The Fallacies of MDA for Novice Designers

Ever since MDA was publicized by Hunicke, Leblanc, and Zubek in 2004, it has become a building block for game developers and scholars. However, it has also incited several misconceptions that have spread among students and the gaming community. For example, players have overused the term “mechanics,” to the point that it is virtually meaningless. On the other side, the terms “dynamics” and “aesthetics” have been comparatively neglected, despite their value. Building upon our experiences of teaching an undergraduate game design course, we argue that these misconceptions stem from the ways that consumers have misinterpreted the MDA framework. Game educators are not necessarily working with experienced designers: they are working with students who are often more passionate about playing games than making them. Thus, game educators need to target this misconception in order to shed light on preconceived biases.

Creativity and Digital Games

In the last decades the interest in creativity has grown. One of the questions that has risen from this interest is whether it is possible to aid the development of creativity. This chapter reviews a study on the possibility of developing a digital game with this. The game Luovus was created, utilizing previous research on the subject of creativity and digital games as learning aids. The game has been tested with a group of users and seems to be an effect on the player's self-perceived creative capabilities and society's impact on their creativity. This chapter will also cover studies and past experiments on the subject and how they can be of interest to future experiments.

Femininities and Technologies

The role of gender in the design of technologies has been a topic of growing importance in fields such as interaction design, HCI, and games. Understanding that technology development and usage practices emerge within the cultural processes, the authors propose in this chapter a discussion about the notions of traditional femininity, its relation to video games, as well as new approaches to female representation. It is also assessed the cultural understanding of gender, sex, and sexuality, as well as how these notions may influence the players experience. The issues discussed and briefly analyzed here point to a production and regulation of gender by technologies such as video games. Therefore, the goal is to assess how gender notions and relations influence the design and use of games in terms of visuals, narrative and sociability.

Model-Based Interview Method Selection Approach in Participatory Design

Participatory design is a technique which is being used by system designers to involve the end users and product owners throughout the design process. Even though utilizing this approach brings customers to the design process, implementing it requires a budget, a place, time, and other resources. This chapter demonstrates a model-based approach to facilitate the selection of interviews for each design phase such as listing elements for the interface, choosing location for components, making decision for the general look of the component, finally making the component interactable. Interface designers can use the model to choose different type of interview method for different design phases such as interface components, sketching, lo-fi prototyping and hi-fi prototyping, according to their resources. The research focus is on four different participatory design interview method, which are GUI-ii face-to-face, GUI-ii screen-sharing, GUI-ii Ozlab, and traditional face-to-face interview.

Affective Computing in E-Learning Modules

This article presents a study on emotions of students and their reactions towards learning and watching video clips with different personality traits, with the help of existing facial expression analyzing applications. To demonstrate this, the user's expressions are recorded as video while watching the movie trailer and doing the quiz. The results obtained are studied to find which emotion is most prevalent among the users in different situations. This study shows that students experience seemingly different emotions during the activity. This study explores the use of affective computing for further comprehension of student emotion in learning environments. While previous studies show that there is a positive correlation between emotion and academics, the current study demonstrated the existence of the inverse relation between them. In addition, the study of the facial analysis of movie trailer confirmed that different people have different ways of expressing the feeling. Results of the study will help to further clarify connection between various personality traits and emotions.

Play Teaches Learning?

To provide ideal learning environments for a wider audience, game designers must understand differences in how experienced and less experienced players learn new games. Using a sample of players with different experience levels, our goal is to understand learning processes for a simple real-time strategy game. Data from observations, post-game interviews, and eye movement recordings indicate that the majority of study participants relied on a trial-and-error approach, with more experienced gamers using a structured mental model involving feedback and expectations about making progress. Specifically, experienced gamers in the sample tended to use a top-down learning style emphasizing connections between goals and available actions, and to focus on the functions of game objects. There are also interfaces in which all experience levels of participants share the same opinion. For example, alarming voices/sound effects can catch their attention and be helpful while pop-ups are largely annoying.

ChangeIt

The use of technology-based interventions for ameliorating ASD core deficits has been growing in popularity. However, limited technologies are available that can help children with autism (aged 6 to 11) cope with changes, and these do not typically incorporate the methods used or recommended by practitioners. This project addressed this gap through the design, development and evaluation of a prototype app to support children with ASD overcome their difficulties with changes. The researchers report on preliminary work in developing this app, in which they decided not to involve children with ASD before getting some evidence that the app may be useful and suitable for them. Therefore, the design at this stage was informed by the research literature and design studies involving typically developing (TD) children, practitioners and researchers. The evaluation studies revealed that: 1) the app is easy to use; 2) the activities are perceived as fun and engaging; 3) the app may be suitable for children with ASD.

What-If Analysis on the Evaluation of User Interface Usability

While interactive systems have the potential to increase human work performance, those systems are predisposed to usability problems. Different factors might contribute to these problems during the interaction process and as result, the decision-making process might be compromised. This work uses decision support system methods and tools to assist in the analysis of the usability of a university library website, measuring the constructs of effectiveness, efficiency, and learnability. The pilot study involved thirty-five subjects, and after collecting data, a multidimensional view of the data is created and discussed. Later, a What-if analysis is used to investigate the impact of different scenarios on system-use. The work has the potential to assist designers and system administrators at improving their systems.

Visualization and Minima Finding of Multidimensional Hypersurface

Analysis of multidimensional function properties is required for industrial applications. The solution of its problems is a challenge in economics, sociology, chemistry, biology, biochemistry, and other sciences. For example, the study of the potential energy surface (PES) of a free molecule is of fundamental importance in structural chemistry because it is necessary to determine the stable conformations of a molecule and the ways of interconversion between them. However, if the PES is a function of more than three rotational coordinates, the costs of its quantum-chemical calculation rapidly increases and the problem of its graphical visualization can be hardly solved for a large number of variables. This work describes how a specially developed multidimensional interpolation procedure can contribute to solve these problems. To visualize a five dimensional (5D) hypersurface, the authors applied a special coordinate system.

Measuring and Comparing Immersion in Digital Media Multitasking

In terms of digital media usage, immersion refers to user involvement in and focus on a single activity. However, the commonality of multi-tasking raises questions regarding whether one could enjoy immersion when using more than one media at the same time. Self-report questionnaires and eye trackers were used to measure the immersive experiences while playing video games and watching a television program at the same time. While we found evidence of immersion across the two activities while multitasking, some immersion dimensions were significantly weaker. However, we also noted that immersion experiences from multiple media might be cumulative. A possible explanation for our results is that the act of switching between two media compensated for any down time, users could abandon a less attractive medium and switch to the other, resulting in an impression of continuous immersion in the overall multitasking experience. On the other hand, keeping active awareness of other media beyond the current focus might be a primary cause of immersion degradation.