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9,225 documents·382 writers·28,548 charts and tables
Documents
Whitepaper9 pages
Team Structure in the Development of Game-Based Learning Environments
This study examines optimal team structures and collaborative practices for developing digital Game-Based Learning Environments (GBLEs), advocating for a multidisciplinary, user-driven approach.
- Learning, content-area, and game-design expertise was frequently insufficient or underused across three case projects (Gameli 1.0, Gameli 2.0, and the Social Responsibility and Peatland Adventure projects), with learning and content experts often relegated to consultancy roles rather than responsible positions.
- The authors propose a general early-stage team structure comprising a management team, pre-production and production teams that include game design and software engineering expertise, and a design partner team representing end users.
- Pre-production is framed as the period for building shared understanding of project goals and common ground for implementing the final product, which underpins the argument for giving learning and content experts substantive roles from the outset.
DiGRAJan 2007
Whitepaper8 pages
Gameplay Design Patterns for Believable Non-Player Characters
The document explores gameplay design patterns aimed at enhancing the believability of Non-Player Characters (NPCs) within interactive game environments.
- Believable NPCs depend on players adopting an intentional stance toward them, which requires qualities such as self-awareness, self-impelled action, emotional expression, natural language use, and persistent traits.
- The authors argue that gameplay believability must stay consistent with narrative believability, and they propose new gameplay design patterns, in the format of Lankoski and Björk's existing collection of nearly 300 patterns, to fill the gaps they identify.
- A close case study of Claudette Perrick, a shopkeeper in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, shows partial believability: she displays initiative and goal-directed responses to theft and a basic sense of self, but fails to react to unwitnessed thefts, ignores physical disruptions, shows no lasting physical consequences, and cannot meaningfully alter her life trajectory.
DiGRAJan 2007
Whitepaper8 pages
What Videogame Making Can Teach Us About Literacy and Learning: Alternative Pathways into Participatory Culture
This ethnographic study explores how youth engagement in video game creation within a community design studio fosters digital literacy and participation, particularly for urban youth and English language learners.
- The study argues that building video games offers an alternative route into participatory culture, cultivating design skills and critical awareness as a counterpoint to passive media consumption, and addressing the participation gap, transparency problem, and ethics challenge identified in Jenkins' work.
- An archival analysis of 11,926 files collected over two years at a Los Angeles Computer Clubhouse found Scratch was the most-used design software, accounting for 643 files or 5.3 percent of the total after excluding saved web images, which dominated the corpus.
- Preliminary indications suggest programming complexity and community expertise grew in the second year, though the authors stress these trends are provisional because analyses of programming sophistication remain ongoing.
DiGRAJan 2007
Whitepaper9 pages
A Method for Discovering Values in Digital Games
The document outlines a novel methodology, centered on a "Values Cards" tool, designed to help game designers systematically identify, analyze, and integrate human values into digital games.
- Games inevitably embed human values such as equality, justice, generosity, and competition, in their mechanics, representation, and the prior experiences players bring, much as other media do.
- The Values Cards exercise is presented as a practical tool that lets game designers identify and discuss these embedded values, and it is positioned as the first step in the broader Values at Play methodology of discovery, translation, and verification.
- Designers can gain conscious control over the values their games convey by examining both the positive and negative expressions of those values.
DiGRAJan 2007
Whitepaper9 pages
Pervasive Persuasive: A Rhetorical Design Approach to a Location-Based Spell-Casting Game for Tourists
The document outlines the design and implementation of REXplorer, a pervasive, location-based spell-casting game launching in June 2007 in Regensburg, Germany.
- REXplorer, a location-based pervasive spell-casting game, launched in June 2007 in Regensburg, Germany, using the city's roughly 1,000 medieval and Gothic landmarks (many UNESCO-listed) as its stage to persuade tourists toward situated history learning and exploration.
- The authors define persuasion as the intentional shaping of player behavior and build their "pervasive persuasive tactics" on formal and dramaturgical design rather than on conventional game mechanics alone.
- The design uses a GPS-equipped smartphone in a shell with a custom gesture-based detector device, a personalized geo-weblog, and a walkable city-core layout in which 29 paranormally charged sites serve as graph vertices, with an on-screen control fallback for older players.
DiGRAJan 2007
Whitepaper7 pages
Notes Toward a Sense of Embodied Gameplay
Peter Bayliss's "Notes Toward a Sense of Embodied Gameplay," presented at DiGRA 2007, argues that gameplay is best understood as an embodied phenomenon arising at the interface, the point where player and game meet, rather than as an escape into a virtual world or a purely formal rule system.
- Gameplay is framed as an embodied phenomenon arising at the interface where player and game meet, rather than as an escape into a virtual world or a purely formal rule system.
- The paper proposes a three-layer model of the interface (material, software, and conceptual) and critiques the 'immersive fallacy' that treats play as transport into a game world.
- Flow is distinguished from immersion: flow expands the player's sense of self and draws the game into the player's world, while immersion transports the player into the game's world.
DiGRAJan 2007
Whitepaper5 pages
Human, All Too Non-Human: Coop AI and the Conversation of Action
The document, "Human, All Too Non-Human: Coop AI and the Conversation of Action," explores the cultural sociological implications of human-computer interaction in digital games, particularly focusing on cooperative AI (Coop AI) as a departure from traditional competitive models.
- Simon argues that single-player games often preserve a "humanist remains" by hiding machine labor behind an illusion of individual human mastery, whereas cooperative AI foregrounds a "conversation of actions" in which players must continually track and adapt to non-human comrades.
- The paper frames cooperative AI as a move toward critical posthumanism, drawing on Haraway, Latour, Hayles, and Baudrillard, and uses Mori's uncanny valley to describe the unsettling yet productive tension it creates.
- Simon contends that cooperative AI opens exploratory space that competitive, Turing-style AI (exemplified by chess and the 1997 Deep Blue–Kasparov match) has largely closed off.
DiGRAJan 2007
Whitepaper5 pages
Ghastly Multiplication: Fatal Frame II and the Videogame Uncanny
The document analyzes how Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly uniquely generates the uncanny in a videogame context, moving beyond traditional literary or filmic interpretations.
- The videogame uncanny, per this paper, arises not just from borrowed literary or filmic techniques but from the interplay of operational demands (controls, camera, mechanics) and affective experience, producing a distinctly ludic form of the familiar made unfamiliar.
- Using Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly (Tecmo, 2003, PlayStation 2) as its case study, the authors show how camera-based combat, shifts between third- and first-person perspectives, and restricted movement during camera mode generate uncanny effects.
- The twin avatars Mio and Mayu and the Crimson Sacrifice ritual, in which one twin kills the other, are read as doubles that mirror the player's own uncertain identification with the avatar.
DiGRAJan 2007
Whitepaper7 pages
Mapping Time in Video Games
This paper argues that understanding time in video games requires integrating both formalist and experiential perspectives, with spatial experience serving as a crucial link between them.
- Michael Nitsche's paper argues that players are situated in both space and time during play, and that understanding temporal structures in games depends on understanding their spatial relationships.
- The paper proposes combining the formalist model (Jesper Juul's mapping of play time onto event time, including direct mapping, loading time, cut-scenes, level changes, and back-referencing) with the experiential model (Espen Aarseth's negotiation time and players' cognitive and emotional engagement with temporal situations).
- Space is identified as the connecting element between the formalist and experiential models, with players projecting movement into virtual spaces so that consistent spatial layout keeps complex temporal arrangements legible.
DiGRAJan 2007
Whitepaper9 pages
Understanding Pervasive Games through Gameplay Design Patterns
The analysis explores pervasive games through a bottom-up approach, examining 120 game examples using 75 pervasive gameplay design patterns, 53 of which were newly identified.
- The study analyzed 120 pervasive game examples against 75 gameplay design patterns, of which 53 were newly developed for pervasive contexts and 24 carried over from an earlier study of mobile games.
- Rather than classifying games by genre, the authors used a bottom-up approach, grouping patterns with a custom clustering program and treating cluster names as hypotheses about each group's core character.
- The resulting cluster hierarchy maps the pervasive game design space, with GPS Games the most distinct grouping, separated mainly by its lack of social-interaction patterns.
DiGRAJan 2007
Whitepaper7 pages
Designing a Game to Model Consumer Misbehavior
The document proposes a novel application of game design theory to create a computer game specifically for modeling consumer misbehavior in marketing research.
- The paper proposes a graphical, single-player game as a controlled, ethical way to study consumer misbehavior, a largely emotion-driven phenomenon that is hard to examine through self-reports, direct observation, or role-play.
- The design relies on real-time constraints, a clear winning state, and deliberately withheld information or feedback to induce stress and frustration that may provoke misbehavior.
- Emotionally responsive, context-specific non-player character dialogue is intended to sustain realism, while strong immersion and player control are meant to keep participants engaged.
DiGRAJan 2007
Whitepaper8 pages
Peep-Boxes to Pixels: An Alternative History of Video Game Space
"Peep-Boxes to Pixels: An Alternative History of Video Game Space" posits that the evolution of video games is best understood through the concept of "space" rather than purely economic drivers.
- Philip Sharp argues that video game arcades arose from the convergence of leisure practices, technological innovation, and cultural identity rather than a single line of technical progress, with roots in nineteenth-century optical toys such as Dutch peep-boxes and Japanese magic lanterns, plus pinball and pachinko.
- Sharp contends Japan absorbed Western mechanical and optical devices and framed them as commercial leisure spaces, a pattern he sees continuing in modern arcades, while Japan's arcade and pachinko culture endured in contrast to the American shift toward home gaming and family entertainment centers.
- The report situates arcades within a recurring history of moral panic over amusement spaces, citing American pinball bans as an early stigma that anticipated later reactions to video game arcades.
DiGRAJan 2007