends their time not occupied by work or domestic obligations. This idea of an unfettered choice of games and absolute freedom to play has been complicated by studies using a critical feminist lens to illustrate how social forces continue to write digital gameplay as a primarily heterosexual white masculine space outside of a very narrow definition of games deemed “acceptable” for female play (Chess, 2010; Jenson & de Castell, 2008). While a growing body of interventionist literature documents new entry points for girls and women into traditionally masculine play spaces (Gray, 2012; Jenson, Fisher, & de Castell, 2011; Kafai, 2008) or making games of their own (Fisher & Harvey, 2013; Harvey & Fisher, 2013; Harvey & Shepherd, 2016), these investigations are primarily focused on current game players. What is less understood is how current players came to their particular game(s) of choice, and their reasons for not playing other games. Using the space-themed Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) EVE Online as a case study and an analytical framework provided by the long history of investigations into and theorizing of barriers and constraints to participation by leisure scholars (Crawford, Jackson, & Godbey, 1991; Henderson & Gibson, 2013), I argue for the importance of accounting for non-players in the study of digital games.

Player Skill Decomposition in Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas
By: Zhengxing Chen, Yizhou Sun, Magy Seif El-Nasr and Truong-Huy D. Nguyen

Successful analysis of player skills in video games has important impacts on the process of enhancing player experience without undermining their continuous skill development. Moreover, player skill analysis becomes more intriguing in team-based video games because such form of study can help discover useful factors in effective team formation. In this paper, we consider the problem of skill decomposition in MOBA (MultiPlayer Online Battle Arena) games, with the goal to understand what player skill factors are essential for the outcome of a game match. To understand the construct of MOBA player skills, we utilize various skill-based predictive models to decompose player skills into interpretative parts, the impact of which are assessed in statistical terms. We apply this analysis approach on two widely known MOBAs, namely League of Legends (LoL) and Defense of the Ancients 2 (DOTA2). The finding is that base skills of in-game avatars, base skills of players, and players’ champion-specific skills are three prominent skill components influencing LoL’s match outcomes, while those of DOTA2 are mainly impacted by in-game avatars’ base skills but not much by the other two.

Finding Design Influence within Roguelike Games
By: Xavier Ho, Martin Tomitsch and Tomasz Bednarz

Our work takes the view of video games as a collection of creative ideas, acting as design influence which shapes future games. We examine a popular game genre, roguelikes, from which games found their roots in early stages of the Internet. Our aim is to investigate design influence within the roguelike genre. To achieve this aim, we wrote a script to collect not only data about roguelike games, but also infer the connections between them. We achieved this by using search engines to locate interviews and post-mortem articles, and automated an analysis by frequency of game appearances and their public metadata. To disseminate the results, we employed a series of data visualisations in order to illustrate roguelike influence over the years. Our contribution from this study is twofold: first, connecting roguelike design influence spanning over thirty years using a simple metric, summarised in four different types of visualisations; second, an open-source visualisation tool to investigate design influence in roguelike games, which can be generalised for media studies exhibited on the wider Internet.

First Person Researcher (part 1)

Game and Gameplay Analysis

Antagonists' Physical Characteristics in Video Games: Comparing Villains from 2006 and 2015
By: Hannah Evers and Joshua Estill

Video games of today's generation have many different types of characters involved in game play. One of the most important characters is the antagonist. Today's video games are full of stereotypes, although researchers have only recently begun looking at stereotypes relating to gender, race, and body-type in video games. Thus far, previous studies have examined representation of gender, body type, and race in antagonists from various forms of media such as television and film, which leaves out information from video game antagonists throughout the years. When comparing data from 2006 and 2015 it is clear that the certain characteristics of the antagonists has changed over the decade for these games. In both 2006 and 2015 as well, most of the human antagonists' races were white males. White antagonists have begun to appear more over the course of 10 years. Based off of previous research as well as our own, there appears to be a pattern when it comes to male antagonists in various forms of media, such as video games. We also found that body types of antagonists have become more varied in 2015 as compared to 2006.

The State of Escape: Escape Room Design and Facilities
By: Scott Nicholson

Escape rooms are live-action team-based games where players discover clues, solve puzzles, and accomplish tasks in one or more rooms in order to accomplish a specific goal (usually escaping from the room) in a limited amount of time. This paper presents the results from a survey answered by 175 escape room facilities from around the world about their facilities. The paper highlights different themes, demographics of players, room features, and other design patterns popular in escape rooms during 2015. Given the rapid growth and evolution of escape rooms, this paper serves to document the current state of this phenomenon.

A Social Nightmare: Player 2 as the Ghost in the Machine (Top Paper Award)
By: Andrew Kemp

This paper conducts an examination of the unusual play mechanics of two horror video games, Ju-on and Daylight, that have elected to give second players shared control over the nature of the scares. By exploring the game studies theory of the ludic-gothic and the rhetorical theory of communication apprehension, this paper argues that by sharing the fundamental emotional and power relationships of the game, Player 2's role becomes synchronized with the machine itself, becoming, in essence, an extension of the game's coded mechanics. The relationship between Player 1 and Player 2 is therefore transformed as well, as the social relationship and apprehensive and affective nightmare of social interaction, become spaces of play beyond the space of the screen and the controller. The paper proposes implications about the shared meaning of social gameplay.

Metaphor and Transformational Game Design

Identity in Games

Character Creation Systems, and Their Portrayal of Race, Gender, Body Types, Disabilities, and Age
By: Zachary Abbott and Trent Cornwell

In recent years, video games have become an increasingly large part of everyday media, with US video games sales reaching over 22 billion dollars in 2014 (Entertainment Software Association). The level of impact on the economy is mirrored by the impact that it has on culture. The research conducted for this study focuses around the concept of character creation systems, and their portrayal of race, gender, body types, disabilities, and age. There is a running theme of predominantly white, male protagonists in games that lack the option for players to customize their characters. In addition to the effect on youth development, one may look towards the effect that games have on self-identification across the age spectrum. Because of the diverse group of players a game may have, one may expect to see a range of race, gender, body types, disabilities, and age in video games. Very few studies have been conducted in regards to disabilities in contemporary games. This study focused on the concept of character creation systems, and their portrayal of race, gender, body types, disabilities, and age.

Ageism in Video Games: The Relationship Between Age and Character Roles
By: Alexander Hambly and Matthew Heerdegen

In our society people often unconsciously establish a list of tropes and archetypes for other people and events in our lives. These tropes establish a series of stereotypes along with a certain status quo within both the media and reality for how characters and, by extension, the people they represent should act. Society is adept at creating stereotypes that are often accepted unconsciously as the norm in our world. These stereotypes form from misrepresentation in media and they can be very harmful. Misrepresentation of groups in media often stems from negative or limited roles that are assigned to characters representing them. The research question at the center of this study was: what relationship, if any, is there between age and the role characters are assigned in video games? The results show that while there were no elderly characters in a “player” role, 63% of recorded elderly characters had what qualified as ‘minor’ roles in the games played for this study. The study found 91% of characters with a determined age consisted of adults or young adults. The study also found that 73% of recorded elderly characters were male. Similar to previous data, adults were a majority in all archetypes and occupied a definitive majority of the player characters. We found that our data largely matched the results of previous studies for films, TV, and books and only differed in a few minor areas.

Through a Pensieve Darkly: Women & Games, Patterns & Links
By: Jennifer Jenson, Suzanne de Castell, Kelly Bergstrom and Emily Flynn-Jones

This paper reports the findings of a survey on diversity in the games industry that immediately preceded the eruption of the “gamergate” wars, then contextualizes contemporary ‘women and games’ debates within a more expansive historical analysis of gendered inequality. Its purpose is to retrieve and recuperate feminist strategies and tactics that risk being overlooked or forgotten as public interest in the gamergate phenomenon wanes, leaving in its wake a reductive and misdirected understanding of both the problem and its possible solutions.

You Are Creepy, but I Will Accept You: A Study of the Effect of Time, Non Player Character Gender and Its Hostility on the Uncanniness Perception
By: Michael Lee

Characters in most role-playing games are often implausible. This is especially true of female non-player characters, which seem to be especially creepy and unpleasant. As with traditional mediums such as television, female characters in video games are often depicted as sex objects (Beasley & Collins, 2002; Dietz, 1998). Most game-character-related research has revealed evidence that female game characters are either underrepresented or stereotypically designed. However, we can easily find examples in which the uncanny feeling goes away quickly over the short amount of time. In this paper, the Non Player Character uncanniness was measured two times with four NPCs selected randomly from a commercial role-playing game to measure the effect of the number of exposures. The sensation of uncanniness was evoked quickly and strongly at the first exposure but significantly decreased in the second exposure. Also, study participants evaluated female NPCs as creepier than male NPCs.

Birds of a Feather Lunch (on your own)

• Learning and Education
• Health Games
• Research and Funding
• Design and Development
• Students
• Virtual Reality

Using the Fundamental Pyramid to Create Engaging Games

Exercise and Physical Engagement

Exerwalls - an Exercise Alternative to Paywalls in Mobile Games
By: Anthony Gallo, Philipp Baumann, Emmanuel Agu and Mark Claypool

Many mobile games implement paywalls, a monetization strategy whereby players are periodically forced to stop playing the game for a short period of time unless payments are made. While potentially effective at generating revenue, our survey results of over 50 people found that paywalls can frustrate players, reducing player retention and overall game ratings. As an alternative to the classic paywall, we propose an exerwall where players have the additional option of exercising to continue playing. The goal is to encourage physical activity, which is often reduced by playing games, while mitigating player frustration with paywalls. We designed and developed a mobile game called Laser Planets to evaluate the viability of exerwalls, incorporating walking as an alternative to waiting to continue play. Our week-long evaluation with over 20 players shows that exerwalls can be successful at both reducing frustration and increasing physical activity, and could potentially be used to integrate exercising into games that currently use paywalls.

Attitudes Toward Software-Generated Exercise Partners During High-Intensity Training
By: Stephen Samendinger, Christopher Hill, Brian Winn, Alison Ede, Norbert Kerr, James Pivarnik, Lori Ploutz-Snyder and Deborah Feltz

Active video games, utilizing SGPs, may be an effective modality to aid in motivating adults participating in high-intensity training. However, just as with human exercise companions, attitudes toward one’s companion may affect participation in the activity. Therefore, SGP characteristics should be designed to avoid interfering with the participant-SGP relationship during this intense exercise. This study demonstrated that SGPs can be successfully implemented with HIT protocols in an active adult community sample. Participants liked their exercise partners and found them attractive, not eerie, while recognizing the SGP was not human-like.

This study was supported by the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, through NASA NCC-9-58.

Physical Engagement Increases Rapport in Multimodal Interactions
By: Ivan Gris, David Novick, and Adriana Camacho

For developers of meaningful games, higher levels of engagement can keep players interacting with the game, thus achieving the game’s intended learning outcomes. And for games based on the technology of embodied conversational agents (ECAs), higher levels of engagement could lead to increased rapport between the player and the agent, again increasing play. Rapport is a complex and extensive behavioral state of affinity, synchronicity, coordination and mutual understanding that is difficult to model, measure and interpret. In this paper we present how full-body physical engagement helps build rapport and engagement by establishing a stronger sense of emotional connection between players and virtual characters.

The Transformational Framework: A Pre-production Process for Teams Working on Transformational Games (part 1)

• Working with diverse stakeholders
  
• Balancing design for transformation AND engagement
  
• Representing unfamiliar domain content
  
• Defining what it means to be successful
  

Tour of MSU Libraries Rovi Game Collection

So What? An Inductive Approach to Developing Models for Serious Game Assessment

• harness problem solving and investigation skills from gaming and apply them to real problems
  
• counteract boredom (alternatively, improve engagement) with the challenges of the multiple levels of game based learning.
  
• meet learners “where they are” with incremental content paths
  
• Promote creativity and collaboration.
  

• Reading and participating in game forums for commonly used educational games (e.g. Minecraft, SimCityEDU) to read about educational usages of these games and gather and query teachers as to how assessment data (if at all) is being gathered via or with game usage.
  
• Contacting teachers via gaming community forums and asking them to complete a short survey (with a small monetary incentive provided) regarding assessment methods and gaming.
  

Games and Cognition

Examining Specific Features of Video Games Which May Improve Task Switching
By: Nigel Robb and Kate A. Woodcock

The ability to switch between two tasks, or to switch between two ways of thinking about a set of stimuli, is one which we rely on heavily in our everyday lives and employment. This task switching ability is an executive function: a high-level cognitive process that coordinates and modulates other cognitive processes. Skill in task switching is positively associated with academic achievement and intelligence. Cognitive tests have been developed to measure task switching, and such tests regularly show that switching incurs a cost: an initial reduction in performance on the new task. Improving task switching so that such costs are reduced could have wide benefits for the general population. Additionally, specific deficits in task switching are shown in individuals with several neurodevelopmental disorders and may be linked to challenging behaviour in these disorders, suggesting that improving task switching could form an important part of a successful intervention strategy. A recent study found that, among novice players, those who trained on the action video games Unreal Tournament 2004 (UT2004) and Call of Duty 2 (COD2) showed greater improvements in task switching than those who trained on the life simulation game The Sims 2 (including the expansion pack The Sims 2: Open for Business). This suggests that playing UT2004 and COD2 involves engaging in activities that lead to greater improvements in task switching than playing The Sims 2. This study is one of several that have demonstrated greater improvements in task switching following training on action video games, as opposed to other kinds of video game.

Gaming the SySTEM: The Relationship Between Video Games and the Digital and STEM Divides
By: Christopher Ball, Kuo-Ting Huang, Shelia Cotten and R.V. Rikard

STEM careers are increasingly vital for our ability to remain competitive and innovative in the 21st century. The growing need for STEM workers has resulted in substantial increases in wages/benefits for those pursuing jobs in these fields. Despite the growing demand and lucrative nature of STEM fields, minorities have remained traditionally underrepresented in STEM careers. The STEM divide has been connected with another detrimental divide, the digital divide. Video games have been used for decades to teach complex concepts, critical thinking capabilities, and increase topical self-efficacy. In this study we use Social Cognitive Theory to frame normal video gameplay as an “enactive experience” which results in greater technology self-efficacy. More specifically, we explore how normal video game experience is connected to computer self-efficacy and emotional costs, which have in turn been connected to the digital and STEM divides. Data were gathered during a large-scale computing intervention which sought to increase students’ interest in STEM fields. The teacher based computing intervention taught teachers to integrate computing into their classrooms, including the use of computer games. The intervention was located in a large urban elementary school district in the southeastern United States. Our results indicate that video game experience does have an effect on STEM attitudes via the mediating role of computer self-efficacy and emotional costs. Video gameplay, regardless of topical content, can be beneficial for young digitally divided populations as it provides them with positive enactive experiences with technology. Future interventions should consider the use of video games to help simultaneously reduce both the digital and STEM divides.

History Shaping Design

Relationships and Sexual Exploitation in Games

A Matched Set: Romantic Couples Play in MMOGs
By: Kelly Bergstrom, Jennifer Jenson, Nicholas Taylor and Suzanne De Castell

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) have been a fruitful venue to study social interactions ranging from small temporary groups, to larger, more permanent in-game social collectives such as guilds or clans. Much of this literature is focused on strangers becoming friends through MMOG play, yet comparatively little is known about gameplay-based interactions between pre-existing romantic couples. To address these gaps, in this paper we describe the results of two studies: (1) small qualitative investigation of the avatars made by twelve romantic couples to illustrate that collaboration is apparent from as early as the avatar-design phase of MMOG play and (2) a quantitative investigation of the in-game actions and collaborations between romantic pairings as they played the fantasy MMOG RIFT. Taken together, these two investigations add much-needed insights to the oft-overlooked play habits of collocated romantic pairs who play MMOGs as part of their shared leisure time.

Participatory research and design across disciplines: Collaborative team processes and the development of a game-based commercial sexual exploitation of children prevention tool
By: Jessica Wendorf Muhamad, Lien Tran and Maria Elena Villar

Sexual exploitation of children represents a significant global problem, with an estimated 1.8 million children exploited each year (ECPAT, 2016), with children living in areas of armed conflict particularly vulnerable. Due to the multifarious nature of commercial sexual exploitation of children, this study benefited from moving away from traditional methodologies and employs a game-based approach. After 18-months of research and design in Colombia, a transdisciplinary team developed a role-playing game, Por Nuestras Calles, in which participants gain a deeper understanding of risk factors and reporting mechanisms. By creating a space where participants can think ‘as someone else,’ new avenues for collaboration can be explored. This paper details formative research involved in game development, team processes, and lessons learned.

Reconocer: Creating safe spaces for the recognition of sexual abuse (Top Paper Award)
By: Jessica Wendorf Muhamad

Currently, close to 20,000 children are victims of sexual exploitation in Colombia, with 3 of every 4 cases of sexual violence reported being cases initiated by a member of the child’s nuclear family (ICBF, 2014). In 2013, 83% of the cases included girls under the age of 18, with 71% of the girls being 14 years or younger (Medicina Legal, 2013). Perhaps even more alarming, current data indicates that every hour approximately two girls are sexually abused. In an effort to contribute to the existing sexual violence prevention efforts, as well as developing a psycho-social tool for mental health practitioners, health care professionals, and young girls in Colombia, emerges Reconocer (“Recognize” in Spanish) a culturally tailored, tabletop role-playing game for pregnant and postpartum girls (ages 11-18), whose pregnancy is a result of intrafamilial sexual abuse.

The Transformational Framework: A Pre-production Process for Teams Working on Transformational Games (part 2)

Teaching Game Design to Various Audiences

Finding Meaning in Emergent Play and What That Means for Design

Game Characters and Avatars

Autism in Video Games: With an Analysis of Characters
By: Jake Hilligoss and Luke Grebe

Autism Spectrum Disorder is a neurological disorder with a diagnosis rate that has been rising over the past decade from 1 in 150 children to 1 in 68 children in the United States. Those with autism have some representation and misrepresentation in the older forms of media, but the question is how they are represented in newer media. Specifically, the question is on how they are represented. So far, there seems to be no complete research on ASD being represented in video games. That is, are they efficiently and fairly represented as playable characters in games or are they underrepresented or misrepresented? The results show that most characters (68.2%) each show 1-3 of the characteristics of ASD. There are a few that do not have any of the listed symptoms built in, but are player choice. However, if measuring by built-in symptoms, most of the characters have very few ASD symptoms and therefore do not display characteristics of ASD. The study determined that video games do not under-represent or misrepresent people with ASD if measuring by player choice.

2014-2015 Video Game Character Census
By: James Klock and Caleb Sams

The number of people who play video games has been increasing steadily in the past few years. In 2014, for example, 59% of US citizens were found to play video games (ESA, 2014). In 2009 Williams, Martins, Consalvo, and Ivory conducted a study on racial diversity in video games and found that the population of video games vastly underrepresented the american population. This follow-up study was designed to see if any progress has been made in racial diversity in video games since 2009. The award winning games in The Game Awards 2014 and 2015 were examined for their portrayal of characters and diversity of races as well as how the races are represented within their context (2014). White females increased in the video game population by 5% from the 2009 study but were still vastly under represented. There was a lack of Hispanic/Latino representation only 0.46% in both primary characters and all characters. Racial diversity was found to be statistically different from the 2009 study and the U.S. census. Although race as a whole improved since the 2009 study, it did not match the 2010 U.S. census. Primary player representation also differed significantly from the U.S. census. Hispanic/Latino characters were the least accurately represented race, although this might be due to limitations.

The Emancipated Avatar: The Virtual Theatre of The Witness
By: Sierra Ortega

The Witness (released January 26, 2016) is an immersive 3D puzzle game created by developer Jonathon Blow. What has been described as a daunting, confounding, and maddening game represents a new wave of innovative, thought- provoking video game design that holds many implications for the future of entertainment and what it means to engage with spectacle. Video games represent a kind of digital neo-theatre with players embodying the spirit of the Boalian spect-actor. They observe action and they create action, simultaneously. The Witness, and its facilitation of digital being through an avatar, allows a player to achieve a state of emancipation (as proposed by Jacques Ranciere) in ways that are impossible through corporeal theatrical practices. We are all just observers of this world around us. We are all spectators; all witnesses. The avatar of The Witness, that is to say the player, which is to say ourselves, reaches this state of emancipation through an active movement through and engagement with the game’s environment. We are totally immersed in its spectacle; we have total ignorance of our place inside of it; and thus, we must practice total inquiry of it.

Game-Designing the Game Design Class

Richard Lemarchand is a game designer, an educator, a writer, a public speaker and a consultant. He is an Associate Professor in the USC Games program, and is the Associate Chair of the Interactive Media & Games Division of the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts. Between 2004 and 2012, Richard was a lead game designer at Naughty Dog in Santa Monica, California. He led the design of all three PlayStation 3 games in the Uncharted series including Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves - winner of ten AIAS Interactive Achievement Awards, five Game Developers Choice Awards, four BAFTAs and over 200 Game of the Year awards. Richard also worked on Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, Jak 3 and Jak X: Combat Racing for Naughty Dog, and helped to create the successful game series Gex, Pandemonium and Soul Reaver at Crystal Dynamics in the San Francisco Bay Area. Richard now teaches game design, development and production in the USC Games program, and is working on a series of experimental game design research projects as part of the USC Game Innovation Lab. His most recent game, The Meadow, a virtual reality art installation game co-created with Martzi Campos, was selected as a finalist in the 2015 IndieCade International Festival of Independent Games. Learn more about Richard.

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

A Content Analysis of Non-Visual Character Dimensions of Female Characters in Video Games
By: Katherine Scheck, Dong Yeop Lee, Byung Pyo Kyung and Wan Bok Lee

Studies have shown that female characters in popular media are often shown in a submissive, sexually suggestive, stereotypical, and insubstantial manner. Further studies have linked these portrayals with real world consequences. Previous game design research has focused on the visual design of female characters and only studied female characters as a single group with respect to male characters as another single group. This study examines non-visual characteristics—goals, agency, and role—and compares these qualities between male and female characters both as a whole and among characters of similar prominence within a game. Results confirm that female characters continue to be underrepresented in games, especially as prominent characters, but suggest that female characters may not be written with less depth when compared to male characters of similar prominence.

A Study on the Difference of Character Believability / Uncanniness Between a Real and Virtual Background
By: Namhoon Kim and Michael Lee

Virtual reality (VR) is made on a synthetic world, which might be existing or fictional. On the other hand, augmented reality (AR) is made on the real world basically. What kind of different recognition can two different backgrounds of these media create for media users? This proposal will measure believability and uncanniness of imaginary characters in the pictures between a virtual background and a real background. In addition, this study will determine the correlation between the background sizes and character believability.

An All-Girls Technology Camp: The Opportunities and Challenges of Implementation
By: Jennifer Killham, Luke Kane and Brittany Holmes

This poster presents the iterative design and “post-mortem” related to the implementation of [name removed], an all-girls technology camp on Game Design, 3D Animation, and Web Development. The poster will outline the STEM objectives of the camp, along with why the female focus was chosen as a means enhance young women’s identity with STEM fields. A thorough review of the scholarly literature will be provided, particularly related to the development of young women’s sense of self-efficacy through game design. A significant portion of the poster will analyze and critique the challenges and opportunities from the 2016 camp, as well as outline the potential improvements for the next iteration of the camp. The presenters will unpack the use of a free online storytelling tool called Twine. Twine was selected by the girls themselves as a means to create interactive, nonlinear stories. The poster will include samples of the girl’s interactive stories, including the creation of a game on the (a) bystander effect and (b) gun violence. Further, the presenters are looking for feedback from attendees on their ideas to further engage the girls with the brainstorming, pitching, and prototyping of a game; critical analysis of pre-existing video games, and the camp’s use of virtual panelist of experts from the video game industry.

Building an Organizational Strategy for Meaningful Play
By: Lindsay Grace, Tony Demarinis and Peter Jamieson

This presentation outlines heuristics from converting educational games and simulations from the controlled environments of academic researchers to the rigor and pragmatics of product based solutions in non-game organizations. These observations were collected from an ongoing research and implementation practice collaboration between the top ranked (anonymized) corporate consultancy and the Princeton Review ranked (anonymized) university game research community.

Competitive personalities prefer competitive games: Validation of the Revised Competitiveness Index with Video Gamers
By: Kevin Schmitt and Shane Mueller

The Revised Competitiveness Index (RCI; Harris & Houston, 2010) has been used to assess both competitiveness and contentiousness, which have been shown to be stable traits that can be assessed reliably. This index has been used with athletes and general population, but previously not been used to assess the personality of video game players. We hypothesized that self-identified gamers with high competitive drives would prefer competitive video games over non-competitive games, and gamers with low competitive drives would prefer non-competitive games over competitive games. To test this hypothesis, we conducted an on-line survey of self-identified video game players that assessed competitiveness and contentiousness with the RCI, and asked about preferred game genres and the primary motivations for playing video games. In a second cohort, we also asked about time spent playing and watching related content. Results showed that competitiveness, but not contentiousness, was associated with higher ratings of racing, shooter/action, and MOBA genres, and the fighting genre was marginally significant. In contrast, preference for role-playing, puzzle, sandbox, and strategy games were not correlated with RCI competitiveness. These results suggest that people who have competitive personalities tend to prefer competitive games more than those with non-competitive personalities, but competitiveness has no impact on preference for non-competitive games. The results validate the RCI as a useful index for studying video gamers, and suggest that the personality trait of competitiveness (but not contentiousness) is an important predictor of video game preference.

Defining Narrative Devices in Digital Gamespaces
By: Mars Ashton

The capabilities of games as a platform for Narrative delivery have evolved throughout the years and provided the game developer, be it the individual or a group, with a multitude of techniques to help define and shape the player’s experience. While some of these techniques are the topic of research papers, articles, blogs, and developer documentation, methodology behind these techniques have not been appropriately categorized and treated as a single entity. By breaking down the Approach and tactics used by games as an experiential medium throughout their history, this Master’s thesis aims to provide the necessary terminology and language for educators and developers alike to communicate their concepts.

By researching and evaluating archetypes of design patterns in story-driven and experiential games, of various forms, the classification of techniques used by designers, writers, animators and artists can be formed. The way these storytellers use the Gamespace as a tool for providing exposition, direction, or instruction will shape this research. This information will then provide the basis for an easily understood nomenclature that will benefit the culture, development, history, and future of game development as a whole.

Through these findings my nomenclature will then be applied to my own personal game development endeavor, Axis Descending, which will represent a plethora of Narrative delivery techniques and application.

Design Pattern Analysis of Autonomous NPC Data Visualization in Games
By: Alexander King

Non-Player Characters (NPCs) controlled by artificial intelligence (AI) are widely featured in digital games, providing game worlds with adversaries, allies and general inhabitants. However, a small subset of games foreground the use of these autonomous AI agents such that their interactions are the primary focus of gameplay itself. Although the design affordances of NPCs which are able to interact with their world and each other are rich and surprising, there are unique challenges in communicating the complexity of these systems to the player. Though there is a growing body of research into methods of architecting systems of emergent AI actors (Park, 2009), this research has focused on creating interesting interactions for an audience with a high degree of systems literacy. Similarly, much work has been done into methods for creating believable and relatable NPCs (Warpefelt, 2013), but such work is focused on ways NPCs can be made to mimic human interactions, not in how to better express an underlying NPC behavior system.

Designing Meaningful Play: Bridging the Classroom-Workplace Divide through Role-Play, Writing, and Problem-Solving
By: Dawn Opel and Benjamin Lauren

Meaningful play, or “experiences that have meaning and are meaningful for players” (Salen & Zimmerman, 2005) has been extended to many contexts, including serious games for the education and training sector (Michael & Chen, 2006). This poster explores the designing of meaningful play experiences for the training of undergraduate students for workplace-specific applications.

Digital Photo Reminiscence Therapy Game for Improving Health and Engagement for Alzheimer's & Dementia
By: Brock Dubbels

When we bring out the family album, and share photos of our lives, we connect through story, sharing, and community. With images, we can engage generations with well-placed questions, and create shared histories for generations. This game is a modern-day photo album, which creates family histories; it structures interaction, and improves memory, while eliciting important data for community health statistics. The game can act in a cocreative and function in an assistive or consultative role, drawing on the player’s expertise about his or her own life, structuring interaction and facilitating communication, constructing a collaborative process that also can engage family, caregivers, and important others in the client’s community. Pilot testing indicates that similar techniques such as bibliotherapy, journaling, and the making of memory books, self boxes, life maps, and time capsules, videography tap into a creative meaning-making process necessary for life review. The collaborative process described facilitates deconstructing problem stories and constructing unique outcomes in their place for the client and quite possibly for the family and important others. This type of activity has also been shown to improve memory in individuals with Alzheimer’s and dementia.

The game is intended to be a tablet application, where players can drag and drop, point and click, as well as type, take and save photos, as well as narrate and record spoken histories. This game works directly through both a browser or a local app, and allows for drawing from the vast collections of image, audio, and news media hosted and curated online.

Dreamy, A Serious Game Designed to Impact Players' Beliefs and Behaviors Related to Indoor Tanning
By: Soyoon Kim and Clay Ewing

This poster abstract summarizes an ongoing, two-phase project involving the design and evaluation of a serious game (Dreamy) developed to address growing health concerns about the use of indoor tanning facilities among young females. Using the format of an online-dating simulator, Dreamy aims to inform the target group about the true danger of engaging in indoor tanning and, ultimately, to discourage the behavior. Notably, we applied a consistent framework throughout the planning, design, and evaluation processes. In the design phase, for instance, the main components, contents, and mechanics of the game (e.g., characters, dialogues, and mini events) were developed based on the constructs of theoretical models that predict and explain people's health-related beliefs and behaviors. While a considerable body of literature demonstrates the merits of serious games as an alternative to conventional health-intervention tools, such potentials have rarely been tested in the context of addressing indoor-tanning behaviors. In the ongoing evaluation research, we empirically test the effects of the game on various determinants of indoor-tanning behaviors, particularly in comparison with other types of health-intervention tools. In addition, we aim to identify the psychological mechanisms and critical game components that generate such impacts. Lessons from the theory-based game-design process and empirical findings from the ongoing evaluation research using evaluation survey data and real-time play data will add valuable knowledge to the field of social-impact game design for serious purposes and health communication research.

Evolving Narratives in Digital/Physical Spaces: A Conceptual Model and Case Study of The Ghost of Pool Woods
By: Charles Ecenbarger, Laura Zdanski and Alex Hammond

“The Ghost of Poole Woods” is a conceptual exploration of how physical and real world elements can be interjected into transmedia storytelling. This project is a retelling of a local story in a digital/physical mélange that will allow geocachers to experience the narrative of local mythology, but also interact with the physical space in which the narrative ostensibly took place. In order to achieve this, we have considered Henry Jenkins’ (2006) seven core concepts of transmedia storytelling as well as a narrative-driven approach to the idea of gameplay. Through hidden geocaches and an altered story, our project guides players through an alternate-reality geocache game that explores local history, space, and a contemporary method of digital storytelling that is deeply entrenched into our perpetually connected society. Thus, the purpose of this presentation is not only to discuss our project, but the theory, methods, and tools used to modernize and retell a centuries old narrative, and how narratives evolve in meaning and medium over time.

Exploring the impact of avatar types and avatar customization on STEM attitudes and motivation to play online STEM games
By: Leticia Cherchiglia, Rabindra Ratan, Rachel Stacey, Harrison Sanders, Will Renius, Amanda Klug, Samantha Oldenburg and Tom Day

This study explores how avatar aspects may impact STEM attitudes (STEM interest and STEM-learning self-efficacy) and the motivation to play online STEM games. We expected that positive effects on the dependent variables would be stronger when participants were using a science-related avatar (instead of a shape-related avatar), especially when this avatar could be customized (instead of simply assigned). Results have shown so far that there is no significant difference between avatar groups in terms of impact on STEM attitudes, although change in customization for the shape-related avatar group led to change in non-STEM self-efficacy. We expect to finish data analysis regarding motivation to play online STEM Games in time for the presentation at Meaningful Play.

Functional Requirements and Quality Characteristics in the Development of Serious Games
By: Nigel Robb

As with all software, the quality of games designed for serious applications – such as education, training and health – is extremely important. The quality characteristics expected of a piece of software are typically viewed as non-functional requirements, such as reliability, usability, and so on. These are distinguished from what are usually known as the software’s functional requirements, that is, the features the software must incorporate (e.g. a word processor should allow the user to delete text). Several standards have been developed to characterize software quality, such as the International Standards Organization’s ISO/IEC 25010, which defines quality in use and product quality models for general software. Games, however, present unique challenges in the assessment and assurance of software quality. Unlike other software artefacts such as word processors, successful games must invoke a wide variety of emotional experiences in the player. Serious games present yet a further challenge: in addition to quality requirements such as fun, immersion, and so on, serious games must also (by their very definition) achieve a measurable outcome. Whether it is effectively training the cognitive process they are designed to train, or effectively promoting the health behavior they are designed to promote, the quality of a serious game must be partly evaluated in terms of the non-entertainment purpose that makes it a serious game. Crucially, whether or not a serious game is effective in this sense is not solely dependent on the kinds of non-functional quality characteristics addressed by quality assurance models. It is also important that the gameplay of a serious game effectively promotes the desired behaviors, skills, or knowledge. These gameplay features are best understood as the functional requirements of the serious game. This suggests that the relationship between gameplay features (functional requirements) and software quality (non-functional requirements) is both important and complex in serious games. A novel model of this relationship is presented here. The model is informed by: (1) consideration of the relationship between the functional requirements and quality characteristics of games in general; (2) analysis of a recently-proposed quality model for serious games, based on ISO/IEC 25010; and (3) practical experience in the development and evaluation of serious games. Implications of the model are discussed: it is argued that quality evaluation should occur early in the development of serious games, and that the development of serious games can particularly benefit from iterative, agile approaches.

Know Your Choices: Exploring How Instructors Support Student Autonomy Through Assessment Design
By: Caitlin Holman, Benjamin Plummer, Rachel Niemer and Barry Fishman

Gameful pedagogy promotes student engagement and intrinsic motivation through the thoughtful use of instructional design mechanics to support autonomy, belongingness, and competence. Here we focus on mechanisms to support autonomy.

We analyzed syllabi from 19 unique gameful courses at the University of Michigan experimenting broadly with gameful learning.

Making Learning Game Data Actionable for Teachers
By: Anne-Marie Hoxie and Alison Lee

Data dashboards are touted as one of the most beneficial features of using educational technology platforms, yet there are no clear guidelines for what information is most effective for informing instruction, or how that information should be presented. We investigate how teachers navigate and use various parts of the data dashboard for the learning game, After the Storm.
In After the Storm, students play the role of Editor-in-Chief of a magazine, where they must read closely, think critically, and solve real-world problems in the aftermath of a terrible hurricane. The game aims to improve struggling middle-school students’ reading comprehension, vocabulary, and 21st century skills as they complete game tasks related to journalism and leadership. Teachers have access to a game dashboard, which displays their students’ performance on reading assessments and in-game progress as well as providing views of students’ writing assignments. The dashboard is comprised of three significant parts: the class level progress (degree of game completion), class level performance (scores on assessments), and students’ actual written work completed in the game. Researchers investigated how teachers used the data presented in the dashboard to provide informed recommendations for how the dashboard could be improved. Results from Google Analytics suggested that teachers review data on their class’ progress in the game and individual students’ writing assignments most often but infrequently review their class-level performance data, or students’ scores on the reading standards. Corroboration between data on dashboard use and qualitative feedback from teacher focus groups and surveys are distilled into 4 suggestions for dashboard improvements: showing clear next steps to teachers for which students to target for intervention; linking performance data to concrete skills that educators can directly teach; including a benchmark for student performance to better explain how a score in the game compares with other students or an expected achievement level; and displaying data about students’ non-cognitive skill development such as how well students perform on decision making and problem solving tasks. Results will be discussed as they apply to best practices in data dashboard design.

Play in Nursing Home Residents
By: Leah Mancini and Doug Maynard

Adults over the age of sixty five are the quickest growing population in the United States. With age comes geriatric concerns including coping with loss, decreased independence, depression, anxiety, and lack of relatedness. Older adults who have strong mental health and adaptive coping mechanisms are more likely to live full, meaningful lives despite these challenges. Play is an topic of study in developmental psychology, but research on the role of play in adulthood, especially late adulthood, has been limited. Promising preliminary research has suggested that adult play yields increased positive affect, improved relatedness, and reduced stress. The psychological benefits of play in children have been exemplified through child-centered play therapy, but have also shown possible benefits in the elderly. In a case study of elderly-centered play therapy, participants became less depressed, less isolated, more active, and behaved in more socially appropriate ways. In the current study, we are exploring the phenomenon of play in the elderly, more specifically nursing home residents. We interviewed 15 nursing home residents to help understand how they have experienced play through their lives, and how their relationship with play has shifted since coming to the nursing home, and why. The interview data are being analyzed using a grounded theory approach, with the intent of developing a new model of play in the context of a nursing home. Data collection is ongoing and will be complete by August 2016. We used initial interviews with participants to identify main themes and new questions, and are now conducting follow-up interviews with those same participants to more deeply explore those questions. Emerging themes which will be further explored through follow-up interviews include barriers to play experienced by the elderly, the ability of elderly to change the way they play, and play as a coping mechanism. For example, the nursing home residents may have a need to play, but are experiencing barriers that come with aging, including physical limitations (e.g., breathing tubes, wheelchairs, and general lack of mobility) and social ones (e.g., isolation, and difficulty communicating due to loss of speech, hearing loss, and dementia). As research continues, how residents respond to these barriers barriers to play and other emerging themes will be more fully analyzed, leading to a better understanding of play in nursing home residents.

Pushing Game Definitions by Introducing Game Design to Diverse Novices
By: Mark Chen

This interactive poster (i.e., I’ll have the game on a digital device for participants to play) will describe how a novice to game design pushed theory about what makes a good game. The game in question was developed in Twine and featured very little player agency, which ironically served to give players a richer experience. That a novice could create something deeply personal that butted against conventional game design guidelines highlights the importance of opening game design up to as broad an audience as possible.

RECONOCER: Creating safe spaces for the recognition of sexual abuse
By: Jessica Wendorf Muhamad

Currently, close to 20,000 children are victims of sexual exploitation in Colombia, with 3 of every 4 cases of sexual violence reported being cases initiated by a member of the child’s nuclear family (ICBF, 2014). In 2013, 83% of the cases included girls under the age of 18, with 71% of the girls being 14 years or younger (Medicina Legal, 2013). Perhaps even more alarming, current data indicates that every hour approximately two girls are sexually abused. In an effort to contribute to the existing sexual violence prevention efforts, as well as developing a psycho-social tool for mental health practitioners, health care professionals, and young girls in Colombia, emerges Reconocer (“Recognize” in Spanish) a culturally tailored, tabletop role-playing game for pregnant and postpartum girls (ages 11-18), whose pregnancy is a result of intrafamilial sexual abuse. Following two years of extensive in-country fieldwork and formative research, a multidisciplinary team has been assembled and the game is now in the development phase. Real time data on the status of sexual abuse and pregnancy has been incorporated with narrative interviews, focus groups, and observational data to form a more robust understanding of the phenomena and the game components essential for an efficacious intervention. Games function in many of the same ways that other entertainment-education programs do, with processes such as transportation and identification being key to their success in enacting change. However, while serious games share many constructs and processes with EE, the mechanisms by which games work mean that these processes are potentially enacted differently. Games move beyond embedded prosocial messages and mere entertainment value; games are facilitators of deeper and more personalized processes. Incorporated within existing psychotherapeutic groups, Reconocer enables young girls to explore their past experiences as characters, thus providing a healthy emotional and psychological distance for internal reflection in case of prior sexual abuse. Reconocer draws on Freire’s (1970) participatory learning model by utilizing problem posing and participatory exercises to promote active involvement. Through enacting situations and corresponding responses, Reconocer aims to increase identification as well as to provide mechanisms for discussion and reporting. Given the unfortunate normativity of intrafamily sexual abuse in Colombia it is essential to balance the free and force choice options during gameplay. Reconocer provides young girls an opportunity to execute choices that might not otherwise be accessible. This ranging from exploring the possibility of having been sexually abuse (targeting denial) to formally reporting to local agencies or governmental offices. As such, instances in which players might encounter reactance and/or counterargument have been considered. Psychological reactance entails the selective avoidance of uncomfortable or difficult information via two types of resistance: inertia and/or fear. Inertia can be explained as an individual’s desire to avoid things that contradict (dissonance), thereby preferring to not change attitudes, behaviors, and beliefs (Knowles & Linn, 2004). Fear stems from an individual’s active attempt at coping with arousal through either ignoring it or adopting a defense position (Witte, 1994). As a persuasive EE tool, Reconocer seeks to move away from threat and closer to transportation through purposeful engagement with charged content framed within entertaining media. Counterargument, or the rejection of a message post elaboration, within this context is particularly challenging. Although the game seeks to create situations that are accurate representations of cultural and social norms, contextual expressions of abuse, and the possible responses, it must do so in a space that does not feel threatening. During the game design and development phase careful attention has been brought to ensuring a collaborative, participatory framework, in which local knowledge and expertise is considered.

Shuttle to Mars: Training airline pilots for critical situations - Matching pilot tasks and working conditions with space game events for developing pilot competencies
By: Esther Kuindersma, Jelke van der Pal, H.Jaap Van den Herik and Aske Plaat

Airline pilots are well trained professionals. They operate in increasingly automated environments. With the high levels of automation pilots spend less time handling the aircraft manually and more time managing and monitoring all automated processes. When critical situations occur, pilots need to jump into action. Specific cognitive competencies are needed to move from the monitoring state into an active state. These competencies need to be trained. In aviation the use of training simulators with a high fidelity is common. As they are expensive to use and availability is limited, the Netherlands Aerospace Centre NLR is investigating to what extent serious games can be used for training purposes.

This poster presents the approach taken (1) to identify the essential higher-order competencies and (2) to translate the pilot tasks and working conditions into engaging game events. The game events should be suitable (a) for assessment of the behavioural indicators of the competencies and (b) for the measurement of the learning progress.

The Efficacy of a Serious Game Aimed at the Promotion of Positive Bystander Behavior in Cyberbullying among Adolescents: Examining the Role of Player Experience and Player Behavior
By: Heidi Vandebosch, Laura Herrewijn, Katrien Van Cleemput, Steven Malliet, Sara Bastiaensens, Frederik Van Broeckhoven, Gaetan Deglorie, Ann Desmet, Sofie Van Hoecke, Koen Samyn, Olga De Troyer, Ilse De Bourdeaudhuij and Karolien Poels

The paper presents a study on the efficacy of a serious game that aims to promote positive bystander behavior in cyberbullying with 12-14 year old adolescents. The serious game was developed within the scope of an interdisciplinary research project, investigating how ICT-related tools can be effectively used in interventions with regard to cyberbullying amongst adolescents. Digital games are powerful motivational tools and learning environments; their highly interactive and involving context promotes active, critical learning and can stimulate behavior change both within and outside of the game environment. This relationship between the experiential, involving aspect of games and learning and behavior change is often seen as implicit and rarely questioned. Little research has explicitly investigated the relationship between the experiential aspect of games and their potential for learning and behavior change, though. Consequently, the aim of our study is to pay particular attention to how play-related variables such as the player experience (e.g. enjoyment, involvement) and player behavior (e.g. succeeding or failing in the mission, game duration, performing positive/negative bystander behaviors) influence the efficacy of the serious game. In order to do so, a group-randomized controlled trial (GRCT) consisting of three measurement phases (i.e. pre-test, intervention/post-test, follow-up) was designed. This GRCT investigated the effect of the game on bystander behavior when confronted with cyberbullying, as well as its determinants (e.g. beliefs, attitudes, behavioral intentions). Moreover, we specifically measured and took into account both player experiences and behaviors by means of self-report questionnaires and the logging of the players’ gameplay statistics. Results of our study show that playing the serious game had a significant impact on respondents’ attitudes regarding positive and negative bystander behavior in cyberbullying, their self-efficacy regarding how to deal with cyberbullying, and their positive bystander intentions (i.e. their intentions to perform positive bystander behavior when witnessing a cyberbullying event in the future). Moreover, the effect of playing the game differed according to the experiences that respondents encountered and, even more so, the behaviors that they performed in-game. Especially the respondents’ actions when dealing with a cyberbullying event (e.g. aggressively standing up to the bully) and witnessing its consequences in-game proved to have an important effect on the outcome of the intervention. As such, our study provides explicit support for the notion that play-related variables are crucial factors in establishing learning and behavioral outcomes, and should be taken into account when studying the efficacy of a serious game.

Exhibited Digital Games

1979 Revolution: Black Friday
By: iNK Stories

1979 Revolution: Black Friday is a choice driven, narrative game that brings players into the brooding world of a nation on the verge of collapse. Play as Reza, an aspiring photojournalist, and make life and death decisions as you survive the gritty streets of Iran during the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

A Moment Free from Darkness (student-created game)
By: Inflatable Reality

A Moment Free from Darkness is about feeling empathy for a girl sold into sex slavery by her parents. Situations are presented through her subjective experience ranging from the hopeful to the horrific. The game has four acts that represent a cycle that repeats many times everyday of her life. The experience does not flow like a normal game. Each act feels distinct and demands cognitive work from players to thread one moment with the next and understand the game as a narrative whole. The game is played on four platforms sequentially to evoke an increasing sense of immersion through the first three acts (played on mobile, desktop, and Oculus Rift 2, respectively) and a drop off of immersion in a final act of healing and recovery (played on the Apple Watch).

Beach VR Meditation for Embodied Presence
By: Carrie Heeter, Marcel Allbritton, Josh Farkas

Feeling deeply connected to yourself and your body creates a richer experience of presence in a virtual world, even when your body is sitting in a chair wearing VR googles. We call this embodied presence. Connection to the self and body (paying attention to present-moment sensations and feelings) enhances the sense of self and the sense of presence, regardless of whether you are in the natural world or a VR world. Our Beach VR Meditation demonstrates how meditation can be designed to increase the experience of embodied presence in a virtual world.

Breath of Life
By: Bella Shah MD, Robert Alexander PhD

Breath of Life is an interactive real-time biofeedback experience in which the user's breath is turned into a sonification and visualization. The sonification and visualization of the user's physiology is realized through custom parameter-mapping algorithms. Individuals simply place a phone equipped with an accelerometer on their stomach and breathe. The acceleration information is transmitted to the computer via wifi and the algorithms generate a sonification and visualization of the breath. This biofeedback is intended to enable user mindfulness, fitness and breath control.

Charlotte
By: Elizabeth Goins

Charlotte is a serious, educational game that explores the connections between the short story, The Yellow Wall-paper, and the life of its author, Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Our research goal is to improve player engagement with educational material by the incorporation of game mechanics and narrative. The content in the game can be used in high school and college level classes for 19th century history, literature and women's/gender studies.

Warning: This is an adult version which contains examples of 19th century erotica that may not be suitable for work or younger players. For the educational version (with no erotica) go to https://magicspellstudios.itch.io/charlotte-educational-version

Coco's Cove (student-created game)
By: Bobbi Schultz, Caleb Bill, Heath L. Moore, Robert W. Miller, Gregor Armstrong, John Medwick, Eric Arbizanni, Monica McGill

Coco is a fun, energetic monkey living in a cove. Like any monkey, Coco likes to romp around the jungle near the cove to find adventures to fill its days.

You can help Coco fuel these adventures by stretching its tail back then releasing. That action flings Coco through the air to collect yummy food. Bananas are a definite favorite, but Coco also likes salmon, cake, and even french fries! Delicious!

We all have our challenges in life, and Coco is no different. Though you can't tell by looking, Coco happens to have type 2 diabetes. Eating the wrong foods (like too many carbs) or not eating at the right times can affect blood sugar. But, hey, no worries. That can be a bummer sometimes, but with practice, you can help Coco move along to the next world.

Coco lives a great life in the jungle. Help Coco explore the jungle, overcome many challenges, and...well...live that carefree jungle life that makes Coco happy!

Codemancer
By: Robert Lockhart

Aurora must learn magic to rescue her kidnapped father, but the way Magic works in Aurora's world is the way Programming works in ours. Play as Aurora and her Animal Familiar as you learn to code. The game is intended for kids 6-12, but fun for grown-ups, too.

Community in Crisis
By: Classroom, Inc.

Community in Crisis is a learning game that immerses students in an authentic workplace experience while learning literacy skills, engaging with meaningful texts, and developing 21st century life skills. Players take on the role as Director of Common Ground Community Center, a local organization responding to the effects of a major hurricane. As the Director, players must focus on providing services to the community with the help of their support staff by deciding how best to respond to daily challenges by making critical decisions based on information gathered through various sources in the game. As players navigate through the life of a working professional, they learn how to be critical thinkers, tackle real life problems, become strong decision makers and hone valuable literacy skills.

Criminal Procedure: Investigation
By: Brian Winn, Adam Candeub, Connor Kurtz, Nick Thurston, Liang Cui, Chris Ulrich, Joe Dykstra, Sarah Zelenak, Zach Klegon, Michael Beyene, Patrick Williams, Travis Nichols, Sahil Tandon, Justin Girard, Tyler Summers

"Criminal Procedure: Investigation" is a game that will be integrated into a Michigan State University College of Law course on criminal procedure. The primary purpose of the game is to bring to life criminal procedure law in a dramatic story and allow students to explore the law in an interactive environment. In this game, the player role-plays as a police officer and is tasked to collect evidence to solve a series of interrelated cases.

The player has the option to collect evidence according to law (in a "legal manner") or not, but ultimately the ramifications of gather evidence unlawfully will be that the evidence is not admissible in court and the overall case may fall apart. For instance, a player might find a fallen letter on the ground outside of a suspicious house and would be presented with the possibility of taking the letters, leaving them alone, or inspecting them visually for information. If the player takes the letters, it would not be admissible evidence. If the play leaves the letters alone they make no progress in gathering evidence. If however, they inspect the letters (without touching them), they might find that it is addressed to someone who is not listed as a resident of the house. Using this information, the player could then pursue additional evidence.

The game will be available as part of a College of Law course on criminal procedure starting in Fall 2016.

Dragon Dad
By: Tiltfactor, Astra Rose Studio

In Dragon Dad, your strict dragon father has chores for you. Spoiler alert: no matter how well you do, he'll never be satisfied. Complete each minigame as fast as you can, but they're going to get harder and harder until you leave your father disappointed.

Some of the minigames promote high-impact personal actions players can do to be more sustainable, like biking instead of driving. These minigames are intermixed with minigames that are "just for fun." A pilot study suggests that Dragon Dad makes players feel as if their actions can affect the environment more, which would lead to greater willingness to behave sustainably.

Dragon Dad is currently in development. A prototype is currently available to demo.

Dreamy
By: Clay Ewing, Soyoon Kim, Kenny Langer, Allison Chin, Valentina Crespo, Matthew Kyprie, Kelsey Kjeldsen

Dreamy is a dating simulator that places the player into conversations with potential suitors where physical appearance matters. The objective of the game is to find a date during a 30 day trial of a dating service. The central game mechanic in the game is choosing how to respond to potential suitors. These conversations highlight the choices and reasons for risk-taking behavior associated with indoor tanning. Outside of the conversations, the player can visit a tanning salon, get piercings, boost their love quotient, and visit a dermatologist. Each of these activities have effects on the way the player is perceived by potential suitors. Components and content in Dreamy are based upon two behavioral prediction models: Integrated Model of Behavioral Prediction (IM: Fishbein, 2000, 2007; Fishbein & Yzer, 2003) and the health belief model (HBM: Rosenstock, 1974; Rosenstock, Strecher & Becker, 1988). The game mechanics have been designed to target salient beliefs and attitudes to determine behavioral intention to engage in tanning behavior and discourage indoor tanning.

Einstein's Playground (student-created game)
By: Zachary Sherin, Heather Fairweather, Philip Tan, Gerd Kortemeyer

Einstein's Playground is a fulldome scientific talk & demonstration, where planetarium audiences are surrounded by a real-time simulation of the visual effects of Einstein's theory of special relativity. By slowing the simulated speed of light to a crawl and placing the audience in a familiar, human-scale environment, people can observe and learn about the concepts of doppler shift, Lorentz contraction, relativistic aberration, and the finite speed of light.

Escape from the Robot Factory
By: Jared Segal

Sam was snooping around the world's largest robot factory when he overheard a scary conversation about world robotic domination. Now Sam is trapped inside the factory with only one chance of escape. As Sam, you'll need to control a lowly maintenance robot to solve puzzles and find a way out of this place. Here's the catch: you'll need to program the robot to handle what's being thrown at it in these puzzles. Help Sam get out and keep the world free from robotic overlords! The goal of this game is to introduce people to programming in a fun puzzle game.

Forest Defender
By: Nathaniel Abernathy, Aaron Mundale, Brean Pavlinak, Mike Dale

Forest Defender is a fun experience to help teach Michigan resident and visitors about the invasive Asian Longhorned Beetle (ALB). Players are tasked with collecting as many ALB's as they can in 60 seconds.

Players are given opportunities to learn more about the ALB and other native beetles, but are not forced to learn any more than they choose. The information is only limited to what is necessary as the version placed at state parks works in conjunction with the additional information found at the exhibits.

Friendly ATTAC
By: Heidi Vandebosch, Katrien Van Cleemput, Steven Malliet, Sara Bastiaensens, Laura Herrewijn, Frederik Van Broeckhoven, Gaétan Deglorie, Ann DeSmet, Sofie Van Hoecke, Koen Samyn, Olga De Troyer, Ilse De Bourdeaudhuij, Karolien Poels

'Friendly ATTAC' (Adaptive Technological Tools Against Cyberbullying) is a serious game that was developed within the scope of an interdisciplinary research project, carried out by researchers from the University of Antwerp, Ghent University, the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and Howest University College West Flanders (http://www.friendlyattac.be/en/). This research project investigated how ICT-related tools can be effectively used in interventions with regard to cyberbullying amongst adolescents. Within this project, the goal of the serious game was to promote positive bystander behavior in cyberbullying with 12-14 year old adolescents.

I Can Feel it Coming in the Air Tonight (student-created game)
By: James Earl Cox III, Julie Buchanan

I Can Feel It Coming in the Air Tonight is an interactive fiction game about the permanency and fleetingness of our choices.

Kerem B’Yavneh
By: Brian Winn, Casey O'Donnell, Reuven Margrett, Greg Kozma, Xavier Durand-Hollis, Kevin Pauly, Andrew MacAfee, Peter Burroughs, Sarah Zelenak, Jackson Hopcroft, Andrew Bagdady, Tyler Summers, Elan Gleiber, Ryan Chuang, Paul Stanos

The fun and quirkiness of your favorite farming and city-building games meet the richness and vibrancy of Jewish ritual, history, and thought. Run a profitable homestead, observe festivals, learn Torah, and experience life and community in ancient Yavneh, the birthplace of modern Judaism. Never before have there been Jewish games both so cutting-edge and so well-adapted to use in an educational setting.

Kirchhoff's Revenge
By: Gerd Kortemeyer

Gustav Kirchhoff is annoyed: nobody appreciates his circuit laws. In this first-person proof-of-concept, you get abducted and have to solve a number of puzzles to be released.

Mountain VR (student-created game)
By: Cuyler Quint, Tony Morelli

Augmented Reality Information Simulation for Snow Sports. Augmented trail maps show best path based on the ability of the athlete. Snowboard down the mountain on a Wii Balance Board using an Oculus Rift to experience what the future of augmented snow sports could be!

Night of the Living Debt
By: Luke Erickson, Lyle Hansen, Barbara Chamberlin, Seth Powers

In a post-apocalyptic world, credit and credit payments have taken on the form of zombies! "Night of the Living Debt," is the newest addition to the Northwest Youth Financial Education educational game library. This app is free and currently available to K-12 teachers on iOS. It was developed by University of Idaho Extension and the New Mexico State University Games Lab. In this game, students will learn how to maintain good personal credit scores while balancing savings and expenses. The cartoon-like zombies are playfully used as a metaphor for illustrating the pros and cons of common personal finance decisions, especially loans and debt payments. The game was designed for grades 11-12, but has shown significant appeal to younger audiences as well.

Open Sorcery
By: Abigail Corfman

Open Sorcery is a text-based browser/mobile game built with the Twine engine. It follows the development of an elemental firewall--a creature of intertwined magic and code--that is becoming sapient. It plays like a choose your own adventure game interspersed with riddle-like challenges and focuses heavily on the relationships you develop with other characters. Player decisions determine the emotional development of the AI and lead to one of eight endings, some happy, some devastating.

Putrajaya Billionaire
By: John M. Quick

Putrajaya Billionaire is a newsgame that satirizes current events while raising awareness about political turmoil in Southeast Asia.

Rangers VS Planners
By: Tony Morelli, Joe packer

A cooperative hybrid learning experience. Players learn about the balance between urban development and wild life population. City Planners play a physical game on top of a projected map. As pieces are placed onto the map, the virtual world reflects the buildings. Forest rangers play in the virtual world from a 1st person perspective and attempt to move wild animals to safe locations

REVISIONS (student-created game)
By: Steve Cha, Team REVISIONS

REVISIONS is an autobiographical, metafictional series of vignettes. In the game's first act, the player plays minigames chronicling the subject's life. The second act of the game invites the player to view each minigame through the designer's eyes.

REVISIONS was developed as Steve Cha's MFA thesis project at USC's Interactive Media and Games program.

Rija's Day (student-created game)
By: Aaron Albert, Daniel J. Cohen

Rija's Day is a short, interactive story about cultural discrimination. Players control Rija, as she goes about her daily business. Throughout the day, Rija becomes the victim of violence and verbal abuse similar to what the people of various cultures experience every day.

Saving Draggy
By: Brian Winn, Chase Grove, Tyler Summers, Anya Kolesnichenko, Greg Kozma, Justin Girard, Andrew MacAfee, Joshua Symanzik, Peter Burroughs, Sarah Zelenak, Jackson Hopcraft, Ryan Chuang, and Max Wilhelmi

Your baby dragon has gone missing in this magical children's adventure game! Targeted at kids ages 5-10, children will increase their cognition and understanding of basic financial concepts as they engage in an epic quest to save Draggy.

The game is developed by the Games for Entertainment and Learning (GEL) Lab at Michigan State University and supported by the Michigan State University Federal Credit Union.

Saving with Piggy
By: Brian Winn, Justin Girard, Peter Burroughs, Jackson Hopcroft, Tyler Summers

Give your child a jump start on their financial literacy! Saving with Piggy is an educational game that helps young children (age 2 to 5) learn about coins by feeding piggy (aka, putting coins in the piggy bank). The game features Piggy, a lovable animated piggy bank that needs help saving coins.

The game is developed by the Games for Entertainment and Learning (GEL) Lab at Michigan State University and supported by the Michigan State University Federal Credit Union.

Silent Streets
By: Ilia Moshkov, Demid Tishin, Alex Nitz

Silent Streets is an adventure detective game with step counter mechanics, ironic humor and dark atmosphere, set in a small Victorian port town. You travel from location to location on foot or in a cab. Cabman costs you in-game money, which you earn by solving the cases and side-quests. If you go on foot, put on your headphones and go for a walk in your real life. Every step you make in real life causes a step in Snowport. No directions captured, only the number of steps. While you're walking you will hear sound ambience of the Snowport districts in your headphones, depending on the current in-game route. The story is non-linear, there's a reputation system that affects the gameplay heavily. When in location you engage in dialogues, search for clues in hidden-object mini-games, and choose your own story. The release version is to have all NPCs professionally voiced over.

Smorball
By: Tiltfactor

You're the head coach of the Eugene Melonballers, an up-and-coming team in the Federation of National Smorballers. Can you coach your team to victory, helping them win the coveted Dalahäst Trophy and bring glory home to Eugene?

Smorball is a quick but challenging browser game that asks players to correctly type the words they see on the screen--punctuation and all. The more words they type correctly, the quicker opposing teams are defeated, and the closer the Eugene Melonballers get to the Dalahäst Trophy.

Smorball shows players words from the Biodiversity Heritage Library's collections of scanned historical books. By playing Smorball, players help transcribe and make these books searchable, saving them from digital oblivion.

Soteria - Dreams as Currency
By: Play 4 Change

"Soteria - Dreams as Currency" (SDC) is a single-player, 3D adventure game designed to promote players' readiness to use psycho-therapeutically proven strategies to overcome general anxiety disorder. Based on the research of Anxiety Treatment Center founder Prof. Reid Wilson, it serves to communicate principles of anxiety treatment in a way that enables experiential understanding. The design leverages "recursive learning" principles that subvert player expectations and initiate a "perspective switch" from avoiding to confronting anxiety. Taking the role of Ana, a young woman feeling trapped by her fears, the player aims to liberate Ana's dreams from the evil entity, Oicys. The game is set in a metaphorical harbor town crawling with Shadow Creatures (representations of fears) and dedicated to the Goddess of Safety, Soteria. The first part of the game revolves around stealth mechanics. The second part changes to "lingering" through fear and provoking it through dialogue options.

SYNC (student-created game)
By: Robert D. Bishop, William Pheloung, Eric Walsh, Luc Wong, Yihao Zhu

You have lost the love of your life. Overwhelmed by grief, you sit by her tomb, flipping through the pages of the journal that chronicles your life together. So begins SYNC, an interactive visual novel designed in Unity using Affdex, new facial recognition software from Affectiva.

SYNC was created to consider alternative mechanics that could enhance the presentation of our narrative. We believe that controlling the game through player emotions and facial expressions has the potential to strengthen player investment in the story as well as player connection with the main character by having them literally come to embody her emotional state.

Temporality (student-created game)
By: James Earl Cox III, Julie Buchanan

Temporality is a reflective game that combines minimal controls and interpretive art to create a thoughtful atmosphere. The player only controls the passage of time, using "A" to reverse it, and "D" to push time forward. This game is particularly relevant as the anniversary of The Great War continues.

Terra (student-created game)
By: Urian Lee, Lucienne Lee, Jay Patel, Ethan Wong

Terra is a side-scrolling Metroidvania shooter seeking to illustrate global warming and pollution. Play as Terra, a gardener with a watering can with the power to heal trees and smother entities of pollution.

The Fiscal Ship
By: Kerry Grannis, Davide Wessel, Eric Church, , David Rejeski, Ben Sawyer, Tobi Saulnier, Colin Wilkinson

The Fiscal Ship challenges you to put the federal budget on a sustainable course. Your mission is to pick from a menu of tax and spending options to reduce the debt from projected levels over the next 25 years. Small changes to spending and taxes won't suffice. The choices are difficult, but the goal is achievable. To win the game, you need to find a combination of policies that match your values and priorities AND set the budget on a sustainable course.

Time Zone X2
By: Will Jordan-Cooley, BrainPOP

Time Zone X2 is a major remake of the first version. The game is about constructing a timeline using context clues and careful reading. In Quest mode, the game is won by placing all four key events, unique to each Quest. In Classic mode, the player completes as many decks as they can. It's game over if the player places four events incorrectly in a row.

Unsavory
By: Clay Ewing, Pablo Obando, Andrew Curtis Gaines, Alejandra Jimenez, Brandon Wilson

Unsavory is a mobile game designed to put the player in the precarious position of choosing between their health and their financial wellbeing. Like other activist games, the intention is to create awareness and empathy around an issue, paid sick leave, that is best understood as a system. Additionally, the game seeks to be a catalyst for change by embedding a social media campaign into gameplay.

VR-Rades (student-created game)
By: Molly Rossman, Tony Morelli

Single Room, Group Play, Virtual Reality Learning Game.

Wake Up, Koala!
By: Monica McGill, Nathan Clark, Joel Ferneno, Alex Jagim, Michael Holwey, Payton Orr, Ian Karlovsky, Kyle Des Jardins, Alan Lam, Jake Rodelius, Chad Watson, Alexander "A.J." Hambly, Dominic Bavetta, Rhianna Guptill, Trevor Tomasic, Nick Luciani, Jordon Lamping, William "Billy" Peters

As part of their capstone project, seniors at Bradley University collaborated with the Sjögren's Syndrome Foundation to design and develop Wake Up, Koala! The primary objective of this game is to raise awareness about Sjögren's (SHOW-grins), an autoimmune disorder in which the body's immune system attacks moisture-producing glands. The primary mechanic involves water and dropping the water in a way that will wake up Mama Koala, who, similar to many Sjögren's patients, is very tired. This puzzle game features over 100 levels across 7 worlds, boasts 20 achievements, and a daily trivia section.

Walden, a game
By: Tracy Fullerton

Walden, a game, is a first person simulation of the life of American philosopher Henry David Thoreau during his experiment in self-reliant living at Walden Pond. The game begins in the summer of 1845 when Thoreau moved to the Pond and built his cabin there. Players follow in his footsteps, surviving in the woods by finding food and fuel and maintaining their shelter and clothing. At the same time, players are surrounded by the beauty of the woods and the Pond, which hold a promise of a sublime life beyond these basic needs. The game follows the loose narrative of Thoreau's first year in the woods, with each season holding its own challenges for survival and possibilities for inspiration. The audience for the game is broad: from experimental game players to lovers of Thoreau and Transcendental literature. As such, the game offers more opportunities for reflective play than strategic challenge.

Whistle While You Brew
By: Travis Faas, Claire Faas

Whistle While You Brew is a game for all those people who need to make noise in order to focus. This virtual reality game puts the player in the shoes of a barista in a magical coffee house. This particular location has a steady stream of customers who want their coffee or tea as quickly as possible. Being a place of magic, the player is not allowed to use your hands to get the orders to their caffeine deprived patrons. Instead, the player must whistle, hum, or sing specific notes in order to pick up and deliver the appropriate order to their customers.
More experience than full featured game, this demo was built to explore the use of user generated music as an input and seeks to challenge the notion that no one would want to sing at their phone in public. Sometimes we just need a reason to be a bit loud.

World of Riders (student-created game)
By: Lucas Martins, Taiwoo Park, Anya Kolesnichenko, Irem Yildirim

World Of Riders is a hybrid online multiplayer exergame developed for virtual reality and mobile platform. In World of Riders, players are boat riders who need to work together to defeat a monster located in the center of a lake. Surrounding the lake there are spikes, players are
constantly being pushed away from the monster and towards the spikes. Players need to collect missiles and shoot them at the monster from the shooting booths, in order to defeat it. While doing so the players must dodge the monsters attacks and collect health pickups to be able to survive.
During the battle players need to paddle on the stationary cycle trainers to overcome the opposite water stream and so avoiding the spikes at the border of the lake. The faster players paddles, the closer they get to the boss.

You Must be 18 or Older to Enter (student-created game)
By: James Earl Cox III, Joe Cox, Julie Buchanan

'You Must be 18 or Older to Enter' recreates the feeling and situation of being a prepubescent kid looking at porn for the first time. Through interactive fiction elements combined with ASCII styled art, 'You Must be 18 or Older to Enter' blurs several genres together to create an anxious experience. It is akin to horror, yet the fear is of being caught by parentals and being embarrassed of looking at the human body. The ASCII art makes the images hard to read close up, making the player embody a child-like role. Audiences at farther distances will be able to see the pictures more clearly, casting them in the role of adults. This game pushes the boundaries of storytelling, casting the player in the roll of an adolescent not only through narrative but through shared anxiety and paranoia with their character while exploring the website in the game. It's just a game, and the art isn't porn, yet it's just as nerve-racking.

Exhibited Non-Digital Games

Abhi ya Khabi
By: Sreeram Kongeseri

The primary objective of Abhi ya Khabi is to promote social engagement and inspire reflection and informed decision making for rural and tribal communities in India. Abhi ya Kabhi introduces players with low to mid-level literacy, and little game-literacy from rural areas of India to a gamification context where they have to make choices that reflect their real life. By investing money into different actions (from volunteering to building a new house) players collect smiles in reward and protect themselves from life's potential traps. With the aim of collecting the maximum number of smiles, players must decide their strategy and build their own path to happiness through the different items and challenges of the game.

Ballot Box Bumble
By: Scott Nicholson

Ballot Box Bumble is a game designed for the BreakoutEDU platform, which is a tool to create puzzle-based games, similar to escape rooms in concept, for the classroom. In this game, designed to teach about the Canadian electoral system, players are volunteers at the polls. The director of the poll has gone missing, and the players are investigating her office to find out what happened. As they do, they learn about some of the controversies surrounding Canadian elections.

Cops Arrest Manatees
By: Tiltfactor

Cops Arrest Manatees is an unofficial expansion to Cards Against Humanity. After Tiltfactor research found that despite Cards Against Humanity's bad rap, players felt more motivated to be less biased after playing (pending publication). Can we do the same thing for climate change? Cops Arrest Manatees is filled with opportunities for disparagement humor around the environment, and is currently undergoing pilot evaluation to judge its impact.

Emoji-cize: An Empathy Game (student-created game)
By: Liz Owens Boltz

Emoji-cize is a fast-paced card game designed to promote empathy and a deeper understanding of different emotions. The game encourages players to develop self-awareness about their own emotions, often drawing on personal experience to enact them. Players also develop empathy by learning to recognize emotions in the facial expression and body language of another person. Emoji-cize has two serious goals: to strengthen understanding of different emotions and to encourage players to develop and practice empathy.

Great Lakes Invaders (student-created game)
By: Karen T. Cleveland

Great Lakes Invaders is a card game designed to teach players how to identify invasive plant species found in Michigan and learn how to report them. The game aims to remove the intimidation factor that can be inherent in field training for those not knowledgeable with plant lore and the outdoors. Rather than technical descriptions of physical characteristics, cards highlight images of defining features of species.

Hello, My Name is Bill
By: Mary Gross

A game designed to teach students how a bill becomes a law and to serve as a beginning point for a discussion on the origins and value of the process.

Outbreak (student-created game)
By: Elaine Fath, Alexandra To

Outbreak is a race-the-clock, question-asking, transformational game created for a Carnegie Mellon HCI research project. Our project focuses on designing and researching games that foster curiosity as an intervention for middle school students underrepresented in STEM fields: minorities, students from low socioeconomic status households, and women. Outbreak's aim is to help its players increase their comfort with asking questions and ability to ask well-formed questions on the fly, and is currently in the early stages of being field tested for impact. In Outbreak, a scientist's lab at the old house at the end of the block has an experiment gone horribly wrong. Now all of his assistants are turning into monsters, zombies, and ghosts. The lab is full of threats, from broken lab equipment to angry people to monsters. There are also virus antidote ingredients hidden in each room. You're a remote radio team that is in contact with the remaining scientists at the lab. You have control of a sensing robot that can scan the rooms, but can only answer certain questions about what's inside. Will you investigate the rooms and find the right people for the job before it's too late?

Por Nuestras Calles (Through Our Streets)
By: Lien Tran, Jessica Wendorf Muhamad, Maria Elena Villar

Por Nuestras Calles (PNC) is a facilitated board game designed to elicit empathic and non-stigmatized responses to the complex issue of commercial sexual exploitation (CSEC) while creating safe spaces for dialogue. The game was designed primarily for use in Colombia by the Colombian National Police (CNP) and as a direct response to expanding existing prevention efforts. It is suitable for 4-8 players, ideally with 6 players being guided by a trained game facilitator.

Tech Trek (student-created game)
By: Leticia Cherchiglia, Renee Jorae, Qin Zhang, Yilang Zhao, Carrie Heeter

Tech Trek is a 4-player learning card game that has the major goal of exciting middle school students (especially girls) about pursuing technology related careers, so that they carry this excitement throughout their education and hopefully pursue STEM careers in the future.

Well Sourced (student-created game)
By: Marziah Karch

Well Sourced is a librarian-facilitated card game that provokes information literacy discussions and promotes information literacy skills in students new to academic research. It can be played using either computer labs with research databases or smartphones in a more informal setting.

Registration Check-In and Continental Breakfast

The Science & Art of Biofeedback Games Designed for Emotional and Mental Health

Isabela Granic received her PhD from the University of Toronto in developmental psychology. She is currently Professor and Chair of the Developmental Psychopathology department at Radboud University, in the Netherlands. She is also co-founder of The PlayNice Institute, an organization that builds evidence-based games that promote emotional health and well-being for children and youth. Her research focuses on the positive effects of playing video games, including the cognitive, emotional and social benefits. By integrating clinical and developmental research with interactive media design, she is creating a suite of evidence-based games that are also commercially viable and can be widely disseminated to slash the prevalence rates of anxiety, depression and bullying in youth. She has published 50 articles with results from two decades of research which have appeared in the highest impact journals in developmental and clinical psychology.
Learn more about Isabela.

Affection Games: The Casual World of Flirting, Hugging, Kissing and Making Love

Lindsay Grace is a professor, game designer and researcher. He is the founding director of the American University Game Lab and Studio. He has published more than 40 papers, articles and book chapters on games since 2009. His game designs have received awards from the Games for Change Festival, Meaningful Play, Advances in Computer Entertainment and others. His creative work has been selected for showcase in more than eight countries and 12 states, including New York, Paris, Rio De Janeiro, Singapore, Istanbul, Sao Paulo, Chicago and Vancouver. He has given talks at the Game Developer's Conference (GDC), SXSW, Games for Change Festival/Tribeca Film Festival, the Boston Festival of Independent Games and many others. He currently serves on the board for the Global Game Jam™ (2015 Vice President) and served on the board for the Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA 2014-2016).
Learn more about Lindsay.

Transformational Games

Creating Games to Combat Climate Change
By: Gili Freedman, Max Seidman, Ross Virginia and Mary Flanagan

Although climate change is increasingly seen as an imminent global threat, there is a lack of research on how people’s behaviors and attitudes can be altered to improve the environment (Swim et al., 2010; van der Linden, Maibach, & Leiserowitz, 2015). The present paper provides two examples of how games can be used as interventions to foster environmentally sustainable attitudes and behaviors. Both games show promise for game designers and psychologists interested in harnessing the power of games to improve the environment by increasing sustainable attitudes and behaviors.

Tandem Transformational Game Design: A Game Design Process Case Study
By: Alexandra To, Elaine Fath, Eda Zhang, Safinah Ali, Catherine Kildunne, Anny Fan, Jessica Hammer and Geoff Kaufman

In transformational game design, developing a clear, shared vision of how the player should change as a result of the game is a critical and ongoing process. However, multidisciplinary teams, particularly those comprised of both expert and novice designers and researchers, may experience barriers to a shared vision due to disparate vocabulary and theoretical frameworks. Adding a new contribution to the growing body of approaches that tackle this challenge, we present Tandem Transformational Game Design—a process that uses physical prototypes to continuously anchor a team’s shared alignment to their vision and goals. Drawing on HCI practices that emphasize prototyping to discover and reflect, the Tandem Design approach positions the articulation of game goals and the design of game prototypes as intrinsically intertwined, iterative cycles occurring in tandem with one another, supporting one another as the need arises.

Greenie - Alternative Transportation Means for a More Sustainable Environment through a Serious Game
By: Lydia Sidhom, Slim Abdennadher and Fatema Gabr

The ultimate goal of sustainable development is to improve the quality of life of a society and the world while ensuring the integrity of the life support systems. This affects the life of all humans from one generation to the other as well as our planet. This work has a twofold purpose which is to reduce the traffic congestion and meanwhile increase the public environmental awareness through a serious game. The purpose of the game presented here is to raise people's awareness about the problem of traffic congestion and how it affects the environment and themselves. Moreover, it aims at introducing them to alternative transportation means other than using the car, and measuring the change in their behavior towards their transportation after playing the game.

The Radical, Inclusive Approach to Learning to Code

Passages and Pedagogies: Classroom Applications for the Twine Platform

Using Non-digital Play for Facilitation of Learning Goals

Virtual and Augmented Reality

Virtual to Functional Reality - Using Virtual Reality to Teach Individuals With Intellectual Disability Real World Skills
By: Tony Morelli, Jordan Shurr, Andrea Jasper, Meagan McCollow, Ethan Coggins and Molly Rossman

Students in special education programs may benefit from using virtual reality to learn real world skills. Virtual reality headsets can focus the student's attention on the task at hand as opposed to standard computer learning methodologies where the student's attention may switch to other items within the room. This paper presents research that analyzes the use of virtual reality with training for students in special education programs. It was found that learning improvement was significantly faster when using head mounted virtual reality displays as opposed to using a standard computer training environment.

Augmented Personal Experience - Run Time Video Game Accessibility (Top Paper Award)
By: Taylor Ripke and Tony Morelli

As technology naturally progressed over time, video games became increasingly complex as strategy and fast-paced first-person shooters require a high level adherence to finite details coupled with the ability to react to unpredictable situations without hesitation. These games coincided with advancements in game input devices, giving players more control, and allowed for game mechanics to require substantial thought and memorization skills. However, this complexity presents significant challenges for some players, as many modern games do not provide the necessary accessibility features for everyone to play. Most games do not offer multiple language subtitles or the option for extra assistance in the game. Nevertheless, preexisting games without accessibility features built in can be made more accessible through responsive programming. This paper presents a system for augmenting existing video games with assistive visual and audio cues. Image processing algorithms give players active feedback on the current state of the game and offer advice on how to complete a specific task with additional information added to the existing video game presentation.

Game Transfer Phenomena in the Augmented Reality Game Ingress
By: Cynthia Sifonis

Oritz de Gotari & Griffiths (2014) demonstrated that extended game play can result in automatic thoughts and involuntary behaviors associated with the game. This is known as Game Transfer Phenomena (GTP) and is a common video gaming phenomenon. A neglected area of videogame research is that of augmented reality (AR) gaming in which players play in the real world using smartphones. In AR games, the game world is represented as an overlay in the real world. Whereas AR has been examined for its potential for education, little research has examined potential positive or negative effects of playing AR games. The current research examined the degree to which the factors affecting GTP in AR games are similar to that affecting GTP in video games. 867 players of the augmented reality game Ingress responded to a survey examining the degree to which they experienced the subtypes of GTP. AR gamers exhibited all types of GTP to some extent. Unlike traditional video games in which altered auditory perceptions was the most common type of GTP, the most common type of augmented reality GTP was automatic thought processes. Female Ingress players were significantly more likely to experience GTP than males. 18% of players experienced reverse GTP in which real world actions were used to interact with the game. Future research should examine the causes of increased GTP in females and the mechanisms underlying reverse GTP across multiple types of AR games.

Birds of a Feather Lunch (on your own) and Industry/Student Meet'n'Greet

Lunch

• Educational Games
• Health Games
• Research and Funding
• Design and Development
• Students
• Virtual Reality

Industry/Student Meet'n'Greet

Coursera Meet'n'Greet

Game Design and Tourism: Two Fields that Play Well Together!

Games and Learning

Design and evaluation of a cybersecurity education game
By: Paul Gestwicki and Kaleb Stumbaugh

We present the background, design, and evaluation of Social Startup Game--an original cybersecurity education game for ages 10-16. The game is designed with two primary goals: first, to teach the player fundamentals of cybersecurity, and second, to show them possible careers and educational paths to careers in cybersecurity. Social Startup Game is a single-player strategy game in which the player takes the role of a security consultant at a fictional social media software development company, Social Jam. The player balances the tasks of their employees to maximize user acquisition while reducing security vulnerabilities; during the simulation, the player has to make several narrative-based decisions that are designed to foreground our design goals. We evaluated the game using a qualitative research methodology involving semi-structured interviews and recorded gameplay with thirteen minors in our target demographic. This led to four primary findings: the players have mixed views about the role of education and degree toward career goals; there are diverse opinions about professional developers' appearances and interests; players' background knowledge had a significant impact on their ability to learn from playing the game; and there were two distinct modes of character-based decision making, which we distinguish as pragmatic or empathic. Among our conclusions are the need for continued study of the role of characters, narrative, and player background in educational simulation games, especially with respect to classical theories of constructivist learning and more contemporary theories of situated learning.

Embedding Gestures into Narrative Tutor-games to learn Fractions?!
By: Michael Swart, Jonathan M. Vitale and John B. Black

Combining gesture and narrative together, the research team designed and developed Mobile Mathematics Movement (M3). Two independent variables, gesture (I vs. D) and narrative (S vs. W), allowed developers to create 4 versions of the tutor-game, M3:i3: SI, SD, WI, WD, where students split objects (i.e., parts-to-whole) schema (Steffe, 2004) and determine equivalency between objects. In the study, students (n=131) from New York City after school programs were randomly assigned to 1 of the 4 conditions and completed parallel pre/post assessments, played all seven levels of the tutor-game, filled out exit surveys and a 7-minute semi-structured clinical interview. Results suggest that particular combinations of gestures and narratives are differentially beneficial to learners of varying proficiencies. This research has significant implications for the design and development of meaningful math games.

An Empirical Comparison of a Video Game and a Digital Video as a Pre Reading Activity for Comprehension and Problem Solving
By: Brock Dubbels

This study examines the role of video games and digital video as pre-reading activities for improving motivation, recall, comprehension and problem solving. A video game provides multimodal representation, increasing accurate representation and experience, and diminishing the need for guesswork. Games structure incremental learning through practice, feedback, and rehearsal—activities traditionally offered by a teacher in one-on-one training for the development of learning strategies for reading instruction. Well-constructed, interactive game should be more effective than re-reading strategies, or watching a digital video. A sample of 132 students was randomly assigned to one of three media conditions, controlled for interaction and feedback. Each participant was pretested for prior knowledge, working memory, comprehension, reading ability, and media preference. Both the video game and video improved performance in recall, comprehension, and problem solving—but the game was much more effective as a pre-reading activity. Multiple comprehension assessments were used in the form of protocol analysis (construction of walkthrough), multiple-choice questions, and a word problem. The embodied game provided superior pre-reading preparation, superior mental representation, and superior identification of causal relationships between narrative events across the comprehension assessments.

Twine Workshop and Game Jam (part 1)

Meaningful Play Learning Postmortems

Serious Games and Exercises Typology Workshop

Indigenous and Participatory Games

Digitizing Indigenous Storytelling in Never Alone: Games, Ritual, and Understanding (Top Paper Award)
By: Tanya Zuk

"Never Alone: Kisima Inŋitchuŋa" leverages “embodied storytelling” to incorporate players into the Iñupiaq’s ritual of storytelling through gameplay, thus leveraging the connection between ritual and game (Gee, 2003, 81). Using a variety of traditional and culturally specific elements in the world building and game design Never Alone presents a fully contextualized experience for gamers.

Participatory Game Design for Life Skills in Rural India: A Multi-Site Case Study
By: Sreeram Kongeseri, Srividya Sheshadri, Alexander Muir, Christopher Coley and Rao R Bhavani

We present a game concept designed to teach life skills in rural India: ​Abhi Ya Kabhi (AYK, pronounced ah­BEE ya ka­BEE) meaning “If not now, then when?” This concept has been designed in a highly participatory process with forty participants in five rural village sites across five states in India. The concept includes a light strategy game for people with low to middle general literacy, as well as low game literacy. The rural Indian population is mostly at or below the poverty line, and wrestles with multiple “wicked problems.” Our participatory model is designed to be contextually sensitive and maximally productive for the target communities.

An Evaluation of Games for Advocacy in Health and Human Rights (Top Paper Award)
By: Soroya Julian McFarlane and Lien Tran

Serious games are designed around a public issue – such as health or a social cause – with the intent to raise awareness or bring about a behavior change through giving players a realistic understanding of the issue. This study primarily contributes qualitative evidence of games as a viable communication platform for advocacy in health and human rights. Using a qualitative design with control groups and treatment groups, 9 focus groups were facilitated in March 2016 with over 50 South African advocacy leaders, representing more than 15 human rights organizations. Participants of the study either played a game or read a report, both based on the same critical human rights issue. Transcribed focus group conversations were analyzed using Nvivo 11 qualitative software, and using a constant comparison analytical method. Preliminary results demonstrated that serious games for health have potential to be effective tools for advocacy for diverse causes and populations, especially at particular levels of prior knowledge or experience by players.

VR Experiences for Kids: Design Best Practices

• Dealing with the ergonomic challenges faced by a young audience
  
• Managing the performance constraints of BYOP consumer VR
  
• Accounting for young players lack of separation between real and virtual
  
• Accommodating the current unknowns related to impact on vision and brain development
  
• Strategies related to the current age rating for most VR devices
  

Transformational Games

Transformational Play: Game design as Meaningful Play for Foreign Language + Culture Learning
By: Cary Staples and Sebastien Dubreil

This presentation examines game design as a model to organize transformative learning experiences; in this instance, foreign language (L2) development in a rich, culturally authentic context. A group of 12 students guided by two faculty members designed and developed an innovative approach to language learning in the form of an immersive mobile game designed to enhance the teaching/learning of the French language and culture to elementary-level students.

Solving the Feedback Problem in Crowdsourcing Games: Design Lessons from Smorball
By: Max Seidman, Mary Flanagan and Gili Freedman

In recent work (Seidman, Flanagan, Rose-Sandler & Lichtenberg, 2016), we outline the algorithms and processes by which we verify player’s responses in crowdsourcing games, and are able to determine accurate responses. In this paper, we focus on design. Crowdsourcing games, which seek to motivate users to complete human intelligence tasks through enjoyable gameplay, pose unique design challenges not encountered when designing entertainment-only (non-impactful) games or non-game crowdsourcing applications. These challenges often present themselves in the form of a trade-off: risk lower task efficiency or data quality to improve gameplay and user experience, or vice versa. Chief among the challenges to designing crowdsourcing games is the “feedback problem”: a game must be able to provide feedback to the player about whether her action was correct or incorrect. While a crowdsourcing application can thank a user for contributing data without commenting on whether that data was helpful or not, a crowdsourcing game, in order to be compelling, ought to be able to reward the player for submitting good data and avoid rewarding the player for submitting low quality data. Since, however, the crowdsourcing game system by definition cannot tell whether player-submitted data is correct (otherwise the task could be automated), providing feedback to the player risks reinforcing the wrong behaviors: marking the player incorrect when she has completed the task correctly, or vice versa. This paper investigates design aspects, and in particular, how the feedback problem in the creation of crowdsourcing games can be effectively addressed. We illustrate this concept using the design of the document transcription game Smorball (2015), winner of the Boston Festival of Indie Games’ Best Serious Game award, as a case study.

The Mattering Circle: How Social Gaming Can Promote Mattering among Golden Gamers
By: Jessica Francis, Christopher Ball, Tim Huang and Julie Brown

Older adults are susceptible to feelings of loneliness, isolation, and depression. The theoretical concept of “mattering” has been shown to protect against these negative aspects of aging, thus promoting healthy aging and increased well-being. In essence, mattering is a person’s belief that they are important and relied upon by others. We argue that digital games are uniquely positioned to promote a sense of mattering among older adults. Furthermore, we posit that digital games can be designed to encourage social interactions and social presence, which may increase older adults’ feelings of mattering. Preliminary qualitative interviews suggest that mattering has a cyclical effect on older adults by both serving as a motivating factor that actively engages older adults in gameplay and as a beneficial outcome that can contribute to healthy aging and increased well-being. Given the insightful responses from our interviewees, we believe there is both a theoretical and practical justification for further exploring the mattering circle with forthcoming quantitative data. Therefore, we are in the process of conducting a small scale survey of older adult gamers, or "golden gamers", to determine how mattering influences their lives and well-being.

Twine Workshop and Game Jam (part 2)

Growing the Game Industry in Michigan: 2016 Update

Integrating Video and Board Games into Classrooms

• Designing the curriculum to create a structured environment meant to teach students the course material
  
• Transforming the casual experience of teaching a game into an opportunity to learn practical material
  
• Tools to assess learning throughout each class session and to encourage students to stay focused on learning goals
  
• Logistics, concerns and challenges that emerged during the initial pilot phase
  
• Human and departmental resources required during the initial pilot phase
  

Avatars and Community

Tracking Learning Resources in a Competitive Gaming Community
By: Sean Duncan

The present study reports on a case of “games with learning” -- or understanding the ways learning practices evolve and are employed within authentic gaming practice -- via a study of the identity resources (Nasir & Cooks, 2009) used by participants in a competitive gaming community. Focusing on player practice within the competitive card game Android: Netrunner, I describe the design practices employed by a top-level player, Simon (a pseudonym). Analysis uncovers that Simon's approach to deck design and deck building in the competitive game reflects a sophisticate melding of material, relational, and ideational resources (Nasir & Cooks, 2009). Further research is argued to tease out the ways that motivated, authentic game practices such as these drive learning with games in the "wild."

Veneer: A Digital Visual Novel Game Exploring Player Empathy
By: Felicia Tucker

This paper describes the design and development of Veneer, a digital visual novel, developed to explore empathy during game play. In particular, this game uses well-developed character avatars, with strong personality traits and a clear back-story, to explore player empathy with the character avatars and to explore the extent to which player actions reflect the character’s and the player’s personality. Many games have less developed character personalities and back-stories, which sometimes leads to players feeling disconnected from the character they are playing, and thus player actions in the game may not reflect actions that the character would take. Veneer was designed with two main character avatars, one that is altruistic and one that is narcissistic, and players are faced with choices throughout the game in which they can decide the path of the game. The game can serve as a platform to explore whether players make choices that align with the avatar's personality or if players make choices that align with the player’s own personality traits regardless of the avatar. It can also be used to investigate whether playing the game as both avatars, each with its own distinct personality, will result in any change in behavior in the player. These questions will be explored in future work.

Meaningful Mediated Selves: Examining how game-based mechanisms influence avatar identification and embodiment and thus potentially moderate the Proteus effect
By: Rabindra Ratan, Chih An Wan, Christopher Kmiec, Celina Wanek, Jiat Chow Tan, Malinda Robedeau, Adam Cockman, Maxwell Miller, Elan Gleiber and Scott Holzknecht

This study examines how specific mechanics of self-mediation — avatar identity and control scheme — induce feelings of identification with and embodiment in an avatar within an endless-runner game designed for these research purposes. Findings from a lab-based, within-subjects experiment with 70 participants suggest that these mechanics influence identification and embodiment, mostly with medium and large effect sizes. Using an own-identity (compared to a randomly generated) avatar led to the highest amount of identification and also contributed positively to embodiment. Having a greater amount of control over the avatar led to the highest amount of embodiment and also contributed positively to identification. More interestingly, when using an own-identity avatar, identification was higher when the control scheme led to a low rather than high amount of cognitive load. Conversely, when using a randomly generated avatar, identification was higher when the control scheme led to a high rather than low amount of cognitive load. These findings are consistent with previous research and also contribute new theoretical insights about the psychological mechanisms of the Proteus effect. Such insights will inform future research and interventions that apply the Proteus effect toward positive outcomes in meaningful societal contexts, such as education and health.

Playing in a New Reality: The Virtual Landscape

Halcyone Wise (Cy) is a games industry generalist, consultant, and sociologist residing in Austin, TX. A ten-year games industry veteran, she has worked on award winning MMO titles including Lineage I & II, Guild Wars I & II, Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa, and Wizard 101. She returned to the University of Texas in 2012 to complete her studies in Sociology. She specialized in video game communities, internet fandoms, and emergent computer-mediated communications and identities. She has since gone on to work on multiple VR titles including Oculus-exclusive Chronos, and Owlchemy Labs' multi-platform, room-scale title, Job Simulator.

When she is not professionally managing VR communities, she is casually managing VR communities as a co-organizer of VR Austin, the second largest VR meetup in the United States. She can also be found haunting her old university as a guest lecturer, and producing any convention, event, or gathering of minds that will have her. She is currently Owlchemy Labs' multi-hat-wearing designer, marketer, writer and community wrangler, colloquially called "Owlmancer.".

Dinner Break (on your own)

Pure Michigan Game Exhibition and Celebration

Registration Check-In and Continental Breakfast

The Impact of Video Games On Our Children, Society and Culture - Should We Be Worried?

Michealene Cristini Risley is an award-winning writer, director and human rights activist. She has worked with a number of fortune 100 companies such as Sega of America, Zynga, the Walt Disney Company, Marvel Comics, Nike, and Adidas. She ran for the Americans Elect nomination for President of the United States in 2012. Michealene founded and ran the non-profit organization Freshwater Haven from 2002 - 2014 to address the dramatic social change that is required to stop physical, sexual and emotional abuse of women and children.

As an award winning filmmaker, Michealene Cristini Risley co-wrote and directed Tapestries of Hope, a feature-length documentary that exposes the myth behind the belief that raping a virgin cures a man of HIV/AIDS. Her trip to Zimbabwe resulted in her being imprisoned and deported in an attempt by the Mugabe-led government police to quash her telling the story of Betty Makoni, a Zimbabwean child and human rights activist (a CNN top 10 hero for 2009) whose Girl Child Network rescues abused girls and provides them counseling, healing and educational support.

Currently, Michealene continues to focus on merging her corporate life with her work on human rights issues as well as innovative ways to leverage technology and media to create awareness and social change. Learn more about Michealene.

Verby Nouns: A Casual Well Played

Drew Davidson is the Director of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a professor, producer and player of interactive media. His background spans academic, industry and professional worlds and he is interested in stories across texts, comics, games and other media. He completed his Ph.D. in Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to that, he received a B.A. and M.A. in Communications Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He chaired Game Art & Design and Interactive Media Design at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and the Art Institute Online. Drew has taught and researched at several universities. Drew also consults for a variety of companies, institutions and organizations.

Process and Production Studies

Engineering a Collaborative Framework for Applied Game Development
By: Carrie Crossley, Alexia Mandeville, Kelsey Binninger, Angelica Garcia and Samantha F. Warta

The field of applied game development is highly interdisciplinary, requiring collaboration from many expert groups including game developers, instructional designers, and researchers. Although this collaboration is necessary to create a successful product, it is often difficult for experts to unify their diverse knowledge, opinions, and goals. A comprehensive literature review illustrates that there are many barriers to interdisciplinary collaboration, which frequently lead to communication issues between various expert groups. In an applied game development setting, this often results in experiences that lack effective learning content, engaging mechanics, or proper data collection methodologies. This article examines the roles of various expert groups involved in the development of applied games and identifies the gaps between goals, ideas, and understanding of these groups. The authors propose a solution framework that is designed to close these gaps in order to promote more effective practices for the research and development of applied games.

A Web-based Scrum Process Management Game
By: Bruce Maxim, David Edwards, Ethan Evans, Christopher Apzynski, Margaret Kellow and Raspinder Kaur

Many computing students do not receive adequate training in software quality management. Some students do not have the opportunity to practice software process improvement activities even if they do see the topics covered in their course lectures and textbooks. We have created a serious game that will serve as a virtual learning environment to allow students to explore agile process improvement practices. Our web-based game is designed as a single-player game where the player takes the role of software team leader and plays against an AI (artificial intelligence) opponent representing the customer’s interests and needs. Players are rewarded for developing project strategies that allow for completion of projects on time, within budget, and meet the necessary software quality requirements.

Picture the Impossible: Designing, Deploying, and Evaluating a Community-Based Game
By: Elizabeth Lawley

Location-based games have been available for mobile phones and other devices since at least 2003, and are becoming increasingly popular and visible with the widespread adoption of smartphones and the successful introduction and widespread coverage of the popular game Pokémon Go!. This paper describes the design, implementation, and assessment of a seven-week-long, city-wide game with location-based and web-based components, by a team of university faculty and students, in collaboration with a local newspaper. It discusses the challenges and benefits of a design and development process shared between the two organizations, the many activities and mechanics comprising the game and their relative success in both engagement and impact, and the lessons learned for future development.

First Person Researcher (part 2)

Playing with the News

Keeping the Game a Game: Merging Evaluative Measures with Pedagogical Aims in a Foreign Language Video Game

Experience and Consequence in Games

Ask Why: Creating a Better Player Experience through Environmental Storytelling and Consistency in Escape Room Design
By: Scott Nicholson

The purpose of this paper is to help those designing escape rooms and similar live-action puzzle-based experiences to create more consistent games through applying an “Ask Why” approach. The concept is to embed the challenges in the game along with the game narrative into the environment, using Jenkin’s concept of Narrative Architecture. Designers are encouraged to ensure consistency between their genre, setting, world, and challenges to create a more engaging player experience.

Between the Familiar and the Strange: Exploring the Cognitive-Affective Model of Historical Empathy through Multiple-perspective Videogame Play (Top Paper Award)
By: Liz Owens Boltz

Historical empathy involves an understanding of the context and cultural norms that shaped the actions of historical figures, recognition of the multiplicity of perspectives and lived experiences that exist at any point in time, and an affective engagement with people in the past. Activities that engage students with different historical perspectives have been shown to promote historical empathy more effectively than traditional instruction, but little is known about the effectiveness of videogames in this regard. This case study examined how players demonstrated historical empathy while playing the game Valiant Hearts. Results suggest that certain types of game play may promote particular dimensions of historical empathy more effectively than others, and that some dimensions tend to arise spontaneously while others require prompting.

This Action Will Have Consequences: Interactivity and Player Agency
By: Sarah Stang

This paper examines and challenges the assumption that video games are interactive experiences which allow users to exercise control and agency over their narratives. Interactivity is a debatable concept which has been so over-applied as to be rendered meaningless, and the sense of agency that video game players experience is illusory. While this illusion of agency is problematic, it allows developers and players alike to engage with questions of ethics and morality. This paper uses two case studies to explore different ways in which game developers have attempted to connect player agency with issues of morality. The developers of BioShock attempted to subvert notions of player agency by denying the player any meaningful control within a narrative that centralizes free will. In The Walking Dead, players are forced to make morally-heavy choices in a narrative shaped by branching and converging decision trees. While these games are enjoyable and critically acclaimed, they present the player with false choices and offer only an illusion of agency. In the end, this paper argues that true player agency lies not within pre-scripted video game narratives, but in the player’s interpretation of the game text, in his or her engagement with fan communities, and in the exchanges that occur between fans and developers.

Games and Learning

Board games as a platform for Collaborative Learning
By: Andrew J Hunsucker

In this paper I will describe the current state of commercially produced board games and how they can be used to study collaborative learning. Board games are analog systems designed to create a gameplay experience. They include specific rules that players must translate in order to play the game. While board games come in a wide variety of types, their rules are constructed very similarly, including a game overview, order of play, and victory conditions. In a study conducted over 6 weeks, I examined what strategies players used to explain the game to others and learn the game for themselves. These sessions revealed many similarities between explanation strategies and common thinking in collaborative learning. I will explore these similarities and how various frameworks and theories can be used to describe player behavior during a board game play session.

Learn to Play: Leveraging the Freemium Model in the Religious Educational Game Kerem B'Yavneh (The Vineyards of Yavneh)
By: Casey O'Donnell, Brian Winn and Reuven Margrett

Kerem B’Yavneh (meaning literally "A Vineyard in Yavneh") is a custom, collaboratively designed game between the Michigan State University Games for Entertainment and Learning Lab and the Frankel Jewish Academy. The goal of the collaboration was to create a game that motivates students to be more engaged in the Academy’s rabbinic curriculum and further make use of the Academy’s one-to-one tablet-based education technology initiative. Kerem B’Yavneh (KeBY) is a casual, social, religious education, homestead-simulation, world-building game. KeBY brings the fun and quirkiness of your favorite farming and city-building games to the richness and vibrancy of Jewish ritual, history, and thought. In the game, the player's goal is to manage their homestead, observe festivals, learn Torah, cook, and experience life and community in ancient Yavneh, the birthplace of modern Judaism. The story within the game unfolds in ancient Yavneh, a small agricultural community that was transformed into the center of Jewish life and learning after the destruction of Jerusalem’s Second Temple by the Roman Empire in 70 CE (also the subject of a game collaboratively developed between the GEL Lab and Frankel Jewish Academy). The player is a budding scholar-farmer leading this transformation. In KeBY, players must adhere to traditional Rabbinic law, culture, and practice while raising a family, growing crops of increasing diversity and goodness, trading in the marketplace, and helping Yavneh flourish. Never before have there been Jewish games both so cutting-edge and so well adapted to use in an educational setting. KeBY makes history come alive, brings context to Rabbinic literature, and provides a deeply interactive vehicle for critical thinking, discussion, and classroom debate. The game, which can be played by each student concurrently as a classroom community, provides in-game rewards for out-of-game work in school. Instead of using a "free" to play, pay-to-play or "freemium" model (F2P), KeBY promotes learn-to-play, collaboration, and friendly competition amongst players. It enables the teacher to create customized content within the game to enhance and reinforce classroom learning and motivate players to truly engage in the material. Leveraging the freemium model, the game provides an opportunity for substantive Rabbinic educational content to be delivered both through the game's underlying mechanics, but also through content found in a "quiz" system that players can use to recharge aspects of the game's systems with "sparks" or what would typically be the abstracted "real" currency in a F2P game. This provides the opportunity for a player to progress without being required to interact with the quiz, but the player's progress in the game is dramatically simplified by engaging with this aspect of the game.

Power up learning: Designing practice into video games
By: Elizabeth Veinott

Identifying the relative effectiveness of different video game features on learning is important for game designers and game researchers. In this paper, I argue that building in practice, something that can occur naturally in a video game, may be one of the most effective game features for learning. While practice is known to be important, very little discussion exists regarding how to implement practice in video games. Practice tends to produce effect sizes two times the size of most other game variables for complex cognitive tasks. Several design ideas for implementing practice based on experience developing serious games and the research evidence are described.

Writing and Reviewing for Publication in a Scientific Journal

Meaningful Play Game Postmortems

Failure, Death, and Game Over

The Changing Value of Permadeath in Rogue-likes
By: Justin Tokarski

For classic rogue-likes such as Beneath Apple Manor (The Software Factory, 1987) and Rogue (Toy & Wichman, 1980), permadeath was a defining characteristic. Permadeath refers to the permanent death of the player’s avatar, requiring the player to restart from the beginning of the game with a new character; either an entirely new avatar or the same avatar sans items, abilities, experience points, etc. Beginning with Strange Adventures in Infinite Space (Cheapass Games, 2002) rogue-like games, and the permadeath mechanic associated with them, began to see a resurgence. However, due to changes in the gaming landscape and experimentation with the ‘rogue-like’ genre, permadeath and the value associated with permadeath are very different from its earlier incarnation.

A Meditation on Loss Within Games
By: Justin Tokarski

In the following meditation on and examination of failure I propose a definition of failure within games which I call Loss. This unique form of failure distinguishes it from non-game failure and distinguishes game activities from non-game activities. After defining Loss, I will be distinguishing four major characteristics which make up the Loss Event within games; Loss Conditionals which define the rules of Loss unique to a game, Loss Design which translates these Conditionals to game events, Loss Value which defines the results of Loss in terms of player effort, and Loss Experience which expresses the player reaction to Loss. I hope that defining Loss will provide a shared vocabulary which can be used across the many fields of game studies, reducing confusion between disciplines and encouraging future work examining Loss. I will examine a few possibilities for implementing this definition of Loss in different areas of game studies in the hope of encouraging the use and exploration of this new concept.

Emotion and Therapy

The Short-Term Emotional Effects of a Brief Play Intervention
By: Doug Maynard, Leah Mancini, Allison Vaughn and Vania Rolon

While there have been many investigations into the impacts of games upon outcomes such as learning or aggression, there is less research upon the impact that a brief period of play can have on an adult player’s emotional states. In the current investigation, we examined changes in positive and negative emotions among college student participants who played either a cooperative or competitive version of the stacking card game Rhino Hero. Results revealed that 15 minutes playing the game resulted in an immediate increase in positive emotional states (e.g., joviality, vitality) as well as a slight decrease in negative emotions. These benefits were seen for both the cooperative and competitive versions of the game, and regardless of whether the participant played with an acquaintance (e.g., friend, roommate) or someone they did know know. Finally, those who reported that their need for play had not been met in the previous week saw the greatest boost in positive emotion from this brief play intervention.

Understanding Learning and Memory: Re-conceptualizing the Dynamic Systems Theory to Design a More Effective Game For Down Syndrome
By: Kelsey Prena

Video games can be important learning tools for children with special needs. This review article will turn to the dynamic systems theory, a theory that has only relatively recently broken its way into mass communication research, to better understand how learning occurs within the brain. Conclusions about dynamic systems are re-conceptualized using the dominant neuroscience theory of learning and memory, and then applied to educating children with Down syndrome. This kind of thinking is novel, but essential to designing learning games to target particular populations. Understanding the neurological changes that occur during video game play can help alleviate some of the neurological deficits that children with Down syndrome face. To design more effective learning games for this population, the message should be interactive, induce feelings of success, frequently reward the player, and provide the player with many modes input.

Living in the Moment: Exploring Aesthetic and Movement Quality Attributes to Create Successful Immersive Gameplay in Therapy
By: Kimberly Hobby and Kristin Carlson

The quality of aesthetic and movement experience can be imperative to a physical therapy patient’s recovery. While the experience of moving is often restricted to the physical actions determined for the patient’s personal needs, the addition of external motivation such as interactive movement games can support the quality of the recovery experience. We ask the question, ‘how can interactive art games support a patient’s recovery process by focusing on quality of movement performance, enjoyment and engagement?’ The recent rise of virtual and augmented reality in gameplay with high resolution graphics and believable characters is now easily available to the consumer. This provides an opportunity to explore how these platforms of gameplay can be used for the betterment of people who are battling illness and injury. In our research of color psychology, movement quality techniques/observances, and implementation of gaming elements like scoring and entertainment, we hope to find trends as to what succeeds or what fails to make an enjoyable and productive therapy game. Our project will provide data and answer the questions: 1) How the quality of visuals affect the behavior of the patient, 2) How to simulate authentic therapy movements and exercises into real life and gaming situations, and 3) How to provide an experience for the patient that drives them to succeed in their therapy.

Lunch

From 8-Bit Invasion to Thunderbird Elation: Indigenous Game Design

Elizabeth LaPensée , Ph.D. expresses herself through writing, design, and art in games, comics, and animation. She is Anishinaabe, Métis, and Irish, living near the Great Lakes. Most recently, she designed and programmed Invaders (2015), a remix of the arcade classic Space Invaders inspired by art from Steven Paul Judd. She is currently working on Honour Water (2016), an Anishinaabe singing game for healing the water.

Her dissertation in Interactive Arts and Technology from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia shares experiences from the Indigenous social impact game Survivance (2011), which encourages ongoing healing through storytelling and creating art. Continuing this work, she was the Postdoctoral Associate for the University of Minnesota's Research for Indigenous Community Health Center and a Research Associate in the Initiative for Indigenous Futures. Elizabeth became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media & Information at Michigan State University in Fall 2016. Learn more about Elizabeth.

Conference Closing and Game Awards