Game Design Commons^™

Design-Based Research Mobile Gaming For Learning Jewish History, Tikkun Olam, And Civics, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

How can Design-Based Research (DBR) be used in the study of video games, religious literacy, and learning? DBR uses a variety of pragmatically selected mixed methods approaches to design learning interventions. Researchers, working with educators and learners, design and co-design learning artifacts and environments. They analyze those artifacts and environments as they are used by educators and learners, and then iterate based on mixed methods data analysis. DBR is suited for any "rich contextualized setting in which people have agency." (Hoadley 2013) such as formal or informal learning environments.

The case covered in this chapter is a mobile Augmented Reality …

Scare Tactics, Tiago Martines, Gabriel Ortega, Karan Sahu, Lucas Pereira Vasconcelos, Henrique Silva Chaltein De Almeida

Theses

It is the purpose of this document to describe the design and development processes of Scare Tactics. The game will be discussed in further detail as it relates to several areas, such as market analysis, development process, game design, technical design, and each team members’ individual area of background research. The research areas include asymmetrical game design, level design, game engine architecture, real-time graphics, user interface design, networking and artificial intelligence.

As part of the team’s market analysis, other games featuring asymmetric gameplay are discussed. The games described in this section serve as inspirations for asymmetric game design. Some …

Ingress Well-Played: City As Mmo, Elizabeth L. Lawley

Articles

This paper describes player experience for Ingress, a geo-local, mobile augmented reality game created by Google’s Niantic Labs. Ingress incorporates aspects of both pervasive, alternate reality (ARG) and massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. However, unlike many ARGs, Ingress is not focused on a specific time-limited period, or linked to a single real-world event or location. And unlike a typical MMO, play in Ingress is geo-spatially limited; players must be physically proximate to game elements in order to interact with them. Using game mechanics similar to those of many MMOs, Ingress provides for a range of gameplay, based both on …

Alpha, Beta, Launch: A Newbie's Guide To Educational Video Game Development, Colleen Krahulik, Lori Goszczynski

Journal of Interactive Humanities

This paper details the process we went through to develop an educational video game, which includes: research on implementing video games into the classroom, vendor selection, video game design, and curriculum development. Throughout the video game development process, we faced challenges such as budget, time constraint, and varying areas of expertise. This paper serves as a guideline for similar organizations interested in educational video game development.

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Pox And The City, Elizabeth S. Goins

Journal of Interactive Humanities

Pox in the City is a prototype of a social history game that focuses on the medical profession circa 1800 in Edinburgh. The prototype was research, designed and developed on a small budget (about $17,000) and in a short time frame (20 weeks). The experimental design goal was to create a narrative driven educational game that was engaging and delivered some basic educational goals to be used in the high school and college level classrooms. To experiment with writing historic game narrative and to stay within budget, the design was built around a point and click adventure framework. Narrative was …

Press Start: Video Games In An Art Museum, Georgina Goodlander, Michael Mansfield

Journal of Interactive Humanities

Art museums can be complex, confounding, boring, exciting, absurd, and breathtaking. They can be sad, enlightening, hurtful, alive, dead, mainstream and avant-garde. They can, at once, be all of these things. Or they can be any one of these things separately. Museums can be more. Art museums might provide a place for contemplation, a place for social commentary, a place for political discourse, a place for lunch. They can identify us, deconstruct us, or illuminate our experiences for everyone. They can be an index for the health and vibrancy of our culture and our time. The Smithsonian American Art Museum …

Embodied Tuning: Interfacing Danish Radio Heritage, Christian Hviid Mortensen, Vitus Vestergaard

Journal of Interactive Humanities

Most museum exhibitions favor vision, not hearing. When there is audio in exhibitions, it tends to take on a secondary role as a soundtrack or commentary. In some cases, however, audio should be the primary object of interest. Radio heritage is such a case. The traditional way of showcasing audio is through webaccessible archives or through listening kiosks in the exhibition. Neither one takes advantage of the unique affordances of the spatiality and physicality of an exhibition. We therefore propose an alternative way of exhibiting radio heritage in a listening exhibition where users move around and explore the physical gallery …

Modding The Humanities: Experiments In Historic Narratives, Elizabeth S. Goins, Christopher Egert, Andrew Phelps, Chandra Reedy, Joel Kincaid

Journal of Interactive Humanities

While the ludology versus narratology debate raged within game studies circles [1], game designers continued building games and developing methods to improve player experience. Today however, while designers may have their personal preferences, there is no longer any doubt that both mechanics and story can have an important role to play in a game [2,3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

You Have Died Of Dysentery: A First Attempt At Navigating A Course In Educational Games, Adrienne Decker, David Simkins

Journal of Interactive Humanities

This paper describes our experiences developing and piloting a course in educational games. We discuss the structure of the course, the topics we included in the course, as well as the final projects the students created for the course. Of particular interest to non-technical educators interested in exploring games in their courses is the fact that our course incorporated many critical thinking skills as part of the coursework. We felt that an important part of the student’s immersion in this material was not just the production of the game, but also a deeper understanding of the issues surrounding education and …