Research Quest: Dino Lab is designed to encourage the acquisition of higher-order critical thinking skills of middle school students. In order to arrive at the design for the game, the team conducted several participatory design sessions utilizing the Design Box methodology. In doing so, the team was able to gather data and elevator pitches from the end user (students), stakeholders (teachers),...

Formal game modeling tools could support the automated analysis of game rules and rapid automated playtesting, but are not widely used. Furthermore, existing game design support tools are often limited to very specific classes of game, require significant programming expertise to use or customize, or are fully-automatic tools with limited affordances for human designers. We therefore propose a ...

This paper presents a case study of the key decisions made in the design of Orbit, a child sexual abuse prevention computer game targeted at school students between 8 and 10 years of age. Key decisions include providing supported delivery for the target age group, featuring adults in the program, not over-sanitizing game content, having a focus on building healthy self-concept of players, makin...

In this paper we present our design tool GUIDE, which allows the user to explore a design in UML interactively by playing a game. The game incorporates both the design model and a specification of what it means for the design to be correct. The central idea of this approach is that the designer can increment the game during a play and gradually add more detail to it. Specification and design ar...

BACKGROUND There is an increasing interest in health games including simulation tools, games for specific conditions, persuasive games to promote a healthy life style or exergames where physical exercise is used to control the game. OBJECTIVE The objective of the article is to review current literature about available health games and the impact related to game design principles as well as so...

While this paper looks at the definitions of heuristics and usability as they apply to digital games, its primary focus is expanding the usability dialog into the arena of mobile educational games. Recent discussions of game heuristics have made some useful connections between work completed in the area of heuristics and game design theory. This paper expands the usability dialogue, beginning w...

The challenge of educational game design is to develop solutions that please as many players as possible, but are still educationally effective. Educational game designers need to understand how users interact with different types of user interfaces and how this interaction affects users’ educational experiences and effectiveness of learning. In this research we utilized eye tracking method in ...

Automatically generating content for videogames has long been a staple of game development and the focus of much successful research. Such forays into content generation usually concern themselves with producing a specific game component, such as a level design. This has proven a rich and challenging area of research, but in focusing on creating separate parts of a larger game, we miss out on t...

Games are often designed to shape player behavior in a desired way; however, it can be unclear how design decisions affect the space of behaviors in a game. Designers usually explore this space through human playtesting, which can be time-consuming and of limited effectiveness in exhausting the space of possible behaviors. In this paper, we propose the use of automated planning agents to simula...

Games are often designed to shape player behavior in a desired way; however, it can be unclear how design decisions affect the space of behaviors in a game. Designers usually explore this space through human playtesting, which can be time-consuming and of limited effectiveness in exhausting the space of possible behaviors. In this paper, we propose the use of automated planning agents to simula...