Digital games and digital gaming have had a fast expansion in the 21st century and today the vast majority play some kind of digital games. From a teacher’s perspective an interesting type of games are the so called learning games and the didactic idea of Game-based learning (GBL). In the last decade GBL has been an emerging field and several researchers have pointed out its strong learning pot...

The experiences game players and other people have around digital games are not limited to the intensive, immersive ways of playing them. Therefore the earlier SCI model of gameplay experiences is not sufficient to cover the full range of game experiences. In this paper a more comprehensive model is presented by describing the multiple contextual layers that surround and underlie every encounte...

Affection games are ludic experiences in which players are required to express culturally recognized expressions of liking as a primary goal in the game. Interestingly, while the physical world of analog play has many such activities, the digital world has been relatively limited in affording players the ability to express affection as the primary game goal. Affection games in digital play exis...

This paper addresses the question of how the gaming experiences of students and their attitudes towards gaming influence Game-based Learning in formal contexts. Based on the subject-scientific learning theory it explores how digital games can further expansive learning. The aim is to combine these issues to explain learning outcomes with digital games. For this purpose the paper presents the re...

The digital media and games industry is one of the biggest IT based industries worldwide. Recent observations therein showed that current production workflows may be potentially improved as multimedia objects are mostly created from scratch due to insufficient reusability capacities of existing tools. In this paper we provide reasons for that, provide a potential solution based on semantic tech...

Gerontology researchers have demonstrated that cognitive and social factors are keys that may sometimes outweigh physical conditions in determining life satisfaction. Social interaction and cognitive challenge are consistently identified as key elements to enhance older adults’ quality of life. Digital games can offer many potential benefits to older adults in a motivating and playful way, such...

Goal recognition in digital games involves inferring players’ goals from observed sequences of low-level player actions. Goal recognition models support player-adaptive digital games, which dynamically augment game events in response to player choices for a range of applications, including entertainment, training, and education. However, digital games pose significant challenges for goal recogn...

Scholars, educators, and media designers are increasingly interested in whether and how digital games might contribute to civic learning. However, there are three main barriers to advancing understanding of games’ potential for civic education: the current practices of formal schooling, a dearth of evidence about what kinds of games best inspire learning about public life, and divergent paradig...

Mobile devices are already an important platform for digital games. These devices need specialized input metaphors as they have various restrictions such as their own hardware capabilities and the lack of external input devices. Especially challenging are fast paced interactions as in Jump and Run games. This paper explores three user inputs for Jump and Run games on mobile devices along the ga...