Information Technology

While much of the games research field for the last two decades has focused on digital games, this article draws attention to the benefits of combining analogue and digital game components to cater for a serious but fun game experience. In this case, the game design provides a set of game rules for players, where the goal is to win by finding another player’s hidden treasure. But, the game also includes deceptive characters, initially unknown to the players, whose goal is to lure the players to reveal information, which will make a player lose the game. Hence, the players and the unknown characters are involved in opposite but intertwined activities. To describe the differing activities we use the activity system model found in Activity Theory. The theoretical conceptualisation, the game design and the play situation create what we term a zone of experience where young players can experience the consequences of sharing too much information. The game design mimics real world online i...

This article presents the result from a study comparing the perception and understanding of a game story between sighted and visually impaired players playing the same game. In particular, whether sighted and visually impaired players could experience and recount the same story construed from the plot elements that are either manifested by audio and graphics in the case of sighted players or primarily by audio in the case of visually impaired players. To this end, we have developed a graphical point-and-click adventure game for iOS and Android devices that aims to show how inclusive game design may be used to facilitate a shared gaming experience between sighted and visually impaired players. The game provides players with audio feedback that enables visually impaired players to interact with and experience the game, but in a manner that does not interfere with the overall appearance and functionality of the game. Thus, it has been designed to be fully inclusive to both groups of players and to give the same gaming experience when it comes to story content. The game has been evaluated through formal user tests where subjects have been asked to play the first chapter of the game followed by an interview. The study shows that the perception of the story was almost identical between the two groups. Generally it took visually impaired players a little longer to play the game but they also seem to listen more carefully to the dialogue and hence also build a slightly deeper understanding of the characters. The study also shows that the sighted players did not respond negatively towards the inclusive game design employed in the game.

In this paper, we discuss a part of participatory culture that so far has not received much attention in the academic world; it is the writing and reading of game fan fiction. The focus in this paper is on fan fiction, based on three different games that represent three different game genres: Tetris, StarCraft and Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. The aim is to advance our understanding of how players experience and understand the game environment, and promote further research interest in fan fiction based on computer games. We do this by discussing narrative elements in the above mentioned computer games, and the fan fiction that is based on them.

This chapter presents a model for the structuring of computer game audio building on the IEZA-framework (Huiberts & van Tol, 2008), Murch’s (1998) conceptual model for the production of film sound, and the affordance theory put forth by Gibson (1977/1986). This model makes it possible to plan the audio layering of computer games in terms of the relationship between encoded and embodied sounds, cognitive load, the functionality of the sounds in computer games, the relative loudness between sounds, and the dominant frequency range of all the different sounds. The chapter uses the combined model to provide exemplifying analyses of three computer games—F.E.A.R., Warcraft III, and Legend of Zelda—. Furthermore, the chapter shows how a sound designer can use the suggested model as a production toolset to structure computer game audio from a game design document.

An important factor for success in project-based learning (PBL) is that the involved project groups establish an atmosphere of social interaction in their working environment. In PBL-scenarios situated in distributed environments, most of a group's work-processes are mediated through the use of production-focused tools that are unconcerned with the important informal and social aspects of a project. On the other hand, there are plenty of tools and platforms that focus on doing the opposite and mainly support informal bonding (e.g., Facebook), but these types of environments can be obtrusive and contain distractions that can be detrimental to a group's productivity and are thus often excluded from working environments. The aim of this paper is to examine how a game-based multi-user environment (MUVE) can be designed to support project-based learning by bridging the gap between productivity-focused and social software. To explore this, the authors developed a game-based MUVE w...