
Nelson ZagaloUniversity of Aveiro | UA
Nelson Zagalo
PhD Communication Technology
Scientific Coordinator of DigiMedia, the Digital Media and Interaction Research Centre at University of Aveiro
About
194
Publications
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Introduction
I've been researching the design of interactive experiences for the past 15 years, now I'm focused on engagement design within three dimensions: games, creativity and narrative.
Additional affiliations
Education
September 2002 - July 2007
Publications
Publications (194)
Interactive media designers have been discussing modes to optimize interaction design beyond mere usability. With the arrival of Emotional Design followed by the success of the User Experience (UX) approaches, the discussion continued and augmented. Experience has become a complex buzzword, which is more about the subject’s experience than the prod...
In this article we discuss the emergence of the domain of narrative design in the development of video games, we define the concept departing from the domain of experience design in Human-Computer Interaction and propose a model for the creative approach to the production of narrative in the video games that it intends to give support to narrative...
This article addresses multimodality and expressivity in digital games, from the perspective of audiovisual communication, discussing essential critical dimensions regarding game literacy and experience. An overview on how we make meaning from audiovisual media is presented, to frame the focus on the multimodal cognitive nature of digital games. Af...
Portuguese video game history is mainly characterized by the production of various highly interesting games and game technologies, but ones without international consequence. This means that from 1982 to 2012, we can find highlights in every five-year period; however, these hardly relate to each other, thus failing to grow and empower a Portuguese...
This edited book discusses the exciting field of Digital Creativity. Through exploring the current state of the creative industries, the authors show how technologies are reshaping our creative processes and how they are affecting the innovative creation of new products. Readers will discover how creative production processes are dominated by digit...
A major cinematic component in game storytelling is the camera, offering the player a perspective towards the environment. Although the camera use in game storytelling has been undoubtedly important, there has been lack of understanding of its implications in narrative comprehension and relatedness to the game world. Forty-six young adults aged bet...
Cultural heritage is a vital resource whose loss impoverishes global heritage. Cultural tourism, driven by the desire to learn and experience the culture of destinations, has become a powerful tool for preserving and transmitting cultural heritage. The integration of information and communication technologies within cultural tourism, particularly t...
Media literacy plays a pivotal role in equipping young people to react responsibly during crises, cultivating a critical viewpoint and attitude towards
global incidents. In this light, game-based innovative learning strategies hold extensive potential to facilitate immersive educational experiences for
youngsters, fostering cognitive skill develo...
Cultural tourism is an essential sector for ensuring the preservation of cultural heritage. Although there is a stigma that learning about culture is bland experience, the growth of digital games in this context proves the opposite. Digital games can enhance visitor engagement and foster heritage preservation by integrating game, narrative, and cre...
The widespread dissemination of contradictory information through various media platforms can increase anxiety and confusion among younger generations. This highlights the need to promote Media Literacy (ML) skills, enabling them to evaluate online information's validity critically. Video game-based learning can be valuable in this context, fosteri...
The Checkers Game installation wanted to create a space for reflection on issues that focused on the violation of human rights, particularly the violation of women's rights. For the development of the project, the reality to be contemplated was delimited and, in this sense, an illustration of the framework of feminism in the Portuguese context of t...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been part of every citizen's life for several years. Still, the emergence of generative AI (GenAI), accessible to all, has raised discussions about the ethical issues they raise, particularly in education. GenAI tools generate content according to user requests, but are students using these tools ethically and safel...
As the adoption of XR progressively grows across diverse domains, it is paramount to delve into the factors that can affect the user experience while using XR technology. The purpose of this research was to understand the influence of content type, exposure time, and gender on presence and cybersickness within the context of virtual reality experie...
The prevalence of dementia is a growing concern, affecting approximately fifty-seven million individuals worldwide, with projections indicating a rising incidence. The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted the lives of people with dementia in unforeseen ways, leading to higher social isolation and feelings of loneliness, as well as an increa...
This study aimed to provide an overview of the doctoral theses carried out in the field of Digital Media over the last six years. Two doctoral programs linked to the DigiMedia Research Centre were considered: the Doctorate in Multimedia in Education and the Doctorate in Information and Communication on Digital Platforms.
A total of 46 theses were c...
Game cinematics, consisting of filmmaking techniques, cutscenes, and animations, often play an essential role in the player’s emotional attachment and relatedness with game storytelling. While extensive research has been carried out in game storytelling and design, very little attention has been paid to the role of cinematics in the gameplay experi...
Science communication is an essential activity for institutions, research units and scientists seeking to reach out to the public, find funding opportunities or career advancement. In this article, we intend to better understand and present the reality of science communication practices in Portuguese research units. A questionnaire was drawn up and...
In parallel with the rapid growth of the digital games market, the modding phenomenon has been gaining momentum. Mod culture, a manifestation of the convergence and the remix cultures, emerges as a way to adapt digital games to the needs of their players and incorporate content from other media, such as books, movies, or series, into the game world...
Embora os jovens sejam considerados nativos digitais, os estudos constatam que eles não têm necessariamente a literacia mediática que lhes é frequentemente atribuída (Pereira, 2021). A literacia mediática não é apenas uma questão de saber usar dispositivos específicos, implica uma compreensão crítica aprofundada de como os media funcionam, comunica...
The preservation of cultural heritage is a basilar to support the feeling of identity and community. In this context, cultural tourism emerges as an effective strategy that, when combined with participatory activities, may increment tourist perceptions, contributing simultaneously to the acquisition of knowledge associated with cultural heritage. T...
Keeping players in a video game until its completion has been a challenging task for the industry since there are many reasons for quitting video games. Motivation and the experience of flow are important factors in game completion, as they contribute to the enjoyment and retention of players' attention. Consequently, players who reach a state of f...
There are no recipes or rules to develop games, any more than there are to develop stories. When we try to define a game system that not only has to create a balanced experience, but also has to tell a story, which can engage players in creating empathy and meaning, everything gets complicated. We faced this problem when we had to develop a serious...
Background
No Man’s Sky (NMS) is a sci-fi videogame about survival and exploration where players fly spaceships, search for elements, and use them to build, trade, and survive. Despite evolving around scientific concepts, NMS isn’t a serious game, and not all the scientific content in the game is presented with evidence.
Theory and Method
Looking...
The rapid changes experienced in the industrial development processes to ensure interconnectivity and customization have led to an increasing need to adopt collaborative design practices and consider end-users' context at earliest stages. Such contextual information generates large amounts of data that are usually oversimplistic, overlooking the sp...
(1) Background: serious games seem to show promising strategies to promote treatment compliance and motivate behavior changes, and some studies have proven to contribute to the literature on serious games. (2) Methods: this systematic review aimed to analyze the effect of serious games in promoting healthy eating behaviors, effectively preventing c...
The main objective of this article is to present the video game “Know Me” and expose the obtained results with the performed usability tests and user eXperience evaluations. Gender inequality in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) areas still exists, so it is important to act to tackle this gap. “Know Me” integrates an interacti...
Without a cure for dementia, researchers are focusing on reminiscence therapy, which effectively improves patients' quality of life. The use of virtual reality as a complement to this non-pharmacological therapy could help mitigate the loss of oral communication competencies in people with dementia. This systematic literature review aimed to invest...
Serious games are being developed in many fields of research and proving to be valuable practical tools. In the planning field, games can help approach complexity and engage more participants through first-person experimentation. This paper presents an overview of the main strengths and limitations of applying serious games in spatial planning and...
Objective. Public participation has benefited from innovative engagement tools that
facilitate the negotiation between diverse sets of stakeholders with different
planning perspectives. Our objective is to test and evaluate the use of a fast
Serious Game (SG) to support a participation process in the context of a
conference on urban mobility. We al...
FlavourGame is a hybrid board game, from the serious games category, which aims to promote among children, discussion and awareness for taking correct choices in their nutrition. As part of this project, the design of the characters that make up the game’s narrative is being developed. This process, which is still undergoing, so far involved, in a...
The history of European videogames has so far been overshadowed by the global impact of the Japanese and North American industries. However, European game development studios have played a major role in videogame history, and many prominent videogames in popular culture, such as Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider, Alone in the Dark, and The Witcher, wer...
Keynote for the 1er Congreso Internacional de DiGRA España 2021, delivered at Barcelona, in December 16, 2021.
There are no recipes or rules to develop games, any more than there are to develop stories. Our aim was to develop a serious game with the goal of promoting discussion and awareness among children around nutrition: FlavourGame. For this purpose, we needed not only to design game mechanics, but also to create a narrative that provided meaning to the...
Even a cursory glance at scholarly literature from over a decade ago related to games can show authors variously prefacing their contributions with explanations of the newness of games, the impressive growth of the digital games industry, and the interdisciplinary nature of games [...]
The history of European videogames has been so far overshadowed by the global impact of the Japanese and North American industries. However, European game development studios have played a major role in videogame history, and prominent videogames in popular culture, such as Grand Theft Auto , Tomb Raider and Alone in the Dark were made in Europe. T...
A multimédia fomenta uma compreensão da tecnologia dos meios de comunicação, assim como competências práticas com múltiplos meios. Além de aprender os fundamentos, um programa de 1º ciclo (licenciatura) em multimédia deveria incluir, entre outros conteúdos: criação e produção multimédia; design web, edição e gráfico; produção multimédia corporativa...
FlavourGame is a hybrid board game that falls into the serious games category,
which aims to promote discussion and awareness among children
about the right choices in their nutrition. As part of this project, the design
of the characters that make up the game’s narrative was developed. This
process involved, in a first phase, a small literature re...
There are no perfect recipes to develop a game, even less for creating an effective serious game. Nevertheless, it is crucial to employ methods and protocols to that ensure certain criteria and goals are met during their development. For that intention, we propose the Mechanics for Engagement Design Protocol (MEDP), a procedure that emerges from th...
This paper examines the methods and systems of game design from the standpoint of existing method proposals failing to establish a common basis for systematizing design knowledge, which this paper aims to help resolve. Game design has often been subsumed by game development and associated disciplines, and game design methodology has often been subs...
In this paper we present and discuss the potentialities of using augmented reality and tangible interfaces to enhance kids’ cooking skills within a serious nutrition hybrid board game, grounded in the research project “FlavourGame”. The research project is developing a serious game for kids aged 10-12 years old to generate discussion and sense maki...
Peripheral Interaction is a fairly new area of interaction that arises as a way to reduce the less positive effects of the omnipresence of technology in the daily life of users, through the use of the human capacities of attention. In a predominantly technological era, the development of a new form of interaction that is less evasive and closer to...
O livro Multimédia, Novos Média e Média Digitais surge da necessidade de inscrever um conjunto de conceitos e princípios caros ao ensino da Multimédia em Portugal. Ao longo da última década, a agência nacional de acreditação do ensino superior, a A3ES, foi chamada a intervir e avaliar todos os cursos do ensino superior, politécnico e universitário,...
Keynote at the IV Conference ISCAR Ibérico,
Madrid, May 10, 2021
Communication processes, with their theories and methodologies, are very important in understanding what happens during the experience of an interactive artefact. Of course, the analysis of the experience while being designed gives feedback to the designer and helps in refining it....
Communication made at ISCAR Ibérico IV, May 10, 2021, Madrid, Spain.
A previous literature review indicated the lack of studies about how to develop accessible games for children with Down syndrome and evaluate their interfaces. With that in mind, the research team decided to do a new one focusing only on finding usability methods that can be applied with this specific audience regarding their safety and their condi...
Keynote delivered at Conference 2021. University of Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal, April 22, 2021
Video games are one of the mainstays of audiovisual production and entertainment activities for society. Every year many games are released on the market, which means an evolution for this industry in constant growth and adaptation. This article is part of a research, development and innovation project (R&D&I) that aims to document the process of p...
In this paper we present and discuss the creative process behind a hybrid game, grounded in the research project “FlavourGame”. The research project is developing a serious game for kids aged 10–12 years old to generate discussion and sense-making around nutrition, more specifically everyday choices of nourishment and food. The main aim is to devel...
Keynote delivered at the conference Mix & Match: Hibridismo e Transmaterialidade, at the Department of Languages and Cultures, University of Aveiro, January 27, 2021
In health promotion, public communication campaigns have been used to promote the adoption of appropriate behaviors, or the prevention/ cessation of health risk behaviors. They are the result of marketing activities by health organizations (including research and government institutions), as part of a strategic communication. Serious games have a r...
Welcome to the eighth issue of the Journal of Digital Media & Interaction (JDMI). For this issue we've assembled a set of six articles and one book review, approaching uses and dynamics of enjoyment of digital technologies, in the sense that digital media affect the way we consume informational content, the way we spend our time, and the ways we ha...
A previous research about mobile games and children with Down syndrome left some
questions about the relevance of the game story and how touch screen interfaces can be
used to enhance the engagement of this audience. In this way, a systematic literature
review was needed to find frameworks and guidelines to aid the development of mobile
games for c...
A comunicação de ciência consolidou-se como disciplina e atividade essencial para cientistas e unidades de investigação. Entre os esforços efetuados pelos vários atores no espaço público, a comunicação de ciência também precisa de ser realizada e alimentada a partir dos centros de investigação-plataformas que podem contribuir para a geração de conf...
In this paper we intend to present a theoretical discussion on the definition and specificity of hybrid games and tangible experiences, grounded in the research project “FlavourGame”. The project is developing a serious game for kids aged 10–12 years old to generate discussion and sense-making around nutrition, more specifically everyday choices of...
This paper showcases how the Contract Agency Model can be used to uncover literacy practices in videogame’s own terms as a complement to existing, more ‘indirect’ games literacies, using as an example the videogame Total War: Shogun 2. The paper first situates the Contract Agency Model within approaches to videogames and within approaches to media...
My book "Engagement Design: Designing for Interaction Motivations" has now been published by Springer. Knowing the importance that models have in the applied domains, but also understanding the speed at which everything goes, I decided to write this short text to introduce the book, namely, adding a short explanation about how the model can be used...
In this final chapter, we present the full engagement design model, introducing the whole analysis model developed to work on the research carried out in both the literature and the empirical data supporting the model. Each of the three streams is then presented in contrast to different applications that make use of their principles, from which we...
In this chapter, we discuss the different types of personalities, their mental models and their motivations, in order to find universal users for our engagement design model. Empirical data from video game motivations is interpreted and discussed from different angles using diverse psychological theories. All is then confronted with real personas (...
We discuss the environments that bring together subjects and artefacts, defining what motivates human curiosity and motivation, and how these two cognitive processes operate together to put subjects in will mode. Even if the willingness comes from inside, it is produced through stimulus, through cognitive triggers found in environments surrounding...
Interactive media artefacts are not just products; they work with messages and have specific needs beyond their design. However, the design impacts and transforms these messages. To improve the design of interaction of these media, we have approached experience as being studied in HCI. However, this demonstrated that it was not able to deliver the...
In this chapter, we enter the discussion of the design of artefacts, their representational possibilities and approaches connected with our profiles and contexts. We present the representation divided into three main categories—symbolic, enactive and mimetic—from which we then build a discussion on the different impacts they have on interaction. Th...
After a literature review published by Nascimento et. al. (2017), the research team noticed the lack of studies focused on game controllers’ accessibility during use by children with Down syndrome. In view of that, this research describes a mobile game development and its usability analyses, which were created to evaluate the accessibility of touch...
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Videogame Sciences and Arts, VJ 2019, held in Aveiro, Portugal, in November 2019.
The 20 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 50 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: Games and Theories; Table Boards; eSports; Uses...
With respect to the Walt Disney Pictures repertoire of the past few years, there has been a considerable increase in cinematographic adaptations from animation to live-action. We can identify different types of adaptations, from narrative modifications, extensions of the story, to the remakes of first versions. Contextualizing these sorts of transf...
Welcome to the third issue of the Journal of Digital Media & Interaction (JDMI). For this issue we’ve assembled a set of seven articles, the first four articles being regular and the other three articles constitute a thematic dossier, which is the result of the Internet Day Seminar 2019 organized by DigiMedia / UA.
Estudos recentes apontam que o acesso a dispositivos móveis é universal para crianças dos zero aos oito anos e indicam os tablets como os dispositivos preferidos das crianças. A preferência associa-se à adequação à idade, devido à portabilidade, autonomia de utilização, interação multitouch e variedade de apps e jogos disponíveis nas app Stores, de...
La digitalización afecta no sólo al consumo, sino también a la creación. Las historias no deben diseñarse solo para un medio (pantalla). Como creadores ya no sólo podemos pensar en un medio, sino que debemos pensar en su relación con el ecosistema de los medios, con independencia del futuro en el que nuestras creaciones se desarrollen, hoy en día e...
Welcome to the second issue of the Journal of Digital Media & Interaction (JDMI). For this issue we’ve assembled a set of articles dedicated to discussions of the uses and impacts of social media in youth, and another group discussing game design and methodologies. We continue our mission to address digital communication technologies and its intera...
This paper presents a novel descriptive model for agency in videogames as communication. Literature pertaining to interactive works including videogames has identified the need to overcome dyadic perspectives of communication in such works. Research specifically to do with agency has called for agency to no longer be confused with freedom of action...
Este número especial da revista Estudos em Comunicação é dedicado à discussão de dados e resultados científicos apresentados no 4a encontro em "Narrativa, Media e Cognição" decorrido, no ano anterior, na Universidade da Beira Interior. O número inclui ainda contribuições de diversos autores que trabalham neste campo ou participaram em edições anter...
Through this transdisciplinary and multilingual approach, the JDMI hopes to support the
scientific community in defining the future of communication technologies, in particular all
aspects related to digital media and all its dimensions of interaction.
This article presents a body of work developed to focus on the development of innovative learning materials that promote young children's exploration and collaborative playful learning that have been deeply inspired by Seymour Papert. Through this contribution, we highlight how his research and published concepts have had a fundamental influence up...
Resumo-O trabalho apresenta um estudo sobre o uso do jogo digital de construção de cidades "Città" como ferramenta que explora diferentes situações educacionais voltadas à problemática das cidades e da cidadania. O jogo está em consonância com uma proposta ambientalmente sustentável que estimula a resolução no coletivo, de problemas sociais das cid...
Resumo-Neste artigo pretendemos abordar a relevância do brincar enquanto criador de pontes sociais e abstração cognitiva na primeira infância, mais particularmente em ambientes de jardim de infância. Partindo da necessidade de presença do brinquedo enquanto estimulador do brincar, apresentaremos uma discussão das atuais teorias e uma análise de um...
A história dos videojogos enquanto meio de entretenimento tem mais de 40 anos. Contudo, ao longo da última década, por múltiplas razões, da tecnologia à transformação dos usos dos conteúdos audiovisuais, os videojogos tornaram-se ubí- quos nas comunidades. Se o cinema dominou toda a paisagem criativa popular no século XX, os videojogos posicionaram...