Wrecking the Game: The Artist as Griefer

This paper aims at examining the anti-game practice of artists that assume a subverting behaviour inside video games. They hijack gameplay to turn it into a space for artistic intervention. The artists discussed in this paper are Kent Sheely, Marque Cornblatt, Justin Berry, and Alan Butler. Their practice shares similarities with the artistic interventions developed by Dada and International Situationist, two artistic movements that aimed at redefining the culture of their time thanks to subversive actions. The artists featured in this paper are defined griefers, deliberate hecklers. Their works are then analysed along with the concepts of counter-gaming and ludic mutation defined by Alexander Galloway and Anne-Marie Schleiner to better understand the characteristics of their subversive behaviour.

Adapting Epic Theatre Principles for the Design of Games for Learning

Educational games are primarily developed for use in formal education, which limits both their typical audience and the subject matter they may address. This paper presents recommendations for designing games for learning to be played outside the context of formal education, which explore the ways complex systems influence real human lives. Existing work from within the field and epic theatre principles form the basis for these guidelines. In this framework, the context of educational game play is considered alongside game content as essential to encouraging reflective play behaviour. Educational aims are made explicit throughout game involvement, and each aspect of the game directly contributes to stimulating reflection on the topics at hand. Complex subject matter — for example, the ways systems such as economics affect players in real life — may be fruitfully explored using this approach.

Debris: Exploring the video game values that can help reduce mental illness stigma

Super Mario as a String: Platformer Level Generation Via LSTMs

The procedural generation of video game levels has existed for at least 30 years, but only recently have machine learning approaches been used to generate levels without specifying the rules for generation. A number of these have looked at platformer levels as a sequence of characters and performed generation using Markov chains. In this paper we examine the use of Long Short-Term Memory recurrent neural networks (LSTMs) for the purpose of generating levels trained from a corpus of Super Mario Bros. levels. We analyze a number of different data representations and how the generated levels fit into the space of human authored Super Mario Bros. levels.

Review of Social Features in Social Network Games

Although social network games on Facebook have become popular, their actual sociability has been questioned. In this paper we review the social features of 16 social games and as a result present a list of 30 social features in three categories: presence, communication, and interaction. A common set of features which were found from all examined games are mainly focused on presence and communication aspects, while neglecting player interaction. In addition, social features are primarily used for acquisition and retention purposes, rather than monetization. These findings are useful for the study and design of social features in social games and in other games with social network integration.

Exploring Playful Experiences in Social Network Games

Social network games are popular pastime for millions of players on Facebook. Despite their popularity, qualitative research on experiences in these games has been scarce. In our study, 110 informants played 23 games on Facebook and reported their experiences using the Playful Experiences (PLEX) framework. We analyzed 110 reports containing 330 PLEX descriptions and present findings from three perspectives. First, we provide an overall analysis on playful experiences in social network games. Then we focus on genre specific experiences in casual puzzle, casual simulation, and mid-core strategy games. Lastly, we provide examples of interesting outlier experiences. Based on our study, Competition, Completion and Challenge are the most common playful experiences in these games. The genre-specific analysis revealed both similarities and differences between the genres, while the outlier experiences provide new perspectives on social network games. Through the PLEX framework, this research helps to understand the playful experiences in social network games.

Applying the Two-Factor-Theory to the PLAY Heuristics

It is a common practice to use heuristic evaluations to assess usability and user experience of digital systems. Video games are no exception. Several video game researchers have presented different lists of best practice, design patterns, principles and heuristics over the last decade. The authors of this paper wanted to see if there is an aspect of priority that can be applied to an existing set of video game heuristics and if it is possible to classify the heuristics according to type. This study uses a survey where the participants were asked to classify Desurvire and Wiberg’s (2009) PLAY heuristics according to Herzberg’s theory into either Hygiene Factors or Motivators. The participants were instructed to view Hygiene Factors as essential to ensure functionality for an enjoyable play experience, while Motivators are mostly aimed at polishing the experience. The method used in this study is inspired by a previous work, where web design heuristics were classified in a similar manner. Results show that the method is applicable, and that it yields interesting results. Preliminary results indicate that mainly heuristics that consider usability are perceived as Hygiene Factors while the heuristics classified as Motivators consider other topics, such as storyline and immersion. Interestingly, the PLAY heuristics are evenly split between these two categories.

A Model for Exploring the Usefulness of Games for Classrooms

Meaningful use of digital games can create a more potent schooling environment where students are engaged, focussed and motivated to learn. However, the potential impact of games in the classroom will not be realised until teachers learn to embrace the strengths of digital games. This paper presents the Game Uses Model for Classrooms (GUMC), a Model to help teachers explore the use of digital games in their unique classroom context. The GUMC was directly derived from experiences of educators in Queensland, Australia. It aims to make explicit the intuitive thought processes of teachers who use games effectively, and can be used as a planning tool for all teachers to help them to richly and elaborately intertwine games into their curricula. The GUMC can also be used by game designers to help them create games that have subtle but powerful classroom relevance.

Online Video Games in Brazilian Public Health Communication

Based on an ongoing doctoral dissertation, this paper discusses online video games’ potential for public health communication in Brazil. Brazil is a continental country, with wide variance of habits and cultures, presenting great challenges for public health policies. Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS), one of the largest public health systems in the world, serves entire Brazilian population guided by the principles of universality, comprehensiveness and fairness. Brazilian government places great importance in health communication strategies, using both traditional (print, radio, television) and new media (websites, social networks). However, most of this communication is centralized, prescriptive, unidirectional, focusing dissemination of peremptory norms and behaviors, ignoring local contexts and population knowledge. This limits communications’ effectiveness and potential for change, particularly among youngsters, resistant to less interactive and dialogic media. There are already some efforts to occasional use of video games in Brazilian public health; however, we still lack a rigorous analysis of the potential of this medium as a means of public health communication. We suggest that video games can play an important role in reaching such young audiences, combining entertainment and interaction. The primary focus of our research is online video games, specifically MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games), where the links created between avatar and player would allow incorporation of in-game learned notions of self-care into players’ offline lives. Such games could enable contextualizing health communication content, since the player experiences the virtual world at his/her own pace and according to individual interests and limitations. MMORPGs also encourage players to act over the environment, emphasizing notions of personal effort and responsibility in maintaining one’s own health. In addition, these games provide immediate feedback and players see clearly results of their actions, which would portray powerful links between cause and effect in everyday behavior and health consequences. Finally, these games allow the emergence of entire online communities with a rich panorama of communication flows, where each player would receive the health content presented by the game system, and also mediate, interpret and re-contextualize this content. In Brazil, this space for socializing and joint creation provided by games thrives today not only in richer homes, but also among lower classes, thanks to the proliferation of Internet cafes in low-income neighborhoods. MMORPGs could provide opportunities for mediation flows more dynamic than traditional media and their use in public health communication may represent a powerful channel for transmission of information, for contact with public and a fruitful environment to foster creativity and social participation of young people. However, appropriate conditions for the design and production of such games are essential to this outcome. In the Brazilian context, games like MMORPGs for health would originate through support of public agencies, as the Brazilian government is the largest investor in this field. This fact introduces special difficulties in the process, such as government’s typical bureaucracy and slowness, which do not match the efficient production of cultural goods required for a fast market such as the games’ one. This further widens the gap between academic thinking and development of products to the public. From this preliminary analysis, we aim to propose some production guidelines to facilitate the creation of such games mixing health content and dialogic characteristics that would enable players to learn and express themselves more freely in the interactive environment: 1) Teams should be multidisciplinary and dedicated to each project, incorporating academic researchers (who will provide data and content about public health) and also representatives from the target audience of the game; 2) tools should be open-source or free, to keep costs down, but also there should be special attention to content’s efficient distribution such as online games accessible through common browsers; 3) the primary attraction of such games should be fun, regardless of any serious content; 4) these games should incorporate features for measuring and analyzing online behavior, which, respecting players’ privacy, could provide developers with useful data for improving the game and at same time provide invaluable information for researchers assessing the effectiveness of health communication portrayed in game; 5) such games should give broad channels for players’ communication and expression, inside and outside the game, from customizing the avatar up to virtual spaces for socialization as chat channels, guilds and clans, with the virtual environment encouraging players’ creative participation through its history and visuals; 6) these games should be in constant refinement, in short production cycles, preferably with many means of communication between public and developers through abundant use of social media like Facebook, Twitter and others. We believe that game projects that incorporate these practices will have a greater chance of success and may represent a major advance in health communication for the Brazilian society.

An Introduction to EEG Analysis Techniques and Brain-Computer Interfaces for Games User Researchers

Games User Research (GUR) can provide meaningful insights into the study of games. As a part of GUR, we focus on the area of cognitive psychology and discuss electroencephalography (EEG) as an evaluation technique for games. We want to introduce game researchers to EEG when studying the cognitive side of player experience and discuss how it can benefit game studies. In this paper, we review EEG techniques before providing researchers with information about general EEG setup and methodology, EEG data collection, preparation, and analysis. Techniques reviewed have been used in medical applications, research, brain-computer interaction (BCI) and human-computer interaction (HCI) applications. In addition, future ideas for applications of EEG techniques in game studies are discussed. We outline how to use different EEG analysis techniques for game research and it is our hope to make these techniques more understandable for the game studies community and to demonstrate their merit for games user research.