Christian Martyn Jones

University of the Sunshine Coast | USC · School of Social Sciences

The proliferation of e-scooters in urban spaces has introduced safety concerns despite their potential to reduce traffic congestion and provide an environmentally friendly solution for short-distance trips. This study consolidates existing knowledge on e-scooter safety through a systematic literature review of 168 academic studies and grey literatu...

Introduction Due to a variety of barriers, the majority of cancer survivors do not do enough physical activity to meet current recommendations. This study will assess the feasibility of participation in parkrun walk-run events as a novel mode of community rehabilitation exercise. Methods This protocol describes a single-arm intervention study with...

Sexual assault is a global problem, with the risk highest among university students. Bystander intervention preventing sexual assaults has primarily been researched using quantitative methods to understand what factors influence it. However, both sexual assault and bystander intervention are complex with many subtle and overlapping issues that, whe...

Purpose This study aims to investigate consumer perceptions of inauthenticity due to adulteration of a narrative brand ending by using the research context of the final season and ending of the television series, Game of Thrones . Design/methodology/approach Two data sets totalling 2,032 online comments detailing consumer reactions to the final se...

In Australia, the professional video game industry overwhelmingly consists of smaller game developers (Keogh 2021). Games created by developers are frequently released and sold on commercial game platforms such as Steam, allowing for the possibility of generating revenue. When utilizing the Steam platform there is a relatively low barrier of entry...

Sports podcasting has spread rapidly over the past decade and reflects how sports media have been quick to embrace new technologies. Despite being a relatively recent medium, podcasts have expanded the sports field with their format and content. The rise in podcast shows and episodes has been noticeable, but less is known, particularly in an academ...

Recent advancement in technology has made virtual reality (VR) more accessible and immersive than ever before, resulting in its increasing utility in various industries. Despite this, VR has remained an underutilised tool within clinical psychology. This study aimed to explore the potential of using VR for therapeutic benefits through examining the...

This article explored how players were impacted by and used emergent narrative to make sense of their gameplay in the Total War strategy video game series. Two stages of qualitative research were undertaken: (i) a thematic analysis of 295 online forum posts; and (ii) 104 respondents to an online survey. The research followed a phenomenographic appr...

This study investigated symptoms of cybersickness and postural instability experienced by new users of head-mounted display virtual reality (HMD-VR), playing VR videogames over long and repeated sessions, and moderation of these symptoms by previous videogame experience and intensity of videogame stimulus. Cybersickness (SSQ) and postural stability...

BACKGROUND Women in pregnancy and motherhood are increasingly accessing online mothers’ groups as a source of information and support. OBJECTIVE To understand the evolution of, and interactions within, an online mothers’ group over ten years, commencing in a large public forum and breaking away to form a small, private Facebook group METHODS A qu...

Video games such as the successful Assassin’s Creed series allow consumers to engage with various historical contexts and to explore them in engaging and influential ways. However, it is unclear what consumers understand as the difference between the historical authenticity and historical accuracy used by developers in these games. Therefore, this...

The Rosetta Wheel framework is a framework for design teams to guide the development of games for health behaviour change. The framework is grounded in evidence-based research of the psychology of behaviour change. It is further informed by game analysis and expert design techniques in order to understand how psychological processes map with game d...

Prior studies into road safety have concentrated largely on studying unsafe forms of driving behaviour such as aggressive, stressed, and risky driving. Little attention has been given to ‘positive’ driving behaviour, such as how pro-social driving may help to promote cooperation with other road users and decrease incidences of aggressive and stress...

Cyber strategies play a role in combating child sexual abuse material (CSAM). These strategies aim to detect offenders and prevent them from accessing and producing CSAM, or to identify victims. This paper explores five cyber strategies: peer-to-peer network monitoring, automated multi-modal CSAM detection tools, using web crawlers to identify CSAM...

This research examines the concept of emergent narrative, located in Game Studies, and brand co-creation, located in Brand Management to bring together both disciplines to produce new understandings about both concepts, video games and their players. Two stages of research were conducted. It was found that players were taking part in brand co-creat...

This research used the branding concepts of brand nostalgia and brand heritage to examine and understand the changes that audiences will accept to a narrative media brand, a term proposed by this research to help distinguish between different types of media brands with the aim of focusing and advancing media branding research into fictional media....

Background Childbearing women engage in large public pregnancy and parenting forums, primarily for the purpose of seeking information and advice. There is an absence of research related to women's engagement in closed and private online mothers’ groups. Aim The aim of this study was to explore the experiences of participation and support for membe...

This research, using online qualitative survey questions, explored how players of the PlayStation 4 console game, Horizon Zero Dawn, formed emotional attachments to characters while playing as, and assuming the persona of the female player-character, Aloy. It was found that the respondents (approximately 71% male) formed emotional attachments to th...

There are ample examples of video game players desiring a greater level of historical accuracy in their games than are provided by developers. This research explores how this desire for accuracy versus authenticity might differ between players of two long running video game series with historical settings: Assassin’s Creed and Total War.

Purpose This study aims to contribute to research into narrative brands by investigating if the lack of closure in the ambiguous season two’s ending of the Australian television series, Wanted, constituted a brand transgression. Design/methodology/approach Comments on posts about Wanted from social media accounts associated with the series were do...

The Mass Effect video game series, a narrative brand, and its Canadian developer, BioWare, were investigated to determine if their brand equity had recovered in 2016 after a brand crisis in 2012 by analyzing comments posted on five online news outlets using thematic analysis and non-participatory netnography. The investigation found that, although...

We propose a low-cost IoT-enabled COVID-19 SOP compliance system which counts the number of people entering and leaving a vicinity, ensures physical distancing, monitors body temperature and warns attendees and managers of violations. The system comprises of multiple sensor nodes communicating with a centralized server. The data stored on the serve...

Background Greater public and professional awareness of the extent and impact of child sexual abuse (CSA) has prompted the inclusions of prevention initiatives within school curricula. However CSA education is not always soundly grounded in empirical evidence, and evaluations of the impact of programs often inadequate. Objective This paper reports...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to investigate members’ reactions to the forced closure of a narrative video game brand community and its participatory culture. Design/methodology/approach The BioWare Social Network forums closure was announced in a thread, which attracted 8,891 posts. These were analysed using thematic analysis, facilitated...

This study investigated players' emotional attachment to two non-player characters, Tali and Garrus, from BioWare's Mass Effect videogame series. Two forum threads, created soon after the release by BioWare of Mass Effect 2 in January 2010 dedicated to these two characters, were downloaded and analyzed using thematic analysis. The results found tha...

Emergent narratives are created by players through their gameplay (Moser and Fang 2015). Research into emergent narratives has focused on simulation games, such as The Sims (Maxis 2000-2019) (Murray 2006; Perlin 2006), while other game genres with the capacity for players to create emergent narratives, such as strategy games, have remained underexp...

This paper evaluated a novel digital game for mindfulness training and assessment. The Interactive Mindfulness Program and Virtual Evaluation (IMProVE) was built as part of a systematic research-based process that investigated how technology can be used to cultivate mindfulness. Developed as an infinite runner game, IMProVE targets eight mindfulnes...

The interaction between the concepts of character attachment, agency, and choice in a video game narrative was investigated using BioWare’s Mass Effect trilogy. Posts on a BioWare forum discussing the depiction of their player characters in the ending sequences of Mass Effect 3, the final game in the trilogy, were downloaded and analyzed using them...

Young drivers are consistently overrepresented in road-crash statistics globally. Increased road-risk for young drivers is principally associated with age and driving inexperience, however this risk can be further increased for young drivers with autism spectrum disorder through autism-related characteristics and comorbidities. Using a systematic l...

Background: Social support is essential in both the transition to motherhood and maternal role development. With diminishing access to traditional communities of motherhood wisdom, women struggle to access this information in their tangible worlds. Aim: This paper presents a review of the research literature investigating childbearing women's us...

This research investigates the relationship between mindfulness and digital games, by identifying which aspects of mindfulness can be trained by digital games and which game elements influence factors of mindfulness. Games and interactive approaches with research evidence for their efficacy are presented for each individual mindfulness factor, as d...

The benefits of using digital games in the curriculum are well documented in literature. Most teachers who use digital games use short‐form drill‐and‐practice learning games rather than the kinds of games most students would choose to play in their free time. The use of more interactive, immersive digital games (IDGs) in classrooms tends to be spor...

In this study a modified version of an app for training mindfulness and the mindfulness factor openness to experience, is presented. This study also extends the utility of an existing app, Positive Activity Jackpot. The Positive Activity Jackpot app uses gamified micro-tasks, by developing and integrating mindfulness-specific tasks. An evaluation o...

Objective: Extensive driving experience is essential for developing vital situation awareness skills. Young (‘inexperienced’) drivers have poor situation awareness (SA) skills compared to middle-aged (experienced) drivers, and driving abilities have been found to deteriorate with increasing age. Much remains unknown regarding similarities and diffe...

Purpose: Marketing research into media fans has been focused on typologies or definitions, while research by Media Studies and Cultural Studies has been preoccupied with issues of power and hegemony in fan behaviour. However, media fans are a potentially lucrative research domain, which marketing researchers have neglected. This article seeks to id...

Background: Driving courtesy, and conversely driving discourtesy, recently has been of great interest in the public domain. In addition, there has been increasing recognition of the negative impact of stress upon the individual's health and wellbeing, with a plethora of interventions aimed at minimising stress more generally. The research literatu...

Since its inception in 2001, the best possible selves (BPS) activity has been the focus of more than 30 studies which have shown it to be a viable intervention for increasing optimism, positive affect, health and well-being. It is timely to critically review the findings from the BPS literature and suggest directions for future research. The majori...

People with dementia living in long-term care commonly experience loneliness and lack of meaningful activity. Memory Keeper is a prototype digital application that presents personalised prompts to stimulate reminiscences and meaningful engagement with formal and informal carers. A trial involving three persons with dementia in long-term care and se...

This paper reviews interactive technological approaches to improve mindfulness and fills a gap in the literature by using technology to target aspects of mindfulness that are missing in scientific research. Interactive approaches to train mindfulness are presented and discussed in relation to Bergomi’s conceptual mindfulness model and Vago and Silb...

This paper explored the psychological mechanisms by which leisure enhances well-being by using sentence-by-sentence coding of the best-possible-selves text produced by 112 participants. Of the 1097 sentences, 41% were coded as leisure indicating that leisure is an important component of optimal well-being. The data showed that Australians have sign...

Because there is a global shortage of nurse educators, highly productive and committed nurse educators are needed to supply a rapidly expanding and changing health landscape. To support the aforementioned effort professional development needs of nurse educators must be systematically identified. This study explores practical issues around professio...

Significant barriers to using digital games in classrooms exist despite evidence to indicate digital games can enhance academic achievement. This qualitative, grounded theory study purports an interpretive understanding of the experiences of 13 Australian teachers who have used immersive digital games (IDGs) in the classroom. These teachers partici...

Recent research suggests the psycho-biophysical impact of stress can negatively impact health long after stressor exposure, in addition to increasing on-road discourteous driving behaviour. Twenty-two drivers participated in a simulated drive during which biophysical markers of stress (e.g., heart rate) were measured in response to interactions wit...

Research evidence has suggested that a positive mother-daughter relationship relates to both the mother’s work outcomes and the daughter’s psychosocial adjustment. Intervening to improve mother-daughter communication may thus offer means to support women’s long-term work outcomes. Phenomenographic analysis of two focus groups of mother-daughter dya...

In recent years, attention has increased around the delivery of mindfulness interventions by means of new technology such as via the smartphone [1]. However, less research has been devoted to investigating how digital games can enable and facilitate mindfulness training. This study demonstrates how mindfulness can be improved by using technology, i...

This study used qualitative methods to explore why some educators embrace the use of digital game-play (DGP) in the classroom. The results indicated that these teachers had a very strong belief that DGP could be beneficial for learning which stemmed from experiencing their own form of subjective success with using DGP in the classroom, availing the...

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 Mode...

International Journal of Inclusive Education Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the "Content") contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warrant...

Abstract Rising health inequities, continuing nursing shortages, and overlooked professional development needs of nurse educators are three important issues facing nursing in Australia. This paper argues for an innovative and proactive strategy that could transform the nurse education workforce into one that is repopulated, reinvigorated and refocu...

Purpose: Whilst instructors must meet specific qualification competencies, little is known regarding how competencies are operationalised during instruction. Of particular importance is higher-order instruction, in which key learnings specific to driving events are transferred more generally to both current and future driving. Recent research exami...

This technical report describes an interactive game environment designed to bring mothers and their adolescent daughters together to discuss three issues that have previously been shown in the literature to be of concern to families, as young girls transition from middle childhood to the adolescent years. The game is called Knowing you, Knowing me...

In this chapter we look at Audio, a key aspect of virtual and augmented realities that, because of the dominance of the visual sense, is often overlooked in the creation of healthcare and other applications. Audio design and implementa- tion is often under budgeted and considered at a late stage in many projects. This chapter seeks to raise awarene...

This paper is a review of the state of play of research linking videogaming and flourishing, and explores the role of videogames and technology to improve mental health and well-being. Its purpose is to develop understandings about the positive intersection of gaming and well-being, to document evidence regarding links between videogames and positi...

This paper presents a case study of the key decisions made in the design of Orbit, a child sexual abuse prevention computer game targeted at school students between 8 and 10 years of age. Key decisions include providing supported delivery for the target age group, featuring adults in the program, not over-sanitizing game content, having a focus on...

Gamified workplaces could be a positive and innovative solution to addressing contemporary problems in organizations. Such problems include high levels of stress, reduced sense of community, reduced loyalty and rapid changes in the workforce. To better prepare organizations for the future it may be helpful to identify and understand the potential a...

Freda Briggs (2007) a leader in the field of child protection in Australia continues to raise concerns about the vulnerability and victimisation of boys, which she believes is substantially under-recognised. She argues that boys have not been well supported by child sexual abuse (CSA) prevention programs with child protection curriculum not yet hav...

Responding to concerns about the negative impacts of videogames on young people’s mental health, as well as emerging evidence of positive impacts of videogames, the Young and Well CRC’s Gaming Research Group have compiled this report on the state of play of research linking videogame play and flourishing mental health. The report specifically explo...

Society is becoming increasingly reliant on Information Systems to meet its everyday communication requirements, yet many current implementations lack support for important conversational cues. One such cue is emotion communication. Emotion communication carries with it many signals that affect our behaviour, the interpretation of the message and p...

This research hypothesises that existing social networking systems do not adequately support emotion communication between members of a social group. To investigate this, a system (called Emotishare) was built to facilitate this type of communication and track the emotion sharing behaviours of participants when using the system. Emotishare is a web...

This paper presents the development and preliminary research results of a mobile information system designed to support the mentoring and assessment of Work Integrated Learning (WIL) activities in Tertiary Education settings. The system has been trialled with workplace mentors and pre-service teachers participating in University Education Practical...

In response to the diverse number of child sexual abuse (CSA) prevention programs currently implemented in school contexts, this paper examines key considerations for selecting such initiatives and the multiplicity of understandings required to inform facilitation of contextually relevant prevention curriculum. First, the paper examines concerns ab...

Emotishare is a web and mobile platform for users to continuously track, share and respond to the emotional states of their friends. The system was trialled with both large and small groups to explore emotional communication. The groups were provided with two alternate interfaces to the system (web and mobile), and usage was compared in order to de...

In Australia, nursing educators work across three main contexts - training colleges, health services and universities. Because the pace of change for nursing has increased dramatically and the curriculum is becoming even more crowded, educators in these contexts are likely to be experiencing work-related stress. This study investigated this issue u...

Drama in games is created by the interplay of the narrative structure of story and the ludic structure of challenges. In this paper, we combine Csikszentmihalyi's model of engagement and flow with Freytag's pyramid, a model of narrative structure. Using this combination, we explore the dramatic structure of Halo: Combat Evolved, comparing ludic and...

Being Safety Smart is an online, social issue game designed to mitigate increasing child abduction rates in Australia. By teaching young children skills and strategies to help protect themselves, the game empowers children with the ability and confidence to act appropriately and decisively. This paper reports on the collaborative research and devel...

Photographs can be used to elicit an emotional response in the viewer to promote attitudinal change. The paper considers the types of photographs which can elicit the strongest impact on viewers and uses a case study of the Mary River Dam. The Queensland government is proposing to dam the Mary River, whilst the Save the Mary River group has been ru...

The explorer project provides educational tours and activities to schoolchildren using existing low cost technologies. The activities take place in environmentally sensitive and remote locations and are based around a proven curricula developed in collaboration with Queensland schools. To undertake the activities, smart phones are provided to stude...

The project develops a Machinima animation promotional film for the Department of Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University, and evaluates whether the promotional material is more engaging and entertaining than traditional materials; more informative about the provider (its values and facilities); promotes Computer Science as relevant to student l...

The Child Safety Awareness Project develops an online games-based educational resource to provide anti-abduction and sexual abuse prevention strategies for children aged 6 to 8. The key messages and strategies are based on global best practice and advice from the Queensland Police Service, the Crime and Misconduct Commission and Education Queenslan...

Interactive speech based systems are moving into the car since speech interactions are considered less detrimental to the driver than interactions with a display. The introduction of in-car speech-based interactions highlights the potential influence of linguistic and paralinguistic cues such as emotion. Emotions direct and focus people’s attention...

Entertainment robots are becoming commonplace in the home. Users are less fearful of interacting with robotic systems however these interactions are often limited to performing pre-recording sequences of actions. The next generation of consumer-level entertainment robots should offer more natural interfacing and more engaging interaction. This pape...

Computer games are becoming visually realistic, and coupled with more violent storylines and characters there is concern among parents and parts of the media that violent games could encourage aggressive behaviour in those who play them. There have been links made between a number of murders and the violent games played by the murderers. To stimula...

Affect and emotion play an important role in our everyday lives: They are present whatever we do, wherever we are, and wherever we go, without us being aware of them for much of the time. When it comes to interaction, be it with humans, technology, or humans via technology, we suddenly become more aware of emotion, either by seeing the other’s emot...

A real-time user-independent emotion detection system using physiological signals has been developed. The system has the ability to classify affective states into 2-dimensions using valence and arousal. Each dimension ranges from 1 to 5 giving a total of 25 possible affective regions. Physiological signals were measured using 3 biometric sensors fo...

Next generation of consumer-level entertainment robots should offer more natural engaging interaction. This paper reports on the development and evaluation of a consumer-level robotic dog with acoustic emotion recognition capabilities. The dog can recognise the emotional state of its owner from affective cues in the owner's speech and respond with...

The automotive industry are integrating more technologies into the standard new car kit. New cars often provide speech enabled communications such as voice-dial, as well as control over the car cockpit including entertainment systems, climate and satellite navigation. In addition there is the potential for a richer interaction between driver and ca...

The Aective Guide System is a mobile context-aware and spatial-aware system, oering the user with an aective multimodal in- teraction interface. The system takes advantage of the current mobile and wireless technologies. It includes an 'aective guide with attitude' that links its memories and visitor's interest to the spatial location so that stori...

Speech interaction with in-car controls is becoming more commonplace as the interaction is considered to be less distracting to the driver. Cars of today are equipped with speech recognition system to dial phone numbers and to control the cockpit environment. Furthermore satellite navigation systems provide the driver with verbal directions to thei...