Paolo Petta’s research while affiliated with Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence and other places

Serious games employ video game technology to convey serious content, facilitate learning, or initiate behavioral change. A common approach is to combine standard game mechanics with linear content expected to deliver the intended message. In contrast, we advocate an approach centered on player decisions and subjective experience, referring to innovative examples of learning by experience, both analog and digital. We present the design decisions underlying Aquamorra, a serious game to support the treatment of childhood obesity in the light of this approach.

We introduce the Design Pattern Canvas, a visual tool for alignment and decomposition of game designer activities.

Serious games deliver interactive worlds in support of a wide range of application areas. Addressing the current paucity of scientific empirical studies in game-based psychotherapy, we address scientific and methodological challenges and their implications for the design of serious games for this domain. We do so in the context of a comprehensive multistage design process that preceded the final game concept of the «Trauma Treatment Game», a serious game to support individualised interventions to children of age eight to twelve suffering from trauma.

Serious games deliver interactive worlds in support of a wide range of application areas. Addressing the current paucity of scientific empirical studies in game-based psychotherapy, we present a principled concept for the design and deployment of a Trauma Treatment Game aimed at the support of individualised interventions to children suffering from childhood trauma. Focusing on the particular methodological challenges of IT-based psycho-therapeutic support, we detail a domain-general staged process that is fully embedded in a scaffolding of validation and evaluation assessments. We motivate the structural decomposition, explain the nature and requirements of quality insurance measures, identify suitable instruments for their implementation, and specify success criteria and contingency measures.

Serious games use video game technology to deliver interactive worlds in support of a wide range of application areas. The vivid interest in the use of serious games in military and commercial settings stands in stark contrast to the paucity of empirical studies focused on game-based psychotherapy. We discuss the possibility and prerequisites of a serious game aimed at the support of individualized interventions to children suffering from childhood trauma.

This journal subline serves as a forum for stimulating and disseminating innovative research ideas, theories, emerging technologies, empirical investigations, state-of-the-art methods, and tools in all different genres of edutainment, such as game-based learning and serious games, interactive storytelling, virtual learning environments, VR-based education, and related fields. It covers aspects from educational and game theories, human-computer interaction, computer graphics, artificial intelligence, and systems design. This special issue consists of two parts: the first one features original research papers on interactive digital storytelling in the applied context of edutainment; the second part contains a selection of revised and expanded best papers from the 4th eLearning Baltics (eLBa 2011) conference. The papers on digital storytelling have been split into sections on theory, technology, and case studies; the eLBA 2011 conference papers deal with technology and applications, case studies and mobile applications, and game-based learning and social media.

The authoring and configuration of affective characters for interactive narratives presents a significant problem for the viability of interactive digital storytelling. Motivated by work on exploring the author's perspective on character creation, we present an outline of how a selection of action sequences as backstory experiences can be used to derive configuration parameters for an affective agent architecture. Potential planning paths that include the action sequences provide the foundation for setting concrete values for the importance of goals, standards, and tastes of the character as well as for determining the availability of implicated plans during runtime.

Autonomous characters in interactive storytelling can be supported by using affective agent architectures. The configuration of most current tools for controlling agents is, however, implementation specific and not tailored to the needs of authors. Based on literature review, a questionnaire evaluation of authors’ preferences for character creation, and a case study of an author’s conceptualization of this process, we investigate the different methods of configuration available in current agent architectures, reviewing discrepancies and matches. Given these relations, promising approaches to configuration are identified, based on initial inner states, “global” parameters of characters, libraries of stock characters, and selections of backstory experiences.

The Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) field has produced numerous research prototypes over the last years. These prototypes cover several different technological domains, including: drama management; human-computer interaction; language understanding and generation; behavioural modelling; 3D rendering, modelling and animation. Research in the field usually focuses on one specific area. However, it is often the case that other dimensions need to be integrated with one's core contribution to provide the end-user with a complete experience that can be assessed. As a consequence, researchers in IDS tend to become "oneperson shows" trying to unite being scientists in multiple fields; engineers in an array of domains; and developers at home with many technologies and processes. Game technologies aim to simplify this challenge by providing, in particular, sophisticated game engines. But since game engines do not cover all IDS needs, important development/integration efforts still remain to be addressed beyond the central scientific investigation itself. This workshop aims at helping IDS researchers identify and adopt existing IDS-relevant technologies, for them to be able to deliver prototypes that are more varied--or better tailored to their needs and goals--with less effort.