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Seagull: A Bird’s-Eye View of the Evolution of Technical Games Research
Abstract
Within Entertainment Computing, games research has grown to be its own area, with numerous publication venues dedicated to it. As this area evolves, it is fruitful to examine its overall development—which subcommunities and research interests were present from the start, which have come and gone, and which are currently active—to better understand the research community as a whole and where it may proceed. In this paper, we present a data-driven analysis and interactive visualization tool to shed light on how technical domains within the games research field have evolved from 2000 - 2013, based on publication data from over 8,000 articles collected from 48 games research venues, including Entertainment Computing, FDG, AIIDE, and DiGRA. The approach we present is descriptive. We first used data mining algorithms to group related papers into clusters of similar research topics and evolve these clusters over time. We then designed an interactive visualization system, named Seagull, comprised of Sankey diagrams that allow us to interactively visualize and examine the transition and coalescing of different clusters across time. We present our descriptive analysis in this paper and also contribute the visualization interface to allow other researchers to examine the data and develop their own analysis.
... Research in games has been consolidated in recent years with the expansion of journals and the improvement of the scientific field. Reviews confirm the interdisciplinarity and diversity of approaches, which include epistemic and methodological debates (1)(2) . In the health area, Serious Games for Health (SGH) emphasize the game as an educational tool, in different applications (patient compliance, behavior changes, motivations for learning). ...
... c-Cronbach's alpha of all variables retained in the model: 0.502. given the identified scarcity (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8) . Regardless of typology (whether digital or non-digital) or trend adopted when creating a game, the results identify factors underlying a phenomenon that is difficult to measure, the playful, placing it at the center of the epistemic field. ...
... The predominant female gender in the sample and carrying out the research with a single game also limit the extrapolation of results. The findings in general corroborate the universe of investigations on games, which indicate caution in generalizing (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8) . ...
Objective:
to validate Ludic-quest construct and reliability to assess game playfulness, through latent factors in gameplay, perception of learning and emotions in the game.
Methods:
a cross-sectional study to validate the instrument's psychometric properties. 247 people responded to the questionnaire after a match in the game Violetas. Exploratory Factor Analysis, using KMO (>0.7), Bertlett (p=0.005), Varimax and factor loading (>0.6). Reliability by Cronbach's alpha (>0.6).
Results:
in gameplay/learning, KMO=0.859, Bertlett significant. The eigenvalue indicated four factors (reflections; immersion; challenges; aesthetics), 10 retained variables. In the factor analysis of emotions: KMO=0.817; Bartlett p=0.000. Extraction of four factors (pleasure; ostraenie; tension; fun), 10 retained variables. The 20 validated variables contain reliability (Cronbach's alpha=0.716).
Conclusions:
the eight validated factors centralize playfulness in health game production, composing a reliable playfulness assessment instrument for use in research.
... But previously, we must take into account that there are works which use the term "games" in general, instead the broader term "videogames". For instance in [6] an analysis of co-words ...
... But previously, we must take into account that there are works which use the term "games" in general, instead the broader term "videogames". For instance in [6] an analysis of co-words and co-venues was made, from a selection of 48 core game journals and conferences, instead searching by term, detecting the appearance of 7 sub-communities. However, as its authors mention, in this work it has been possible to obviate works in interdisciplinary sources. ...
Videogames are a very interesting area of research for fields as diverse as computer science, health, psychology or even social sciences. Every year a growing number of articles are published in different topics inside this field, so it is very convenient to study the different bibliometric data in order to consolidate the research efforts.
Thus, the aim of this work is to conduct a study on the distribution of articles related to videogames in the different fields of research, as well as to measure their interest over time, to identify the sources, countries and authors with the highest scientific production. In order to carry out this analysis, the information system Dimensions.ai has been considered, since it covers a large number of documents and allows for easy downloading and analysis of datasets.
According to the study, three countries are the most prolific in this area: USA, Canada and UK. The obtained results also indicate that the fields with the highest number of publications are Information and Computer Sciences, Medical and Health Sciences, and Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, in this order. With regard to the impact of the publications, differences between the number of citations, and the number of Altmetric Attention Score, have been found.
... The use of online games has grown beyond entertainment or play; of the many contexts employing games, learning has been one field dominated by their implementation [10,11]. Three concepts have been cultivated in this aspect: gamification, game-based learning (GBL) [12], and serious games [13,14]. ...
Educational technology plays a major role in today's learning as it offers significant advantages in delivering learning content, classroom communications, and assessing learners. Assessment is a cornerstone in modern and formal education and is particularly necessary for tracking progress, measuring knowledge or achievement, and planning future educational steps. This study investigates the effects of using an online game-based learning (GBL) approach in students' assessment in terms of their performance and self-efficacy in English as a foreign language (EFL) learning. A quasi-experiment was conducted on intermediate school-level students, who were divided into two groups, namely control and experimental. Each group underwent an English language test conducted through a Google Form and a role-playing game developed to mimic the functionality of an assessment tool. The results indicate that the performance of the experiment group was neither affected positively nor negatively using the GBL assessment tool. On the other hand, the results also show that using such a tool has positively affected students' self-efficacy levels.
... An analysis framework for requirements engineering games is also available [11]. Emerging research trends in this interdisciplinary community include an increased focus on automation (e.g., [5]), data analytics and visualization (e.g., [16,18,14] GAS 2023 was based on the previous GAS Workshops [24,3,10,4,7] with a greater focus on sharing and advancing game engineering and software engineering techniques. The goal of GAS 2023 was to bring the attention of interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners to the opportunities and challenges involved in the new trends and issues related to the development of entertainment games, serious games, and gamified applications. ...
Games are a popular form of entertainment and, due to their nature (i.e., interactive, immersive, etc.), strongly lend themselves for use beyond this original intent. Serious games, or games with a purpose, have been introduced to integrate the entertainment value games with domain specific objectives on important topics within education, health, and the environment to mention a few. In addition, gamification has been used to enhance nonentertainment applications with game elements; it aspires to foster behavioral changes, engagement, motivation, and participation in activities. In this context, the actions performed have meaning/value in the game experience in order to improve workplace performance or learn something in real life.
The growing adoption of gameful experiences in all of the previous contexts make their design and development increasingly complex due to, for example, the number and variety of users, and their potential mission criticality. This complexity is nurtured, among the other factors, by a lack of theoretical grounding and adequate frameworks to engineer the intended solutions. In this paper, we report the outcomes of the 6th International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering: Engineering fun, inspiration, and motivation (GAS 2023 ) 1, which was held as part of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2022) in Pittsburgh, PA, USA on May 20, 2022.
The workshop program includes two exciting keynotes discussing topics related to training and learning, and fulfilling the promise and potential of gamification. The two paper sessions examined gamification from the perspectives of software project, testing, and, design. The conclusion of the workshop is anchored by a panel of four highly qualified researchers and practitioners discussing lessons learned and the future of gamification.
... We chose the interactive narrative genre for Resilient IN's design since interactive narratives are a highly accessible genre of games due to a low demand on player actions, focus on storytelling, and role-playing elements all helping to engage a larger audience [11,69]. 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]. ...
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
... Prior work has argued for interactive storytelling's power in terms of providing therapeutic benefits Starks et al. (2016), Dias et al. (2018) and enabling learning experiences through educational games Weiß and Müller, (2008), Danilicheva et al. (2009), Melcer et al. (2015, Nguyen et al. (2018), Camingue et al. (2020). Specifically, narrative/storytelling is an important element that can be incorporated into educational games in order to maintain and increase students' motivation Dickey, (2006), Rowe et al. (2011), Padilla-Zea et al. (2014, with some suggesting that integration of a good story into an educational game will determine its success or failure Göbel et al. (2009). ...
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 hope to further improve their enjoyment, engagement and efficacy. In this article, we present a case study exploring how the motivational factors of Self-Determination Theory (SDT) underlie players’ perceived most and least enjoyable experiences arising from the design of Academical. Specifically, we discuss how certain elements of Academical’s design influence different SDT factors and subsequently player experience, as well as how such elements can be changed to further improve the game. Furthermore, our work highlights potential limitations of existing conceptualizations for the relatedness factor of SDT—discussing ways that it can be extended to properly understand player enjoyment within single-player educational interactive narrative games.
... Visual, auditory, tactile, and kinaesthetic are the four main learning methods (Deng and Yu, 2014). It was evident that most extant studies had been focussed on discussing the technical aspects of game-based teaching and had further illustrated the importance of adapting to new or up to date technology, especially when teaching by means of gamified elements (Aldecoa and Okada, 2015;Arango-López, Collazos, and Velas, 2018;Breyer, 2019;DeWinter and Moeller, 2016;Faustmann et al., 2019;Krevskiy et al., 2016;Morschheuser, Hamari, and Koivisto, 2017;Nguyen et al., 2018;Souza and Marques, 2020;Sukenasa et al., 2020;Urías, Chust, and Carrasco, 2016;Yasin et al., 2018;Ye, Feng, Yang, Yang, and Yang, 2019). ...
Over the last few years, gamification has sparked significant interest in both industry and academia. However, the focus of the debate has been mostly on game studies and human-computer interaction (HCI). Even though games are increasingly being supplied as services to customers, few academic works have linked game studies to the service or marketing literature (Dikcius and Urbonavicius, 2020; Dukembay and Zhaksylyk, 2019). This paper presents an examination of the emerging trends of gamification and e-learning for young learners. The first section presents a text-based cluster bibliometric analysis based on 222 qualified articles published between 2015 and 2020. We conducted this analysis to identify the most prominent themes in the literature through cluster identification via the VOS viewer software. As the themes were found to be interlinked, the second section presents a systematic literature review based on a bibliometric analysis performed using the PRISMA method on 32 qualified articles. The findings highlighted the four major future research themes of personalization, game elements, learner styles, and learner engagement. Finally, we provide a future research agenda based on the theory, characteristics, context, and methodology (TCCM) framework. Our findings offer key insights aimed at enabling actors in education policy making and gamification-based software companies and agencies to identify the gamification techniques best suited for e-learning.
... Prior work has argued for interactive storytelling's power in terms of evoking empathy (Bratitsis 2016;Salter 2016;Samuel et al. 2017), 1 providing therapeutic benefits (Dias et al. 2018;Starks et al. 2016), and enabling learning experiences through educational games (Camingue et al. 2020;Danilicheva et al. 2009;Melcer et al. 2015;Nguyen et al. 2018;Weiß and Müller 2008). Specifically, narrative/storytelling is an important element that can be incorporated into educational games in order to maintain and increase students' motivation (Dickey 2006;Padilla-Zea et al. 2014;Rowe et al. 2011), with some suggesting that integration of a good story into an educational game will determine its success or failure (Göbel et al. 2009). ...
Responsible conduct of research (RCR) is an essential skill for all researchers to develop, but training scientists to behave ethically is complex because it requires addressing both cognitive (e.g., conceptual knowledge and moral reasoning skills) and socio-affective (e.g., attitudes) learning outcomes. Both classroom- and web-based forms of RCR training struggle to address these distinct types of learning outcomes simultaneously. This chapter presents a pair of experiments providing initial evidence that playing a single brief session of Academical, a choice-based interactive narrative game, has positive effects on all three key RCR learning outcomes. Our results highlight that utilizing a choice-based interactive storytelling game is a uniquely effective way to holistically address RCR learning outcomes that drive ethical research behaviors.
... Interactive storytelling has substantial potential for education and games [6,8,36,41,69]. Specifically, narrative/storytelling is an important element that can be incorporated into educational games in order to maintain and increase students' motivation [7,10,44,53], with some suggesting that integration of a good story into an educational game will determine its success or failure [13]. Interactive storytelling has been incorporated into a number of educational games focusing on topics such as history [7,61], STEM [8,70,73], and bullying [2,67]. ...
Concepts utilizing applied ethics, such as responsible conduct of research (RCR), can prove difficult to teach due to the complexity of problems faced by researchers and the many underlying perspectives involved in such dilemmas. To address this issue, we created Academical, a choice-based interactive storytelling game for RCR education that enables players to experience a story from multiple perspectives. In this paper, we describe the design rationale of Academical, and present results from an initial study comparing it with traditional web-based educational materials from an existing university RCR course. The results highlight that utilizing a choice-based interactive story game is more effective for RCR education, with learners developing significantly higher engagement, stronger overall moral reasoning skills, and better knowledge scores for certain RCR topics.
... When interactive, they afford personalised queries, and thus more in-depth and succinct analyses. Previous systematic mapping studies that leverage this technique include: a visualisation of the evolution of technical games research [48], a tool to support the review of HCI and InfoVis literature [53], a system to visualise research trends in conferences [40] and an interactive characterisation of the state of the art in visualizing dynamic graphs [11]. Inspired by these examples, we designed an online tool to allow dynamic visualisation of our dataset using the HFI taxonomy. ...
Activity in Human-Food Interaction (HFI) research is sky-rocketing across a broad range of disciplinary interests and concerns. The dynamic and heterogeneous nature of this emerging field presents a challenge to scholars wishing to critically engage with prior work, identify gaps and ensure impact. It also challenges the formation of community. We present a Systematic Mapping Study of HFI research and an online data visualisation tool developed to respond to these issues. The tool allows researchers to engage in new ways with the HFI literature, propose modifications and additions to the review, and thereby actively engage in community-making. Our contribution is threefold: (1) we characterize the state of HFI, reporting trends, challenges and opportunities; (2) we provide a taxonomy and tool for diffractive reading of the literature; and (3) we offer our approach for adaptation by research fields facing similar challenges, positing value of the tool and approach beyond HFI. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → HCI theory, concepts and models. * Altarriba Bertran and Wilde are co-first authors.
... When interactive, they afford personalised queries, and thus more in-depth and succinct analyses. Previous systematic mapping studies that leverage this technique include: a visualisation of the evolution of technical games research [48], a tool to support the review of HCI and InfoVis literature [53], a system to visualise research trends in conferences [40] and an interactive characterisation of the state of the art in visualizing dynamic graphs [11]. Inspired by these examples, we designed an online tool to allow dynamic visualisation of our dataset using the HFI taxonomy. ...
Activity in Human-Food Interaction (HFI) research is sky-rocketing across a broad range of disciplinary interests and concerns. The dynamic and heterogeneous nature of this emerging field presents a challenge to scholars wishing to critically engage with prior work, identify gaps and ensure impact. It also challenges the formation of community. We present a Systematic Mapping Study of HFI research and an online data visualisation tool developed to respond to these issues. The tool allows researchers to engage in new ways with the HFI literature, propose modifications and additions to the review, and thereby actively engage in community-making. Our contribution is threefold: (1) we characterize the state of HFI, reporting trends, challenges and opportunities; (2) we provide a taxonomy and tool for diffractive reading of the literature; and (3) we offer our approach for adaptation by research fields facing similar challenges, positing value of the tool and approach beyond HFI. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → HCI theory, concepts and models. * Altarriba Bertran and Wilde are co-first authors.
The potential benefits of using the engaging and interactive nature of games to achieve specific objectives have been recognized by researchers and professionals from numerous domains. Serious games have been developed to impart knowledge, skills, and awareness in areas such as education, healthcare and the environment, while gamification has been applied to enhance the engagement, motivation, and participation of users in non-game activities such as sustainability and learning. As a result, the fields of game engineering, software engineering, and user experience are increasingly converging to create innovative solutions that blend the strengths of games with real-world applications.
Background
As entrustable professional activities (EPAs) are implemented in graduate medical education, there is a great need for tools to efficiently and objectively evaluate clinical competence. Readiness for entrustment in surgery requires not only assessment of technical ability, but also the critical skill of clinical decision-making.
Objective
We report the development of ENTRUST, a serious game-based, virtual patient case creation and simulation platform to assess trainees' decision-making competence. A case scenario and corresponding scoring algorithm for the Inguinal Hernia EPA was iteratively developed and aligned with the description and essential functions outlined by the American Board of Surgery. In this study we report preliminary feasibility data and validity evidence.
Methods
In January 2021, the case scenario was deployed and piloted on ENTRUST with 19 participants of varying surgical expertise levels to demonstrate proof of concept and initial validity evidence. Total score, preoperative sub-score, and intraoperative sub-score were analyzed by training level and years of medical experience using Spearman rank correlations. Participants completed a Likert scale user acceptance survey (1=strongly agree to 7=strongly disagree).
Results
Median total score and intraoperative mode sub-score were higher with each progressive level of training (rho=0.79, P<.001 and rho=0.69, P=.001, respectively). There were significant correlations between performance and years of medical experience for total score (rho=0.82, P<.001) and intraoperative sub-scores (rho=0.70, P<.001). Participants reported high levels of platform engagement (mean 2.06) and ease of use (mean 1.88).
Conclusions
Our study demonstrates feasibility and early validity evidence for ENTRUST as an assessment platform for clinical decision-making.
Understanding the evolutionary relationships among scientific topics and learning the evolutionary process of innovations is a crucial issue for strategic decision makers in governments, firms and funding agencies when they carry out forward-looking research activities. However, traditional co-word network analysis on topic identification cannot effectively excavate semantic relationship from the context, and fixed time window method cannot scientifically reflect the evolution process of topics. This study proposes a framework of identifying topic evolutionary pathways based on network analytics: Firstly, keyword networks are constructed, in which a piecewise linear representation method is used for dividing time periods and a Word2Vec mode is used for capturing semantics from the context of titles and abstracts; Secondly, a community detection algorithm is used to identify topics in networks; Finally, evolutionary relationships between topics are represented by measuring the topic similarity between adjacent time periods, and then topic evolutionary pathways are identified and visualized. An empirical study on information science demonstrates the reliability of the methodology, with subsequent empirical validations.
This special issue of Games and Culture aims to engage in dialogue between different traditions of doing games research and to stimulate reflective responses about the overall state of the field.
Recent work has highlighted a notable divide in communication and collaboration between technical and social science/humanities disciplines within games research. In order to provide deeper insight around this apparent separation and underlying difference in epis-temic cultures, we interviewed experts from various communities within games research. Our findings highlight some fundamental differences in research methodologies, publication practices, and epistemic cultures that need consideration in the larger discussion around future directions of games research. We in turn utilize these differing viewpoints to consider an assortment of approaches that could potentially better address the needs of technical, social science, and humanities sub-communities within games research.
Train stations, shopping malls and airports: all public places where we spend a lot of time, waiting for the train, for our friends and for the gate to open. While waiting, we get bored and we would like to entertain ourselves in order to kill time. The first thing that comes to our minds is playing a game or socializing using our smartphone. People around you are doing the exact same thing. Wouldn’t it be great if you could play a game with those people, a game which requires collaboration and interaction with your surroundings?
This is exactly where Paintrix comes into play: gather people, form two teams and let them collaborate and compete at the same time. Teams have to solve the same puzzle against the clock. Be faster than your opposing team to win! How does this work?
The field of distance education is composed of a multiplicity of topics leading to a vast array of research literature. However, the research does not provide a chronological picture of the topics it addresses, making it difficult to develop an overview of the evolution and trends in the literature. To address this issue, a co-word analysis was performed on the abstracts of research articles found in two prominent North American research journals (N = 517), the American Journal of Distance Education and the Journal of Distance Education, between 1987 and 2005. The analysis yielded underlying trends and themes for three different periods (pre-Web, emerging Web, and maturing Web). Additionally, similarity index analyses were conducted across time periods. The pre-Web era was characterized by the need for quality and development. The emerging Web era was characterized by the development of theory. The maturing Web era was characterized by interaction and the use of tools for communication. The results demonstrate that the North American distance education research literature is characterized by having few consistent and focused lines of inquiry. Conclusions are provided.
Serious games are growing rapidly as a gaming industry as well as a field of academic research. There are many surveys in the field of digital serious games; however, most surveys are specific to a particular area such as education or health. So far, there has been little work done to survey digital serious games in general, which is the main goal of this paper. Hence, we discuss relevant work on serious games in different application areas including education, well-being, advertisement, cultural heritage, interpersonal communication, and health care. We also propose a taxonomy for digital serious games, and we suggest a classification of reviewed serious games applications from the literature against the defined taxonomy. Finally, the paper provides guidelines, drawn from the literature, for the design and development of successful serious games, as well as discussing research perspectives in this domain.
Digital games have become a popular form of media entertainment. However, it remains unclear whether a canon of accepted knowledge and research practices has emerged that may define an independent field of research. The present study is a collaborative effort to analyze the outlines of digital games research (DGR) through a survey among the membership of three institutionalized structures focusing on the study of digital games (ICA Game Studies IG, ECREA TWG Digital Games Research, and DiGRA). The study reveals relatively homogeneous viewpoints among games researchers, even regarding controversial aspects of digital games. It
mirrors the mainstream scholarly views on contentious issues of a recently emerged field within communication studies.
The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the historical origins of Serious Games to try to understand where the current wave of " Serious Games " comes from. We first review the origins of the " Serious Games " oxymoron. We will then analyse digital games designed for serious purposes before the 2000's. Such games can be traced back to the beginning of the history of video games. We will use all these elements to discuss how the current wave of " Serious Games " began; and to highlight the differences between " Serious Games " and their ancestors.
Behavioral pattern discovery is increasingly being studied to understand human behavior and the discovered patterns can be used in many real world applications such as web search, recommender system and advertisement targeting. Traditional methods usually consider the behaviors as simple user and item connections, or represent them with a static model. In real world, however, human behaviors are actually complex and dynamic: they include correlations between user and multiple types of objects and also continuously evolve along time. These characteristics cause severe data sparsity and computational complexity problem, which pose great challenge to human behavioral analysis and prediction. In this paper, we propose a Flexible Evolutionary Multi-faceted Analysis (FEMA) framework for both behavior prediction and pattern mining. FEMA utilizes a flexible and dynamic factorization scheme for analyzing human behavioral data sequences, which can incorporate various knowledge embedded in different object domains to alleviate the sparsity problem. We give approximation algorithms for efficiency, where the bound of approximation loss is theoretically proved. We extensively evaluate the proposed method in two real datasets. For the prediction of human behaviors, the proposed FEMA significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art baseline methods by 17.4%. Moreover, FEMA is able to discover quite a number of interesting multi-faceted temporal patterns on human behaviors with good interpretability. More importantly, it can reduce the run time from hours to minutes, which is significant for industry to serve real-time applications.
The number of scholarly documents available on the web is estimated using capture/recapture methods by studying the coverage of two major academic search engines: Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search. Our estimates show that at least 114 million English-language scholarly documents are accessible on the web, of which Google Scholar has nearly 100 million. Of these, we estimate that at least 27 million (24%) are freely available since they do not require a subscription or payment of any kind. In addition, at a finer scale, we also estimate the number of scholarly documents on the web for fifteen fields: Agricultural Science, Arts and Humanities, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Economics and Business, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geosciences, Material Science, Mathematics, Medicine, Physics, Social Sciences, and Multidisciplinary, as defined by Microsoft Academic Search. In addition, we show that among these fields the percentage of documents defined as freely available varies significantly, i.e., from 12 to 50%.
There has been academic research work directed at games and play for decades, but the field has been somewhat scattered, and around the turn of the millennium the idea of establishing a new discipline, dedicated to the study of games in their own right gained prominence. The conference, journal and other publication activity in games research has expanded during the last decade, but it remains unclear how many contemporary academics working on games could be seen to represent a unified group, sharing a common disciplinary identity. This paper reports the first results from an international survey (valid n = 544), carried out among the DiGRA mailing list subscribers, as well as among the members of ECREA and ICA games research groups, aimed at probing the background education, orientation and academic practices of games researchers. The findings highlight the great diversity of educational backgrounds and of the current self-identified research fields, but also the dynamic interdisciplinary changes from one field to another, and how strong the identification as a textquotedblleftdigital games researchertextquotedblright is among the survey respondents.
This study employs hierarchical cluster analysis, strategic diagrams and network analysis to map and visualize the intellectual landscape of the CHI conference on Human Computer Interaction through the use of co-word analysis. The study quantifies and describes the thematic evolution of the field based on a total of 3152 CHI articles and their associated 16035 keywords published between 1994 and 2013. The analysis is conducted for two time periods (1994-2003, 2004-2013) and a comparison between them highlights the underlying trends in our community. More significantly, this study identifies the evolution of major themes in the discipline, and highlights individual topics as popular, core, or backbone research topics within HCI.
Games constitute a research domain that is attracting the interest of
scientists from numerous disciplines. This is particularly true from the
perspective of computational intelligence. In order to examine the
growing importance of this area in the gaming domain, we present an
analysis of the scientific collaboration network of researchers working
on computational intelligence in games (CIG). This network has been
constructed from bibliographical data obtained from the Digital
Bibliography & Library Project (DBLP). We have analyzed from a
temporal perspective several properties of the CIG network at the
macroscopic, mesoscopic and microscopic levels, studying the large-scale
structure, the growth mechanics, and collaboration patterns among other
features. Overall, computational intelligence in games exhibits
similarities with other collaboration networks such as for example a
log-normal degree distribution and sub-linear preferential attachment
for new authors. It also has distinctive features, e.g. the number of
papers co-authored is exponentially distributed, the internal
preferential attachment (new collaborations among existing authors) is
linear, and fidelity rates (measured as the relative preference for
publishing with previous collaborators) grow super-linearly. The
macroscopic and mesoscopic evolution of the network indicates the field
is very active and vibrant, but it is still at an early developmental
stage. We have also analyzed communities and central nodes and how these
are reflected in research topics, thus identifying active research
subareas.
This paper presents a review of the state of the art in Augmented Reality (AR) games. Distinguished ad-vancements in terms of entertainment and serious games from both the research and industry are presented. These works are then analyzed across metrics like tech-nology usage, game genre and chronology. Via this anal-ysis, trends are extracted and novel insights into promis-ing domains are eventually concluded, in both the per-spectives of research and commercial development.
During recent years “gamification” has gained significant attention among practitioners and game scholars. However, the current understanding of gamification has been solely based on the act of adding systemic game elements into services. In this paper, we propose a new definition for gamification, which emphases the experiential nature of games and gamification, instead of the systemic understanding. Furthermore, we tie this definition to theory from service marketing because majority of gamification implementations aim towards goals of marketing, which brings to the discussion the notion of how customer / user is always ultimately the creator of value. Since now, the main venue for academic discussion on gamification has mainly been the HCI community. We find it relevant both for industry practitioners as well as for academics to study how gamification can fit in the body of knowledge of existing service literature because the goals and the means of gamification and marketing have a significant overlap.
Recent years have seen a rapid proliferation of mass-market consumer software that takes inspiration from video games. Usually summarized as "gamification", this trend connects to a sizeable body of existing concepts and research in human-computer interaction and game studies, such as serious games, pervasive games, alternate reality games, or playful design. However, it is not clear how "gamification" relates to these, whether it denotes a novel phenomenon, and how to define it. Thus, in this paper we investigate "gamification" and the historical origins of the term in relation to precursors and similar concepts. It is suggested that "gamified" applications provide insight into novel, gameful phenomena complementary to playful phenomena. Based on our research, we propose a definition of "gamification" as the use of game design elements in non-game contexts.
This article presents an application of a bibliometric and visual study of the research carried out on a social science subfield, concretely the consumer behaviour research (CBR), from a longitudinal perspective (period 1966–2008). The study combines perfor-mance analysis and science mapping for detecting and visualizing conceptual subdomains. Quantitative and qualitative measures are used in order to identify the most prominent themes. Quantitative data are used to put together very related concepts (themes or clusters of topics), while qualitative indicators (as those based on citations) are used to measure the quality and/or impact of the detected themes. The study also uses bibliometric maps to show in a visual way the associations between the main concepts treated by the CBR community. The maps provide insight into the structure of the CBR, visualize the division of the field into several subfields, and indicate the relationships between these subfields. Co-word analysis is the bibliometric technique used to identify the main themes. All this allows us to quantify and visualize the thematic evolution of the CBR. It also helps to both experts and novices to understand the current state of the art of the CBR and to predict where future research could lead.
Pervasive Games have become popular in recent years. Their ambitious goal is to bring the computer into the world in order to augment existing games or to even come up with hitherto impossible or unthought-of forms of entertainment. This paper reflects on the various approaches to define what Pervasive Games consist of, how they relate to playing and games, and how different terms and views can be integrated. The paper contributes a unifying and integrating classification of the respective terms that relates different states of reality to the relevant dimensions and game elements.
This paper introduces a novel and domain-independent method for automatically extracting keywords, as sequences of one or more words, from individual documents. We describe the methods configuration parameters and algorithm, and present an evaluation on a benchmark corpus of technical abstracts. We also present a method for generating lists of stop words for specific corpora and domains, and evaluate its ability to improve keyword extraction on the benchmark corpus. Finally, we apply our method of automatic keyword extraction to a corpus of news articles and define metrics for characterizing the exclusivity, essentiality, and generality of extracted keywords within a corpus.
Science mapping aims to build bibliometric maps that describe how specific disciplines, scientific domains, or research fields are conceptually, intellectually, and socially structured. Different techniques and software tools have been proposed to carry out science mapping analysis. The aim of this article is to review, analyze, and compare some of these software tools, taking into account aspects such as the bibliometric techniques available and the different kinds of analysis.
Pervasive gaming is a new form of multimedia entertainment that extends the traditional computer gaming experience out into the real world. Through a combination of personal devices, positioning systems and other multimedia sensors, combined with wireless networking, a pervasive game can respond to a player's movements and context and enable them to communicate with a game server and other players. We review recent examples of pervasive games in order to explain their distinctive characteristics as multimedia applications. We then consider the challenge of scaling pervasive games to include potentially very large numbers of players. We propose a new approach based upon a campaign model in which individuals, local groups and experts draw on a combination of pervasive games, online services and broadcasting to take part in national or even global events. We discuss the challenges that this raises for further research.
Pervasive games provide a new type of game combining new technologies with the real environment of the players. While this already poses new challenges to the game developer, requirements are even higher for pervasive Augmented Reality games, where the real environment is additionally enhanced by virtual game items. In this paper we will review the technological challenges to be met in order to realize pervasive AR games, show how they go beyond those of other pervasive games, and present how our AR framework copes with them. We will further show how these approaches are applied to three pervasive AR games and draw conclusions regarding the future requirements regarding the support of this type of games.
We present VOSviewer, a freely available computer program that we have developed for constructing and viewing bibliometric maps. Unlike most computer programs that are used for bibliometric mapping, VOSviewer pays special attention to the graphical representation of bibliometric maps. The functionality of VOSviewer is especially useful for displaying large bibliometric maps in an easy-to-interpret way. The paper consists of three parts. In the first part, an overview of VOSviewer's functionality for displaying bibliometric maps is provided. In the second part, the technical implementation of specific parts of the program is discussed. Finally, in the third part, VOSviewer's ability to handle large maps is demonstrated by using the program to construct and display a co-citation map of 5,000 major scientific journals.
Virtual worlds, shared graphical spaces on the Internet, are an exciting new medium of human presence for the 21st Century. This article explores the origins, evolution and future of the virtual world medium from their humble beginnings in multi-player games to their use in education, business, science and engineering. Our focus will be on the development of social virtual worlds including environments such as Habitat, Active Worlds and Second Life.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the First Joint International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling, ICIDS 2008, held in Erfurt, Germany, in November 2008.
The 19 revised full papers, 5 revised short papers, and 5 poster papers presented together with 3 invited lectures and 8 demo papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 62 submission. The papers are organized in topical sections on future perspectives on interactive digital storytelling, interactive storytelling applications, virtual characters and agents, user experience and dramatic immersion, architectures for story generation, models for drama management and interacting with stories, as well as authoring and creation of interactive narrative.
This article proposes a reflexive approach on the scientific production in the field of game studies in recent years. It relies on a sociology of science perspective to answer the question: What are game studies really about? Relying on scientometric and lexicometric tools, we analyze the metadata and content of a corpus of articles from the journals Games Studies and Games & Culture and of Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) proceedings. We show that published researches have been studying only a limited set of game genres and that they especially focus on online games. We then expose the different ways game studies are talking about games through a topic model analysis of our corpus. We test two hypotheses to explain the concentration of research on singular objects: path dependence and trading zone. We describe integrative properties of the focus on common objects but stress also the scientific limits met by this tendency.
This paper attempts to give a high-level overview of the field of artificial and computational intelligence (AI/CI) in games, with particular reference to how the different core research areas within this field inform and interact with each other, both actually and potentially. We identify ten main research areas within this field: NPC behavior learning, search and planning, player modeling, games as AI benchmarks, procedural content generation, computational narrative, believable agents, AI-assisted game design, general game artificial intelligence and AI in commercial games. We view and analyze the areas from three key perspectives: 1) the dominant AI method(s) used under each area; 2) the relation of each area with respect to the end (human) user; and 3) the placement of each area within a human-computer (player-game) interaction perspective. In addition, for each of these areas we consider how it could inform or interact with each of the other areas; in those cases where we find that meaningful interaction either exists or is possible, we describe the character of that interaction and provide references to published studies, if any. We believe that this paper improves understanding of the current nature of the game AI/CI research field and the interdependences between its core areas by providing a unifying overview. We also believe that the discussion of potential interactions between research areas provides a pointer to many interesting future research projects and unexplored subfields.
Mining network evolution has emerged as an intriguing research topic in many domains such as data mining, social networks, and machine learning. While a bulk of research has focused on mining evolutionary patterns of homogeneous networks (e.g., networks of friends), however, most real-world networks are heterogeneous, containing objects of different types, such as authors, papers, venues, and terms in a bibliographic network. Modeling co-evolution of multityped objects can capture richer information than that on single-typed objects alone. For example, studying co-evolution of authors, venues, and terms in a bibliographic network can tell better the evolution of research areas than just examining co-author network or term network alone. In this paper, we study mining co-evolution of multityped objects in a special type of heterogeneous networks, called star networks, and examine how the multityped objects influence each other in the network evolution. A hierarchical Dirichlet process mixture model-based evolution model is proposed, which detects the co-evolution of multityped objects in the form of multityped cluster evolution in dynamic star networks. An efficient inference algorithm is provided to learn the proposed model. Experiments on several real networks (DBLP, Twitter, and Delicious) validate the effectiveness of the model and the scalability of the algorithm.
This survey of the evolution of the smartphone discusses how technology finally caught up with visions of an integrated device and considers what's next on the horizon. In particular, the authors focus on six trends that they predict will strongly influence the function and design of future smartphones-personal computing, the Internet of Things, multimedia delivery, low power operation, wearable computing, and context awareness.
We present CitNetExplorer, a new software tool for analyzing and visualizing
citation networks of scientific publications. CitNetExplorer can for instance
be used to study the development of a research field, to delineate the
literature on a research topic, and to support literature reviewing. We first
introduce the main concepts that need to be understood when working with
CitNetExplorer. We then demonstrate CitNetExplorer by using the tool to analyze
the scientometric literature and the literature on community detection in
networks. Finally, we discuss some technical details on the construction,
visualization, and analysis of citation networks in CitNetExplorer.
This paper relates the results of a co-word analysis of over 70 years of biological safety literature. The database used in this project is theSonger Safety Bibliography (SSB) which lists around 17 000 references. The results show biological safety to be a very fragmented field, characterized by the existence of several relatively independent foci of interest, none of which has been able to structure the field into a tight network. Early periods of activity were marked by the construction of the basic tools of biological safety practices. Those tools became a “robust package” which, in more recent periods, was used routinely. While the safety problems related to recombinant DNA research have received much attention in the general press, they do not seem to occupy a prominent place within the biological safety literature, at least the one compiled in SSB.
We use a co-word analysis of the key words of 6055 articles that appeared in the psychology of work from 1973 to 1987 and were listed in the PASCAL database to bring out changes in the scientific themes of the field. We can discern which themes remained significant and which disappeared, as well as the psychology of work's borrowings from and contributions to other disciplines. Co-word analysis therefore constitutes a new tool in the science policy arena.
In this article I argue for a critical analysis and re-evaluation of the term pervasive. Due to ambiguous definitions in both the discourse on computing and gaming, this term has become theoretically entangled with others. This has led to multiple definitions, and also, in the case of gaming, to the neglect of the different perspectives in which a game can be pervasive. In the current nascent stage of research into pervasive gaming, in which attempts are being made to theorize this concept, I argue for an analytical overview of the use of the term pervasive in order to understand the different perspectives in which it is used.
Virtual worlds, where thousands of people can interact simultaneously within the same three-dimensional environment, represent a frontier in social computing with critical implications for business, education, social sciences, and our society at large. In this paper, we first trace the history of virtual worlds back to its antecedents in electronic gaming and on-line social networking. We then provide an overview of extant virtual worlds, including education-focused, theme-based, community-specific, children-focused, and self-determined worlds – and we analyze the relationship among these worlds according to an initial taxonomy for the area. Recognizing the apparent leadership of Second Life among today's self-determined virtual worlds, we present a detailed case study of this environment, including surveys of 138 residents regarding how they perceive and utilize the environment. Lastly, we provide a literature review of existing virtual world research, with a focus on business research, and a condensed summary of research issues in education, social sciences, and humanities.
Pervasive gaming is a genre of gaming systematically blurring and breaking the traditional boundaries of game. The limits of the magic circle are explored in spatial, temporal and social dimensions. These ways of expanding the game are not new, since many intentional and unintentional examples of similar expansions can be found from earlier games, but the recently emerged fashion of pervasive gaming is differentiated with the use of these expansions in new, efficient ways to produce new kinds of gameplay experiences. These new game genres include alternate reality games, reality games, trans-reality games and crossmedia games.
This study is a ten-year critical review of empirical research on the educational applications of Virtual Reality (VR). Results show that although the majority of the 53 reviewed articles refer to science and mathematics, researchers from social sciences also seem to appreciate the educational value of VR and incorporate their learning goals in Educational Virtual Environments (EVEs). Although VR supports multisensory interaction channels, visual representations predominate. Few are the studies that incorporate intuitive interactivity, indicating a research trend in this direction. Few are the settings that use immersive EVEs reporting positive results on users’ attitudes and learning outcomes, indicating that there is a need for further research on the capabilities of such systems. Features of VR that contribute to learning such as first order experiences, natural semantics, size, transduction, reification, autonomy and presence are exploited according to the educational context and content. Presence seems to play an important role in learning and it is a subject needing further and intensive studies. Constructivism seems to be the theoretical model the majority of the EVEs are based on. The studies present real world, authentic tasks that enable context and content dependent knowledge construction. They also provide multiple representations of reality by representing the natural complexity of the world. Findings show that collaboration and social negotiation are not only limited to the participants of an EVE, but exist between participants and avatars, offering a new dimension to computer assisted learning. Little can yet be concluded regarding the retention of the knowledge acquired in EVEs. Longitudinal studies are necessary, and we believe that the main outcome of this study is the future research perspectives it brings to light.
The aim of this study is to map the intellectual structure of the field of Information Retrieval (IR) during the period of 1987–1997. Co-word analysis was employed to reveal patterns and trends in the IR field by measuring the association strengths of terms representative of relevant publications or other texts produced in IR field. Data were collected from Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) for the period of 1987–1997. In addition to the keywords added by the SCI and SSCI databases, other important keywords were extracted from titles and abstracts manually. These keywords were further standardized using vocabulary control tools. In order to trace the dynamic changes of the IR field, the whole 11-year period was further separated into two consecutive periods: 1987–1991 and 1992–1997. The results show that the IR field has some established research themes and it also changes rapidly to embrace new themes.
A stop list, or negative dictionary is a device used in automatic indexing to filter out words that would make poor index terms. Traditionally stop lists are supposed to have included only the most frequently occurring words. In practice, however, stop lists have tended to include infrequently occurring words, and have not included many frequently occurring words. Infrequently occurring words seem to have been included because stop list compilers have not, for whatever reason, consulted empirical studies of word frequencies. Frequently occurring words seem to have been left out for the same reason, and also because many of them might still be important as index terms.This paper reports an exercise in generating a stop list for general text based on the Brown corpus of 1,014,000 words drawn from a broad range of literature in English. We start with a list of tokens occurring more than 300 times in the Brown corpus. From this list of 278 words, 32 are culled on the grounds that they are too important as potential index terms. Twenty-six words are then added to the list in the belief that they may occur very frequently in certain kinds of literature. Finally, 149 words are added to the list because the finite state machine based filter in which this list is intended to be used is able to filter them at almost no cost. The final product is a list of 421 stop words that should be maximally efficient and effective in filtering the most frequently occurring and semantically neutral words in general literature in English.
Summary We explore the possibility of using co-citation clusters over three time periods to track the emergence and growth of research
areas, and predict their near term change. Data sets are from three overlapping six-year periods: 1996-2001, 1997-2002 and
1998-2003. The methodologies of co-citation clustering, mapping, and string formation are reviewed, and a measure of cluster
currency is defined as the average age of highly cited papers relative to the year span of the data set. An association is
found between the currency variable in a prior period and the percentage change in cluster size and citation frequency in
the following period. The conflating factor of “single-issue clusters” is discussed and dealt with using a new metric called
in-group citation.
Virtual reality (VR) is a scientific method and technology created during the exploration of the nature by human beings to understand, simulate, and better adapt and use the nature. Based on the analysis on the whole process of VR, this paper presents different categories of VR problems and a type of theoretical expression, and abstracts three kinds of scientific and technical problems in VR field. On the basis of foresaid content, this paper also studies current major research objectives, research results and development trend of VR in the aspects of VR modeling method, VR representation technology, human-machine interaction and devices, VR development suites and supporting infrastructure, as well as VR applications. Finally, several theoretical and technical problems that need to be further studied and solved are addressed.
While ISSI was founded in 1993, scientometrics and bibliometrics are now at least half a century old. Indeed, the field can be traced to early quantitative studies in the early 20th Century. In the thirties, it evolved to the "science of science." The publication of J. D. Bemal's Social Function ofScience in 1939 was a key transition point but th'e field lay dormant until after World War 11, when DJD Price's books Science Since Babylon in and Little Science, Big Science in were published in1961 and 1963. His role as the "father of scientometrics" is clearly evident by using the HistCite software to visualize his impact as well as the subsequent impact of the journal Scientornetrics on the growth of the field. Scientometrics owes its name to V. V. Nalimov, the author of Naukometriya, and to Tibor Braun who adapted the neologism for the journal. The primordial paper on citation indexing by Garfield which appeared in Science 1955 became a jnidge between Bemal and Price. The timeline for the evolution of scientometrics is demonstrated by a HistCite tabulation of the ranked citation index of all the 100,000 references cited in the 3,000 papers citing Price.
Data-Driven Documents (D3) is a novel representation-transparent approach to visualization for the web. Rather than hide the underlying scenegraph within a toolkit-specific abstraction, D3 enables direct inspection and manipulation of a native representation: the standard document object model (DOM). With D3, designers selectively bind input data to arbitrary document elements, applying dynamic transforms to both generate and modify content. We show how representational transparency improves expressiveness and better integrates with developer tools than prior approaches, while offering comparable notational efficiency and retaining powerful declarative components. Immediate evaluation of operators further simplifies debugging and allows iterative development. Additionally, we demonstrate how D3 transforms naturally enable animation and interaction with dramatic performance improvements over intermediate representations.