Game Design Commons^™

Understanding The Student Perspective Of Art History Survey Course Outcomes Through Game Development, Joshua Yavelberg, Kelly Donahue-Wallace

Art History Pedagogy & Practice

This heuristic, design-based research study examines student perceptions of their learning experience in the art history survey course as manifested through a game design process. With the purpose of improving upon the lecture model of the standard art history survey, two sections of a capstone class of interdisciplinary art and design students—who had all taken the survey as part of their degree programs—selected learning objectives and designed games to accompany the introductory class. The researchers used the game design process to understand first how students perceived the survey class, its learning objectives, and the students’ experiences. Then the ...

Acts Of Meaning, Resource Diagrams, And Essential Learning Behaviors: The Design Evolution Of Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

Articles

Lost & Found is a tabletop-to-mobile game series designed for teaching medieval religious legal systems. The long-term goals of the project are to change the discourse around religious laws, such as foregrounding the prosocial aspects of religious law such as collaboration, cooperation, and communal sustainability. This design case focuses on the evolution of the design of the mechanics and core systems in the first two tabletop games in the series, informed by over three and a half years’ worth of design notes, playable prototypes, outside design consultations, internal design reviews, playtests, and interviews.

Fall 2019

In The Loop

Healthy Outlook: A unique medical informatics partnership opens students' eyes to research-intensive graduate programs and careers; The Voices of Summer; CDM and the Chicago Housing Authority team up to help Chicago youth express their creativity; Bright Idea: Data science professors take a shine to luminous technology for online learning; They've Got Game: A team of students and alumni score points with a tricked-out basketball toy and an anime hoops star; You Look Marvelous: A DePaul alumna soars at America's most superpowered dream factory; Seen and Heard (college briefs); Code of Honor: Redar Ismail transforms adversity into award-winning software ...

Fall 2019

In The Loop

Health Outlook: A unique medical informatics partnership opens students' eyes to research-intensive graduate programs and careers; The Voices of Summer: CDM and the Chicago Housing Authority team up to help Chicago youth express their creativity; Bright Idea: Data science professors take a shine to luminous technology for online learning; They've Got Game: A team of students and alumni score points with a tricked-out basketball toy and an anime hoops star; You Look Marvelous; A DePaul alumna sours at America's most superpowered dream factory; Seen and Heard; Code of Honor: Redar Ismail transforms adversity into award-winning software that aids ...

Jewish Time Jump: New York, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

Jewish Time Jump: New York (Gottlieb & Ash, 2013) is a place-based mobile augmented reality game and simulation that takes the form of a situated documentary. Players take on the role of time traveling reporters tracking down a story “lost to time” to bring back to their editor at the Jewish Time Jump Gazette. The game is played in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, New York City. Players’ iPhones become their time traveling device and companion. Based on the player’s GPS location, players receive digital images from their location from over a hundred years in the past as well ...

Virtual Dissection Of White Matter Tracts In A Human Brain Using Applied Game Design And Virtual Reality Imaging, Basil Lim, Anurag Nasa, Nicola Carswell, Elena Roman, Malia Kissner, Darren W. Roddy, Veronika O'Keane, James D. Carswell

Other

Visualisation of neural tracts in the human brain has previously been accomplished using two dimensional (2D) representational formats. In most cases, pre-operative visualisation is through the medium of 2D MRI image slices, representing coordinates in the brain through a combination of axial, sagittal, and coronal orthographic viewpoints. Software such as ExploreDTI can visualise off-axis viewpoints, however this method is limited to 2.5D image representations. The use of such 2D representations can require significant training in order to contextualise real-world 3D positions and accurately locate and identify neural tract pathways in the brain. Utilising anonymised tract data and advanced neuroimaging ...

Publication And Evaluation Challenges In Games & Interactive Media, Elizabeth L. Lawley

Presentations and other scholarship

Faculty in the fields of games and interactive media face significant challenges in publishing and documenting their scholarly work for evaluation in the tenure and promotion process. These challenges include selecting appropriate publication venues and assigning authorship for works spanning multiple disciplines; archiving and accurately citing collaborative digital projects; and redefining “peer review,” impact, and dissemination in the context of creative digital works. In this paper I describe many of these challenges, and suggest several potential solutions.

Fifth Aeon – A.I Competition And Balancer, William M. Ritson

Master's Theses and Project Reports

Collectible Card Games (CCG) are one of the most popular types of games in both digital and physical space. Despite their popularity, there is a great deal of room for exploration into the application of artificial intelligence in order to enhance CCG gameplay and development. This paper presents Fifth Aeon a novel and open source CCG built to run in browsers and two A.I applications built upon Fifth Aeon. The first application is an artificial intelligence competition run on the Fifth Aeon game. The second is an automatic balancing system capable of helping a designer create new cards that ...

Spring 2019

In The Loop

Lab Life: New and improved School of Computing labs inspire research in robotics and engineering; A Festival to Remember: Students thrive in film festival environments; Next Gen Data Scientists: Data Science Academy introduces high school students to the big world of data; A Well-Designed Design Colloquium; Game Face: "Sausage Sports Club: creator and CDM alumnus Chris Wade shares the story behind his playful Nintendo Switch game: Connected from Afar: Graduate student Sierra Sellman makes the most of her online degree program; Seen and Heard; Bravo! Bravo!

World Throne, Wyatt Lam

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

World Throne is a four-player strategy board game that has been in development since 2016. Players take control of four distinct factions and battle on a grid-based board. Each player uses unique playing cards to augment piece combat. The object of the game is to conquer other factions by defeating them in battle, defend your castle from opposing players, and claim the power of the World Throne. Prominent game development research guided the creation of World Throne. In addition, Latin, Greek, and Norse mythology informed development of the factions, characters, creatures, cards, and places. The culminating products of this project ...

Measuring Player Perceptions Of Freedom And Control In Modded And Unmodded Versions Of Bethesda's Skyrim: A Qualitative Play Study, Mark Kretzschmar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This interdisciplinary dissertation explores perceptions of control in modded and unmodded versions of Bethesda's sandbox video game Skyrim. Sandbox games are known for greater choice options that suggest greater perceptions of control for gamers. Sandbox games also generally encourage the use of user-generated creations called modifications (mods) that users can download to personalize their games. While we need philosophy to understand and define control as a concept, we also need psychology to understand how users perceive control in media studies. At present, qualitative academic research that measures gamer perceptions of control is non-existent as is research on how users ...

1999 Aaa Jrpg Quality And How A 2019 Indie-Game Developer Can Meet It, Kailynn Haskell-Harbert

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

This paper is a delve into 1999 JRPG AAA video games and how small developers can make something of similar quality with contemporary technology. This is explored by using Final Fantasy VIII and Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete as a 1999 AAA standard, then comparing that standard to modern indie-games as well as my own experience in indie-game development. The ultimate goal of the paper is to prove that small indie-game studios can create 1999 AAA quality JRPGs with relatively minimal investment.

Gamification: Badges And Feedback, Brian Macon

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Gamification, the implementation of game elements in a non-game context, is a rapidly growing field of research. One element of gamification that has experienced a rapid growth in popularity is the use of digital badges. Despite widespread adoption in educational settings, there are still gaps in the understanding of their effects on motivation, engagement, learning, and other factors. Furthermore, feedback delivered through badges can include a symbolic reward for successful completion of a task, providing a credential for gaining a skill, or acknowledging mastery of a particular piece of knowledge. This study implemented digital badges in online courses at a ...

Hearing The Voices Of The Deserters: Activist Critical Making In Electronic Literature, Laura Okkema

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Critical making is an approach to scholarship which combines discursive methods with creative practices. The concept has recently gained traction in the digital humanities, where scholars are looking for ways of integrating making into their research in ways that are inclusive and empowering to marginalized populations. This dissertation explores how digital humanists can engage critical making as a form of activism in electronic literature, specifically in the interactive fiction platform Twine. The author analyzes the making process of her own activist Twine game The Deserters and embeds the project within digital humanities discourses on activism and social justice, hypertext, electronic ...

Spreadsheets-In-Space: A Quantitative Exploration Of Movement, Currency Creation, And Conflict Within Eve Online, Christopher Alan Pryor

Theses and Dissertations

EVE Online is a massively-multiplayer online game with complex interactions between players and their unique, virtual environment. These relationships are the ongoing results of a conflict-driven economy, but they vary both in duration and by location.

This study attempts to quantify the direct effects of movement and indirect effects of conflict upon economic activity in the form of currency creation and delineate how successfully these relationships can be quantified by narrower time-spans and areas. Results of the mediation models used in this exploration indicate the changing relationship between movement (Ship Jumps), conflict (Ship Kills), and currency creation (Faction Kills) is ...

Simply Mo., Marjolijn Jaliene Oskam

Creative Activity and Research Day - CARD

Small portfolio presentation of design work by Marjolijn Oskam, branded under simply mo. The poster includes school work as well as professional work.

3d Procedural Maze & Cave Generation, Jacob Sharp

Student Scholar Showcase

The goal of this project is to generate a maze or cave procedurally so that a player may be able to explore infinitely without a reoccurring pattern. The project also utilizes Virtual Reality (VR); the user will be able to put on a VR Headset and become more immersed in a procedural environment. One of the challenges that needed to be overcome was simple random number generators did not generate natural looking worlds. Introducing VR to the project created the additional challenge of preventing the user from becoming motion sick. These challenges were both addressed through many hours of research ...

Choosing A Door: Narrative Interactivity In Videogames, Daniel Hawkins

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Child’S Play: A Service Learning Project Conducted At Roroš, Nové Mešto Pod Smrkem, Sanaya Attari

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

For my Independent Study Project, I designed a board game for young children inspired by the service learning activities held at ROROŠ. ROROŠ is a private organization located in the town of Nové Mešto pod Smrkem, offering different activities for children which provide a meaningful use of their leisure time. For a period of three weeks, I lived in Nové Mešto with Yveta Svobodová, one of the head directors of the organization. During my stay, I partook in several activities each week and used my experiences to generate new ideas when designing the final game. The game was completed by ...

Iceland's Migratory Birds In Changing Environmental Conditions: An Interactive Synthesis, Frances J. Duncan

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Human-driven changes to environmental conditions alter the habitats, behaviors, and migration patterns of migratory species. Changes in temperature, vegetation, and precipitation are just some of the factors contributing to shifts in phenology, demography, and distribution of migratory birds. These changes are driven by anthropogenic climate change and amplified by human land-use change, and are especially intense at high latitudes. This project creatively communicates the effects of environmental changes on three species of migratory birds in Iceland—the northern wheatear, the Greenland white-fronted goose, and the black-tailed godwit—using principles of storytelling and game design. The resulting interactive product is a ...