Understanding Empathy in Children through 3D Character Design


Chan Kah Easterly Douglas Thomassen Aukje
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

Health, particularly diet and everyday nutrition, as the ultimate causal factor in life is an important aspect of every child’s education. Meanwhile, computer generated (CG) 3- dimensional (3-D) graphics is a medium often used by entertainment and advertising. Educational intervention to help children make appropriate dietary choices can be designed by employing similar methods used by entertainment and advertising, such as 3-D characters aimed at children. The question that this research asked is: can creating an empathic bond between 3-D characters and children communicate a healthy nutrition message effectively? This thesis is based on qualitative research founded on the constructionist theory that focuses on exploring the perspective of children via focus groups. Educational designs based on familiar computer-generated graphics will help equip children to deal with nutritional and dietary choices, ultimately initiating behavioural change as their relationship with food matures earlier. Empathy on the children’s and adult’s sides of the healthy nutrition conversation is important to establish this relationship in children’s nutritional decisions. The main challenge for nutrition education is not in shortterm diversions, but long-term changes in behavioural responses in media literacy. A constructionist approach of helping children work through advertising by improving their media vocabulary would be a more sustainable approach to enhancing their ability to decode advertising rhetoric and in turn forming their own informed opinion and responses. Industry referenced educational content intent on healthy lifestyles can balance the prevalent advertising messages leading to a more balanced overall media that children are exposed to.

 

Evolution and Digital Game Studies


Easterly Douglas Carnegie Dale Harper David
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

While a great variety of fields are addressed in the discussions concerning digital game studies, the natural sciences are rarely among them. We do see references to evolution and biology when we look at new directions in the technical structuring of games, as genetic programming bestows artificial characters with a greater impression of intelligence; but this domain is not discussed in the critical dissemination of player behaviour. If evolution and biology are valuable references for generating artificial intelligences within a digital game, perhaps it is time we consider the significance of such forces for the players engaging the game. As sociobiology pioneer Robert Trivers reminds us: “Natural selection has built us, and it is natural selection we must understand if we are to comprehend our own identities.” Why are the cognitive tools we have inherited for thriving in the Pleistocene era so good at engaging, and being drawn to achieving goals in the fictional pixilated world of digital games? This paper will argue that evolution can play an important role in digital game studies by offering a functionalist explanation to topics such as behaviour, gender, learning, development, and prediction under uncertainty. In building this case, we will examine the history of play research and discuss its dual-lineage: one largely informed by evolutionary biology, and another that is more concerned with play as a cultural artifact. From there, we will consider the potential for Evolutionary Psychology (EP) as a valuable interlocutor for digital game studies. In particular, this field’s approach to addressing judgement under uncertainty lends astonishing insight into how core features of digital gameplay may indeed be triggering innate behaviour. In conclusion, we will present our own experiments being conducted at Victoria University of Wellington, which will provide an example of how Evolutionary Psychology may inform research conducted in digital game studies.