Katharina Emmerich

Applied Games – In Search of a New Definition

The endeavour of transferring attributes and qualities of games and game experiences to users and contexts apart from entertainment values spanned a wide field of research over the years, along with a diversity of classifications and definitions. While respecting their uses, we argue that this diversity might also hinder cross-disciplinary research efforts on fundamental questions and cooperation with practitioners. Moreover, with the postulated development towards a ludification of culture under way, it may become more difficult and less important to distinct examples among these definitions in future.

Defining second screen gaming: exploration of new design patterns

New technologies have made the mobile phone to a multifunctional ally who accompanies many people in their everyday life. Smartphones and tablet PCs have also established new game settings. In this paper, we investigate a new trend utilizing smart devices as second screens that are added to gaming situations. We give a definition of Second Screen Gaming, and illuminate a special subcategory we call Smart Gaming. Further, we argue that there is a need for comprehensive design guidelines to integrate the second screen as a core part of the game design. Additionally, we have identified several challenges while designing such games and point out the opportunities for game designers in following this new trend. At the end of this work, three game prototypes are introduced as case studies, which demonstrate different aspects of Second Screen Gaming and thereby illustrate how innovative, engaging and highly social games can be created.

Creating Age-Specific Interactive Environments about Medical Treatments for Children and Adolescent Patients Diagnosed with Cancer

This paper describes the development of an interactive multimedia environment designed for helping young patients to understand cancer-related medical treatments. The application is not intended to replace the medical consultation but to support it by conveying general information about necessary procedures and thus giving doctors more time for individual concerns and fears of their patients. We used a user-centered approach to author the information advisedly to suit different age groups: preschoolers, school-aged children and teenagers. All approaches are combined to an interactive entertainment environment that uses videos, game based interaction and interactive storytelling to make new knowledge easily accessible.

Gestures From the Point of View of an Audience: Towards Anticipatable Interaction of Presenters With 3D Content.

Presenting content to an audience is important in several fields, including education, marketing, and entertainment. Therefore, the main goal of the presenter is to transport messages to the audience. The paper aims to improve the process of message transportation by providing audience-friendly and anticipatable gestures for the presenter to be used for 3D interaction with the content. For this purpose, we first gathered input from a potential audience through a Wizard of Oz experiment and implemented three coherent gesture sets using the Kinect. We conducted an online survey to evaluate the hypotheses regarding the anticipation rate and perceived user experience. In particular, two of our three gesture sets show tendencies to be intuitively predictable by an untrained, uninformed audience. As the three sets differ significantly in the anticipation level, we conclude that future improvements of such gestures would enhance the audiences ability to predict the intended actions even further.

The Influence of Virtual Agents on Player Experience and Performance

This paper contributes a systematic research approach as well as findings of an empirical study conducted to investigate the effect of virtual agents on task performance and player experience in digital games. As virtual agents are supposed to evoke social effects similar to real humans under certain conditions, the basic social phenomenon social facilitation is examined in a testbed game that was specifically developed to enable systematical variation of single impact factors of social facilitation. Independent variables were the presence of a virtual agent (present vs. not present) and the output device (ordinary monitor vs. head-mounted display). Results indicate social inhibition effects, but only for players using a head-mounted display. Additional potential impact factors and future research directions are discussed.

Training conflict management in a collaborative virtual environment

In this paper we present a collaborative serious game for conflict management training in a role-playing scenario. The game ColCoMa (Collaborative Conflict Management) engages two players to participate in a conversation lead by an AIML chat bot mediator in a 2D virtual environment. Learning how to behave in conflict solving talks is supported by the separation of the game into a conversation phase and a reflection phase, causing players to change their perspective. Additionally, the learning process is emphasized by means of adaptive feedback based on individual analyses. Due to a multi-agent architecture approach, our implementation can be used as an easily adaptable framework for related collaborative learning scenarios.

The Impact of Game Patterns on Player Experience and Social Interaction in Co-Located Multiplayer Games

Outstanding multiplayer games engage players by providing rich social interactions. Yet, it is still not clear how to purposefully design these interactions. Our paper tackles this issue by establishing a research model for social player interaction highlighting the impact of the game design, the player group, and the gaming setting. Based on that model, we investigated the influence of three particular game design patterns - player interdependence, time pressure, and shared control - on the interaction of players. For that purpose, we developed a co-located game to systematically test variations of those patterns. We analyzed the resulting player experience and social interaction by applying questionnaires and videotaping game play sessions. Results indicate that high player interdependence implies more communication and less frustration, whereas shared control results in less perceived competence and autonomy. Moreover, individual player characteristics also impact the social interaction.

Serious Games Evaluation: Processes, Models, and Concepts

Serious games are developed with the goal of having a certain impact on players which goes beyond mere entertainment. This purpose-driven design is immanent to serious games and can be stated as the key characteristic that distinguishes serious games from other digital games. Hence, verifying that a serious game has the intended effect on the players needs to be an essential part in the development process. This and the following chapters are therefore dedicated to give a guidance how evaluation procedures can be planned and realized. The main focus is on aspects which are particularly distinctive to the evaluation of serious games, while methods and principles related to the evaluation of digital games in general will not be covered in detail. The structure of this chapter is as follows: After emphasizing the specific importance of evaluation for serious games, we describe a set of challenges which might occur in this context. In order to enable the reader to face these challenges, we present a framework of evaluation-driven design which offers guidance in the evaluation process. Other models which address different challenges are described before three examples of commendably evaluated serious games are discussed. These examples are intended to demonstrate how the presented abstract models can be applied in concrete evaluation procedures.

Digital Entertaining Health Applications: Researching the Fundamentals of a Cause-Effect Relationship

There are many different approaches on how digital entertaining health applications and particularly health games can be adopted to improve a persons health. In general, they can be effective on a cognitive, behavioral or emotional level, e.g. by providing knowledge, teaching skills, evoking behavioral changes or supporting psychological aspects such as self-efficacy. We illustrate the developmental process of health games and highlight the importance of methodically sound evaluations: The effectiveness of health games is hardly predictable mainly due to largely unknown cause-and-effect relationships between game elements and their impact on the player. Fundamental research in this area could contribute to the effectiveness of entertainment health applications. Furthermore, specific evaluation challenges regarding target group and sample size, evaluation methods and study setting are discussed.

Watch Me Play: Does Social Facilitation Apply to Digital Games?

The presence of observers and virtual characters can significantly shape our gaming experience. Researchers suppose that most of the basic socio-psychological phenomena are also applicable for digital games. However, the social processes in gaming setups can differ from our experience in other social situations. Our work emphasizes that awareness. Insights are needed for the purposeful design of a games social setting, specifically in applied contexts of learning and training. Here, we focus on the social facilitation effect, which describes an unconscious change in performance due to the presence of others, by investigating the impact of real observers and virtual agents on player experience and performance in four different games. The results of our four studies show that, in contrast to previous assumptions, in-game success was not significantly influenced by the presence of any social entity, indicating that social facilitation does not generally apply to the context of playing digital games.