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| Two perspectives and corresponding choice points from Academical's first scenario, "The Head Start." In this story, the player can role-play as an adviser or a graduate student struggling to navigate the human subjects research approval process. The two highlighted text blocks from each scene represent the player's dialogue options for their character.
Source publication
Choice-based interactive storytelling games such as Academical, our responsible conduct of research training game, show great promise as a novel way of providing efficacious ethics training. However, much work remains to determine what factors of such games contribute to their advantages over traditional text-based training tools, especially if we...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... game comprises fundamental ethical topics that inform all aspects of the research process and highlights how this process can be complicated by many factors such as power dynamics and marginalized identities. Each playable scenario in Academical centers on a conversation between two stakeholders in the RCR issue at hand, one of whom is controlled by the player-in the sense that they select dialogue options for that character (see Figure 1). By virtue of these choices, the player will ultimately reach one of several possible endings, a subset of which represent successful navigation of the situation. ...
Context 2
... a couple of these participants did not enjoy the game content because it was too relatable (e.g., one participant did not like thinking about how common these issues are in real life). Just one participant described that they did not recognize the characters as believable (N = 1). Specifically, they stated that some of the responses seemed unrealistic. ...
Context 3
... were much more likely to cite presence/immersion factors to explain what they most enjoyed about the game (19%) compared to what they least enjoyed (9%). The majority of these participants most enjoyed that the game's stories felt relatable, relevant and/or realistic (N = 14). Conversely, just a handful of other participants did not enjoy how the stories did not feel familiar or relatable (N = 4). ...
Citations
... This accessible aspect of interactive narratives has made them highly popular with men, women, and even novices to games [12], as well as for educational/training purposes both commercially and in academia [11,18,46,50]. Furthermore, the role-playing nature of interactive narratives has been shown to be highly effective at improving player attitudes [24,25], motivation [23], knowledge [45], and skills [44]. This makes the use of interactive narrative games an ideal approach for training resiliency as it easily and intuitively enables learners to role-play through various stereotype and social identity threat scenarios. ...
Stereotype threat and social identity threat are social phenomena that adversely affect underrepresented groups within STEM (i.e., women and people of color). While there are existing programs and techniques for training resiliency against these threats, the use of biofeedback and serious games may prove useful to enhance the efficacy and engagement of such training. In this paper, we present the work in progress on our interactive narrative biofeedback game (Resilient IN) that utilizes resonant frequency heart rate variability to train player resilience to stereotype and social identity threat as they move through a mock interview at a tech company within the game. Specifically, we discuss the design of the game in detail—focusing on how specific elements of the design draw from existing literature to evoke and train resilience during play, as well as design and validation of the game narrative/script with individuals in the technology and engineering industry. Finally, we provide future directions for the work, such as upcoming studies to validate the game’s efficacy in evoking and training resiliency to different kinds of threats.KeywordsSocial identity threatStereotype threatSerious gamesHeart rate variabilityBiofeedback
... The participants were also asked to self-report their reading and writing proficiency in any languages that use hanzi or hanzi-derived written systems. The participants were randomly distributed into two conditions (i.e., Zen Hanzi treatment group or Quizlet control condition) with the final count of 27 people in the control group and 36 in the treatment group 12 . There were no statistically significant differences in age, gender or prior knowledge distribution between the two groups, with the exception of there being 10 non-binary participants in the treatment group vs. ...
... This will provide a better understanding of the long-term effects that a component-focused design might have in comparison to SRS methods. Future work should also investigate the possibility of lowered feelings of competence and ways to counteract that effect-as feelings of competence have been shown to be important for the efficacy of educational games [12,42]. ...
Mastering thousands of logographic characters, such as the Chi-nese hanzi or Japanese kanji, is a unique and daunting obstacle for many students of those languages. In this paper, we investigate the efficacy of our component-focused hanzi learning game, Zen Hanzi, in addressing this issue. Zen Hanzi aims to assist Chinese as Foreign Language (CFL) learners in getting over some of the trickier aspects of hanzi, such as differentiating between similar-looking components. We describe our experimental game and provide a comparison study where 63 participants learned 10 complex hanzi using either our game or Quizlet, a flashcard app frequently used in Chinese courses. Results found that both groups had similar improvement on the hanzi recognition test, but the treatment group showed significantly better scores on the hanzi composition test (p<0.004). Our work extends prior findings on the benefits of component awareness to beginner hanzi learners, as well as contributes a scalable design for component-focused logographic learning tools.
Educational videos play an important role in university education. However, they are often not designed to foster active learning and the learning process is not immersive. Interactive digital storytelling is a promising game design element but requires a rigorous evaluation to avoid negative side effects. Therefore, we adopt a design science research approach to design and evaluate an interactive video that includes interactive storytelling and real-world recordings. The proposed artifact aims to raise information security awareness among bachelor students at a German university for malicious USB sticks and the reporting of incidents. In our evaluation, we focus on learning progress before and after using the video as well as qualitative feedback about the experience with the learning object. Our results show that videos that are based on interactive choice-based storytelling can foster an active and immersive process, and significant learning outcomes.
One’s digital identity on the Metaverse is critical enough to warrant EU regulation. Suggesting Interactive Digital Narratives as having a role to play in the Metaverse, we focus on the identity of the Virtual Reality interactor in such virtual spaces, and the potential impact this may have on the self-identity of the interactor. Building upon the notions of identity and the interactor’s construction of their narrative identity, we revisit identification in the context of VR Interactive Narratives (VRINs) and explore authenticity and character similarity as its dimensions. We interpret the construction of a narrative identity in VR as a vehicle for identity shift between the interactor’s self-identity and identification with the character. Based on the theoretical framework, we present a conceptual model for identity shift in VRINs which we then apply to a number of case studies to exemplify its utility and provide some guidelines for VRIN authors in how to use this model.KeywordVirtual realityInteractive narrativeIdentityAuthenticity
