Engaging by design: How engagement strategies in popular computer and video games can inform instructional design (original) (raw)
Free related PDFsRelated papers
Free PDF
2015
Engagement has been identified as a crucial component of learning in games research. However, the conceptualization and operationalization of engagement varies widely in the literature. Many valuable approaches illuminate ways in which presence, flow, arousal, participation and other RUNNING HEAD: FIVE APPROACHES TO MEASURING ENGAGEMENT 3 concepts constitute or contribute to engagement. However, few studies examine multiple conceptualizations of engagement in the same project. This paper discusses the results of two experiments that measure engagement in five different ways: survey self-report, content analyses of player videos, electro-dermal activity, mouse movements, and game click logs. We examine the relationships among these measures and assess how they are affected by the technical characteristics of a 30 minute custom-built educational game: use of a customized character, level of narrative complexity, and level of art complexity. We found that the five measures of engagemen...
Free PDF
How Game Design Thinking becomes Engagement Design
2017
This paper is the product of 12 months of intensive study applying game design to the challenges of journalism and news community management. After conducting interviews and site visits with a wide variety of leaders in major print, web, television and news organizations, primary observations were made. The goal was to understand how the increasingly challenged news media industry could benefit from the knowledge that has sustained the success of the game industry. Our findings indicate that the formal practice of game design offers three key foci that may likely prove useful to industries and practices concerned with improving their audience engagement strategies. These three foci are experience, agency and play. We suggest that these three elements are the key to engagement in non-game contexts and are a likely path to improving the struggles facing not only the news industry, but other domains like activism, social impact, and civic participation.
Free PDF
Free PDF
Free PDF
Free PDF
Free PDF
Proceedings of DiGRA 2007 Conference - Situated Play, 2007
Serious games aim to be both fun and playable games but at the same time be useful for a non-entertainment purpose. This poses an interesting challenge to the design process; how can we ensure that the design allows both for fun and engagement while at the same time fulfilling the non-entertainment purpose? The game design for educational games (a branch of serious games) is dependent on the topic (training objective) and under what circumstances the game will be used. We propose a pragmatic design approach where three design goals are maintained simultaneously: (1) to create an engaging game, (2) to properly cater for the training objective, and (3) to allow the training context surrounding the game to influence design decisions. We will go through a range of design issues and show how the three design goals are interdependent and how a balanced design can fulfill all three. For instance, the training objective may impede a straightforward design of rules and goals. The training context will have an affect how the challenges are constructed and the way learning through games can be carried out. To illustrate this approach the design process of Foreign Ground, a serious game for training, is presented and discussed.
Free PDF
Free PDF
Player Engagement Enhancement with Video Games
2019
This work aims to present and summarize the identified main research fields about player engagement enhancement with video games. The expansion of video game diversity, complexity and applicability increased development costs. New approaches aim to automatize the design process by developing algorithms that can understand players requirements and redesign games on the fly. Multiplayer games have the added benefit of socially engage all involved parties through game-play. But balancing becomes more important as feeling overwhelmed by a stronger opponent may be demotivating, as feeling underwhelmed by a weaker adversary that cannot provide enough challenge and stimulation. Our research concludes that there is still lack of research effort in the identified fields. This may be due to the lack of academy incentive on the subject. The entertainment industry depends on game quality to increase their revenue, but lack interest on sharing their knowledge. We identify potential application o...
Free PDF