Educational games can use storytelling as the underlying model for designing their content and narrative to enhance learning outcomes. We need to evaluate their efficacy to maximise the user benefits. However, the field of user experience (UX) evaluation is full of challenges in itself; and evaluating the UX for digital educational games adds many other complexities. This paper presents various...

Computer game design and technology continues to evolve at an incredible rate and the digital game systems which players must learn to the use and interact with are often far more complex now than in games of even a few years ago. There is an increasing need for interfaces within games that perform more advanced tasks than simply acting as a means for players to make choices, enter commands, an...

Consumers’ product evaluation, choice, and use are driven by both hedonic (HED) and utilitarian (UT) considerations. Digital games that are typically considered a homogenous product category are often conceived as masculine information systems the use of which is dominated by the men. In this research paper, we present results from a survey study where the impact of gender was investigated at t...

Contemporary users (players, consumers) of digital games have thousands of products to choose from, which makes finding games that fit their interests challenging. Towards addressing this challenge, in this paper two different formulations of Archetypal Analysis for Top-L recommender tasks using implicit feedback are presented: factorand neighborhood-oriented models. These form the first applic...

This illustrated paper reports on the early digital games industry in New Zealand, during the late 1970s and 80s. It presents an overview of this largely unknown history, drawing on in depth archival research, interviews with key industry participants and collectors. It discusses the local production of consoles, handhelds, and arcade games in this market, as well as anomalies of distribution o...

Game studies methodologies which focus on the visual, narrative, and semiotic content of digital games overlook the way that embodied perception and physiological response contribute to the meaningfulness of games. Gameplay also needs to be understood in terms of affective response: the embodied, multisensory perception of the game environment. Distinguishing between affect and emotion, this pa...

This report discusses some issues concerning serious games, that is, (digital) games used for purposes other than mere entertainment. The starting point is the serious games concept itself, and what the actually means. Further, serious games allow learners to experience situations that are impossible in the real world for reasons of safety, cost, time, etc., but they are also claimed to have po...

Conducting psychophysiological experiments that measure how players experience digital games not only allows investigating the effects digital games have on players, it also gives game developers a tool to validate game design. In order to develop digital games rapidly that can be used as stimuli in psychophysiological experiments, a coherent and flexible development environment is required. A ...

One of the challenges facing us when we try to use commercial materials in the classrooms, i.e. video games at the moment, is to identify appropriate strategies of collaboration with designers, creators and distribution agents. Recently, we are working on a collaborative project with Electronics Arts to introduce specific video games to classrooms so that they can be used as educational tools b...

In this meta-analysis, we systematically reviewed research on digital games and learning for K-16 students. We synthesized comparisons of game versus nongame conditions (i.e., media comparisons) and comparisons of augmented games versus standard game designs (i.e., value-added comparisons). We used random-effects meta-regression models with robust variance estimates to summarize overall effects...