Abstracts
Long Papers
1. Syamsul Bahrin Zaibon and Norshuhada Shiratuddin
Experimental Study on mobile study on Mobile game-based learning development to game design course.
Various game development methodologies have been introduced for different types of games (genre, platform), which are available in their own specifications. Although there are many introduced methodologies which are currently practiced, studies show that customized phases and steps to develop mobile game-based learning (mGBL) applications are necessary. A mGBL engineering model is proposed intentionally for developing mGBL applications and is outlined in this paper to provide novice developers with an integrated model with which they can approach more systematically the design and development of mGBL. The engineering model combines a game life cycle based on iterative prototyping and learning model, with supporting activities drawn from sources of best practice in mobile game development. This paper describes an experimental study involving the implementation of the proposed model with a group of undergraduate students who are taking Game Application Development course. The result shows that the proposed model was practical and trouble-free in developing mGBL applications compared to other models.
2. Andrew Johnston
Elective Music Students Experiences with Jam2Jam
This paper presents findings from a trial of the interactive music software Jam2Jam in a classroom music setting. Jam2Jam is software which allows musical novices to control generative music in real time. It has an interface which enables users to control multiple audio-visual parameters with a single gesture — an approach intended to facilitate complex, conversational interaction. Examination of students experiences with Jam2Jam indicates that students find Jam2Jam attractive and that it has considerable potential. However, a number of issues for improvement, particularly a need for increased transparency of operation are identified. Extensions to Jam2Jam which would enable students to incorporate more of their own material into the music and visual they create during jam sessions are also proposed.
3. Lars Reng and Henrik Schoenau-Fog
Problem Based Game Design – Lessons in Innovation
Numerous educations are teaching students to produce games in a product oriented fashion; however this approach often results in mediocre and standardized game projects. At Aalborg University’s department of Medialogy, we are using the Problem Based Learning method to encourage students to solve game design problems by pushing the boundaries and designing innovative games. This paper is concerned with describing this method, how we employ it in various projects and how students learn to design for innovation by using it. We will present various cases to exemplify the approach and focus on how the method aspires for innovation in digital entertainment and games.
4. Stefania Serafin and Rolf Nordahl
Footwear-based multimodal interaction for interactive entertainment
We describe different interfaces which have been designed, implemented and evaluated with the goal of enhancing footwear-based interaction in interactive entertainment. The main goal is to investigate the possibilities offered by foot-based interactions, which are still unexplored in entertainment.
The first two interfaces described are based on floor-microphones, which acoustically track the footsteps of a person walking in a closed environments. The third interface described consists of a pair of shoes enhanced with sensors and actuators. We describe advantages and disadvantages of the different systems and how they have been applied in entertainment and rehabilitation.
Short Papers
5. Kah Chan
Playing in Traffic: pervasive gaming for commuters
The influx of cycle commuters and the resulting paradigm shift in traffic composition is causing friction between road users. This paper proposes the use of an experimental alternate reality (AR) role-playing game (RPG) layered on top of the commuting experience. This experimental social game, Playing in Traffic, is played with a global positioning system (GPS) capable smart phone and is aimed at the expanding community of casual gamers. The game is designed to encourage more positive behaviour while in traffic through the creation of social interactions between players. This introduces game rewards mechanisms, such as the collection of achievements that are intrinsic to role-playing games, and provides a positive feedback loop to augment commuter behaviour. Playing in Traffic is an exploratory suggestion that looks at the role of pervasive gaming in addressing the larger issues of urban planning, traffic congestion and the challenges around promoting more active methods of commuting.
6. Kah Chan
Constructionist learning through serious games
The role of gaming in communicating environmental concerns is increasingly important as video gaming and sustainability concerns make parallel ascensions in our contemporary social and cultural vernacular. This paper discusses the evolution of a game design class that adjusted its focus towards exploring the communicative potential of serious games specifically to stimulate learning in children about sustainability concepts such as energy conservation, deforestation and carbon footprints. The author had a specific interest in the potential of integrating constructionist learning principles with increased ubiquity of video games. The course covered theoretical precedents in play and learning, design processes and methods used in creating persuasive games, and investigated character and level design. This paper will also describe selected case studies of student projects.
7. Elwyn Benson and Peter Andreae
Sketch Interaction in Real Time Strategy Games
As real time strategy games are becoming increasingly complex and large scale, new interaction methods need to be explored to overcome the limitations found in conventional interaction methods. This paper explores sketching as an interaction technique, and discusses some of the advantages and disadvantages of sketching for spatial tasks, which are common in real time strategy games. The paper describes two novel sketch interaction techniques for giving precise orders to units – a technique for selecting groups of units, and a technique for specifying movement paths. The paper also outlines user experiments for evaluating the effectiveness of these techniques.
8. Yuliya Khrypko and Peter Andreae
Towards the Problem of Maintaining Suspense in Interactive Narrative
The paper introduces the problem of creating suspense in interactive narrative. We argue that by manipulating choice options offered to the audience in suspenseful scenes in the interactive story both when it is read first time and reread later, is possible to create stronger suspense.
9. Inosha Wickrama and Denisa Kera
Pets and Play: Do they have fun?
This paper describes the current research carried out in the pet-pet owner interaction and the possible area that could be looked into to improve the current animal-human interaction available.
10. David Conroy and Peta Wyeth
Building Better Bad Guys: A New Framework for Game AI Design
Realistic artificial intelligence in video games is important to developers in the games industry. It helps to better immerse the player and keep them in a state of flow. In order to achieve this it is important to design computer opponents to behave and react similarly to human players. In this study we designed a model of human behaviour for a specific interactive component in gaming (aiming). It was built using player game play data and user opinion regarding the subject. The result was a system of behaviour akin to that of human players.
Exhibitions
1. Melanie Swalwell
Exhibition: More Than A Craze: Photographs of New Zealand’s early digital games scene
“More Than A Craze” is an online exhibition consisting of 49 photographs of New Zealand’s early digital games scene, in the 1980s. The exhibition includes the work of some of New Zealand’s best known documentary photographers – Ans Westra, Christopher Matthews, Robin Morrison – with images from the archives of Wellington’s Evening Post and Auckland’s Fairfax newspapers. These photographers captured images of games, gamers and gameplay in the moment when these were novel. These are significant in that they offer insights into the early days of digital games. They are an important primary source material for researchers interested in the history of play and interactive entertainment.
This exhibition has been curated by Melanie Swalwell and Janet Bayly. It is an online exhibition, hosted by Mahara Gallery, Waikanae (http://www.maharagallery.org.nz). It is one of the outcomes of Dr Melanie Swalwell’s research into the history of digital games in New Zealand, in the 1980s.
2.Caroline McCaw, Morgan Oliver, Leyton Leyton and Mark Miller
Face to Face: meeting histories on the street
Interaction Design is a subject taught to year 3 Communication Design students at Otago Polytechnic. The degree programme emphasizes both literacy with a wide creative skill range and the application of these creative skills through client-based projects. The Otago Settlers Museum was the ‘client’ for students in 2010, with the broad brief of making existing exhibits interactive. The results were so successful that students were employed to develop, through the Otago Institute of Design, further concepts and full exhibition designs, for a 2 year exhibition at the Otago Settlers Museum.
The Otago Settlers Museum is a regional history museum in Dunedin, New Zealand that was founded in 1898. It is New Zealand’s oldest social history museum, located in the heart of the city. Extensive additions will close all but one room of this large Museum site during a refurbishment programme that will last 2 years. The collections at The Otago Settlers Musueum are extensive and range from household appliances to vehicles that usually form the basis of the Museum experience, however the brief for this exhibition was to be object-free. This short paper will detail the multi-level collaboration, and the highly creative interactive and playful concept solutions that have evolved through these collaborations.
The designs reflect a strong shift away from object-based didactics, and encourage participation and story-telling in the world, more akin to interactive gameplay, where visitors are included as storytellers in this window of the Museum’s history. The use of student creatives as researchers and concept developers in this way emphasizes local cultural histories and their role for future generations. Fresh perspectives are gained through looking at old stories in new ways. Human relationships, the ghosts of the past, and living in and through material traces are ideas that connect histories with and through young people. Designs combine Michel de Certeau’s ideas of place-making through walking, and Nathan Shedroff’s models of experience design and develop scenarios for participation in ways that challenge traditional Museological experiences.
3. Joel Schroyen, Melissa Hartwick and Jo Anne Tay
University culture and community building
In this paper, we describe the exhibition piece of our 400 level Bachelor of Design degree. Currently, we think there is a lack of university culture and community at Massey University Wellington for first years. Our project is a real-world-based game that uses a mysterious narrative and play theory, combined with Massey’s campus, to create community and culture within it. Traditional fraternities and school-based Houses have a long-standing history of creating community and culture. They offer a genuine sense of belonging that derives from playful exclusivity. In this project the Massey University campus will become Huizinga’s (1938) Magic Circle.
4. Joel Schroyen
Expressive Video Games
This research project investigates the communicative power of game play in video games in informing social attitudes through Dynamical Meaning. Dynamical Meaning, as Jonathan Blow (2007) termed it, is the semiotics of game play; the meaning the player interprets from the way the game system responds to their agency within the game world. Contemporary game design often focuses on a narrative as the main source of meaning, but Dynamical Meaning stems from the core interactive nature of games and can be more meaningful to the player.
The piece to be exhibited is a small and short video game. While the game is intended for audiences aged 20-30, it has been designed with accessibility in mind, requiring little dexterity, and is playable by most any age. Each round of game play is very short, about 30 seconds to a minute so while the whole game should take about less than 10 minutes to play, players are able to get a good sense of the game in a short period. The game also includes a quiet attract mode to keep it visually interesting even when being not played.
5. Daniel Cermak-Sassenrath Cermak-Sassenrath and Charles Walker
Proposal for an Installation of Four Games
An installation of four games-in-development produced by students in the new transdisciplinary Bachelor of Creative Technologies degree at Auckland University of Technology in 2010.
6. Amber-Jean Hornsby, Roshan Patel and Danielle Millar
Solving Preadolescent Anti Socialism Through Play
Anti socialism within preadolescents comes from feeling bad & distress derived from social problems. This a project is designed to help 8-13 year old children’s social development by providing them with a product and game, where through play they can learn valuable social skills and can express who they are creativity. This helps to relieve them from the everyday stresses caused by anti socialism and low self-esteem. The exhibition piece of 400 level of Bachelor of Design will demonstrate how this will support this issue.
7. Roshan Patel
Roopadhyana
This 400 level Bachelor of Design project is endeavoring to educating Hindu devotees about Bhaktiyoga devotion, to help them connect with their God, through an experiential design installation.
8. Anton Berndt
Playing the Museum: towards a rationale for games in exhibition design
Museums are shifting away from exhibiting positivist views of knowledge. Instead they endeavour to present constructivist perspectives that are non-didactic and that can accommodate multiple histories. They also face the continuing difficulty of attracting the public to museums especially as people’s leisure time options are increasing. Consequently the pressing goal of institutions is to identify ways of presenting content in this new mode and which offers valuable experiences to visitors. The thesis that this research intends to prove is that: by design museum exhibitions to operate as games the occurrence of didactic presentation of knowledge can be reduced and visitors will have more rewarding museum experience. This short paper submission is a summary of the research conducted so far and relevant observations made. It also includes an indication of where this research will lead.
9. Tanya Marriott
Interactive memories within museums
This exhibition will discuss the museum visitor; and the need to record and make available, memory testimony and artefacts of Bomber Command Veterans. Storytelling Memories provides the framework for the user to synthesise a physical relationship with the memories and artefacts, which informs an emotional connection. Memory testimony is a reflective narrative, visually and emotionally rich within the mind of the contributor. This project suggests that if this richness of memory could be provided within a visual context, which is substantiated by the unique situation of each memory, it could foster an engaging understanding and relationship between the museum visitor and the memories.
10. Karl Thiart
Frightful Realities
My aim is to use an interactive design solution and environmental character animation to target a young audience of secondary school going teenagers between the ages of 13-17. The design outcome needs to add an awareness of the implications of everyday racism, by illustrating how a minority is directly affected by stigmas from a Majority group. The project deals with how we identify with different people and how they identify with us.
11. Stuart Foster, Sven Mehzoud and Rodney Adank
Up with the Play
With the increasing popularity of online shopping environments there is an emerging trend to augment the physical retail shopping experience with digital technologies. However, engagements with digital technologies in retail environments typically suffer from a disconnect between two different modes of behavior; the physical engagement with products and that of online shopping activities. This paper discusses the prototype of a digitally interactive retail environment and explores how the desirable qualities of physical and online retail experiences and brand encounters can be combined to create more playful, meaningful, interpretive and experience focused environments.
Interactive Demonstrations
1. Werner Lonsing and Stephan Drescher
HotPOI, Locative Exhibitions on Mobile Devices
The idea of a locative exhibition on mobile devices is a new method to present digital data in spaces, especially urban spaces. Based on a concept of POIs the new kind of exhibition opens up spaces and envisions interactivity.
2. Stuart Foster, Sven Mehzoud and Rodney Adank
Up with the Play
With the increasing popularity of online shopping environments there is an emerging trend to augment the physical retail shopping experience with digital technologies. However, engagements with digital technologies in retail environments typically suffer from a disconnect between two different modes of behavior; the physical engagement with products and that of online shopping activities. This paper discusses the prototype of a digitally interactive retail environment and explores how the desirable qualities of physical and online retail experiences and brand encounters can be combined to create more playful, meaningful, interpretive and experience focused environments.
