The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center - Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute's (OSUCCC- James) is a transformational facility that fosters the collaboration and integration of cancer research and clinical cancer care. Unlike regular facilities, transferring between hospitals requires the staff to occupy accurate and specialized knowledge of the spatial layout for the new hospital. In order to have a smooth transition, the hospital staffs are required to orient themselves and navigate in the new facility in a timely manner. We designed a quest-based game framework to examine the scenario. This data driven framework allows the gaming content be easily updated online by demand. 3D Hospital game is developed based on that framework, which aims at training participants with spatial orientation in the OSUCCC-James. The quests are designed based on several key locations and the daily tasks for the hospital staff. We completed floor 15 in time before the transfer. To measure the effectiveness of our game for prepping the staff during the transition, we surveyed 26 participants and obtained an overall positive feedback. At last, we also examine the obstacles that we encountered as well as future direction.
In this paper, we propose a hybrid method to procedurally generate terrains in Scorch Earth. It features both the fast computing speed of random techniques and the wide variety of details of fractal techniques. We indirectly evaluate terrains by analyzing the gameplay data. We create an AI agent to model players' behaviors to produce gameplay data. The agent is capable to shoot and move in different scenarios. Finally we introduce metrics for gameplays to select good terrains.
In recent years the usage of video-games in education, therapies and training, has risen sharply. The adaptation of serious games to users' needs may offer new enriching learning environments. Eye tracking sensors collect information about the location and duration of eye movements within a specific area on a computer monitor. This paper presents a usability analysis of users' eye movements while using the set of puzzle games. For this purpose a set of data collected from 63 children with an average age of 9.95 (SD = 1.21) and different attention skills is analyzed during their interaction with a set of puzzle games. Fixation data is extracted and analyzed as regards of where do they look first and most. These resources should be complemented with other interaction records, but they are interesting for creating optimized user interfaces.
Automatic generation of game content is an important challenge in computer game design. Such generation requires methods that are both efficient and guaranteed to produce playable content. While existing methods are adequate for currently available types of games, games based on more complex entities and structures may require new methods. In this paper, we use computational complexity analysis to explore algorithmic options for efficiently evaluating the playability of and generating playable groups of enhanced agents that are capable of exchanging items and facts with each other and human players. Our results show that neither of these problems can be solved both efficiently and correctly either in general or relative to a surprisingly large number of restrictions on enhanced agent structure and gameplay. We also give the first restrictions under which the playability evaluation problem is solvable both efficiently and correctly.
Serious games are electronic games designed not primarily for entertainment but for purposes such as education, training, health, military, politics, advertising and business. Communication between governments and citizens via electronic channels (i.e. e-government)to deliver services is difficult in developing countries due to limited IT knowledge, user experience and trust issues. Serious games can potentially improve citizen engagement in e-services by helping users expand their personal knowledge regarding services benefits, privacy and security. The main purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which an extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Trustworthiness Model (TM) facilitate the use of serious games in e-government services and empower citizen engagement and participation. In this research, the benefits of serious games are assayed in terms of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use in TAM, as well as increased Internet and government trust in TM to form a conceptual model of factors that influence citizen adoption of e-government initiatives. The model provides a new way to assist governments in increasing citizens' engagement of their online services.
Motion Onset Visually Evoked Potentials (mVEPs) allow users to interact with technology using non-visually fatiguing stimuli in a Brain Computer Interface (BCI). This study employs mVEP in an onscreen controller and evaluates players' ability to use mVEP for online gameplay with games from three different genres namely action, puzzle and sports. The onscreen controller consists of five mVEP stimuli that are presented as buttons to allow the participant to choose from five different actions in each game. The performance was assessed based on online BCI accuracy and game score for each game. Results indicate that the players could control the games with an average online accuracy of 71% (5 class classification chance accuracy is 20%). The results also suggest that the use of the mVEP controller with a detailed environment and stimulating feedback in the form of an action game helped to attain the highest online accuracy (75%).
Procedural content generation for games often uses tile sets. Tilings generated with tile sets are equivalent to pictures generated from a fixed alphabet of characters such as those explored in the area of vision. Formal languages over pictures and their methods of definition such as 2D regular expressions, automata, and array grammars are directly applicable to generation of tilings using finite tile sets. Though grammars such as string grammars, L-systems, and graph grammars have been explored and found useful for the definition of certain content, formal methods have mostly been ignored. We introduce 2D regular expressions and array grammars as generators. We reason about the theoretical capability of these constructs and develop some practical use cases for their application in procedural content generation for games. One area lacking with a search based approach to procedural content generation is an enumeration of all possible tilings that can be generated. We show that 2D regular expressions can be used for enumeration.
Solving puzzles based on number-sum or ordered matrices is an NP-hard problem that requires considerable computational effort. Prime examples of these are the games Sudoku and Kakuro. Kakuro relies on number sequences that must sum to a number indicator shown on the puzzle. Sudoku requires that numbers be listed in an implicit sequence in blocks and rows. Both puzzles require exclusivity of the numbers listed in each row and logical grouping. As a result, solving these puzzles requires an iterative approach. We show that Genetic Algorithms (GA) can be augmented with postprocessing by a Wisdom of Artificial Crowds (WoAC) to constrain the solution space after a number of generations. Using the WoAC method, compared to using GA alone, we can reduce the time to a successful solution by a factor of 50% for easy and medium-difficulty puzzles. Our work has broader applications in the fields of multi-agent theory and collective decision making, as the WoAC method allows for crowd-based improvements to well-known genetic algorithm methods.
NP-hard problems, such as generating crossword puzzles, are candidates for solution by genetic algorithms (GAs). A combination of both a genetic algorithms and a Wisdom of Artificial Crowds (WoAC) aggregation method was developed for the purpose of creating crossword puzzles given a particular outline. The program was written using a GPL Hunspell wrapper NHunspell for word verification and suggestion. In American-style crossword puzzles, we saw performance improvements of around 20% in reaching a local optima, with a 6% improvement in the number of successful words found by a GA + WoAC algorithm over the baseline genetic algorithm.
Criminal and delictual conduct are found within virtual worlds and computer gaming just as in the physical world. These may manifest themselves in myriad ways, from the role playing conduct of players within the game space to conduct by players, game developers and operators and others that may violate criminal laws and normative prohibitions generally. We examine this spectrum of conduct and the implications for players, developers and policy makers.
This paper explores several augmentations to the previously described Plantagenet model of computer game agents to give agents the deceptic capability to deceive the player and/or be deceived by the player. Augmented finite state machine controllers for agents in a simple role playing game are generated using an evolutionary algorithm. It is demonstrated that the proposed model is a practical option for generating populations of around 30 agents in which constraints on agent behaviour to ensure that actions are consistent with deception can be satisfied in substantial portions of the agent population.
We identify three challenges in cybersecurity education that could be addressed through game-based learning: conveying cybersecurity fundamentals, assessment of understanding, and recruitment and retention of professionals. By combining established epistemologies for cybersecurity with documented best practices for educational game design, we are able to define four research questions about the state of cybersecurity education games. Our attention is focused on games for ages 12-18 rather than adult learners or professional development. We analyze 21 games through the lens of our four research questions, including games that are explicitly designed to teach cybersecurity concepts as well as commercial titles with cybersecurity themes; in the absence of empirical evidence of these games' efficacy, our analysis frames these games within educational game design theory. This analysis produces a three-tier taxonomy of games: those whose gameplay is not associated with cybersecurity education content (Type 1); those that integrate multiple-choice decisions only (Type 2); and those that integrate cybersecurity objectives into authentic gameplay activity (Type 3). This analysis reveals opportunities for new endeavors to incorporate multiple perspectives and to scaffold learners progression from the simple games to the more complex simulations.
How diseases spread and their virility in human populations is the fundamental purpose of epidemiology. Historically, human behavior has been intricately linked with the spread of infectious diseases. Models to study human behavior in the context of epidemics usually concentrate on judging the effectiveness of various institutionally enforced public health measures such as school closures, not how the individuals themselves respond to the outbreak. Using a simulated or virtual environment that incorporates human behavior holds promise as a useful modelling tool. The “corrupted blood” incident that occurred in the Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft led to the first large-scale, unplanned virtual epidemic in a game world. This event underscored the fact that MMORPGs can be used to study epidemiological events. Using BrowserQuest, we designed a disease management and dissemination system (DiMANDS) that monitors interactions and triggers infection events - using nonplayer characters (NPCs) as a human proxies - to spread a disease among a virtual population. The rate of infection in the NPC population was logged and a susceptible-infected-recovered (SIR) graph was generated. Our results showed that our SIR graph is similar to other simulation techniques, and further strengthens the possibility of using MMORPGs as an epidemiological simulation tool.
In this paper, the quest for the perfect perfect-maze is performed over the search space of perfect mazes using an approach of search-based procedural content generation. Perfect maze construction is rather random with little to no control of the final product. We propose a search-based framework based on attributes or metrics of a constructed maze to provide a foundation for evaluation functions (fitness functions). Since the meaning of “perfect” is subjective and different for every designer, we allow designers to construct their own evaluation function to generate the best maze. We have also analyzed each metric's space on an exhaustive enumeration of small-sized mazes to determine allowable, and perhaps desirable, ranges for each metric. Using these metrics, an evaluation function is constructed to search for the “best” maze.
Video games are becoming less and less usable by people with disabilities every day. These disabilities include cognitive, visual, and mobility. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the necessity of making video games accessible. This will be done through looking at benefits, current work for all disabilities, and how it's looked at by the law. The topic of video gaming accessibility is especially important in today's age with the disabled population rising. It is important to not let the disabled be left out of the enjoyment of video games.
Motion Onset Visually Evoked Potentials (mVEPs) are elicited by visual stimuli that offer a more elegant, less fatiguing visual presentation than other stimuli used in visual evoked potentials (VEPs) studies. mVEP for use in brain computer interface (BCI) video gaming offer users a pleasant presentation environment to play video games. Modern, commercially available video games are a popular form of entertainment offering visually compelling, dynamic and graphically complex environments. However, most popular games exhibit visually fatiguing properties such as moving, flashing imagery and complex 3D shapes which may hinder accuracies of certain BCI paradigms. Because mVEP relies on motion visual stimulus rather than flashing imagery, it may be more apposite for use within complex game environments than other VEPs such as P300 and SSVEP. In this study we investigate the potential impact of varying levels of graphical fidelity from commercially available video games within an mVEP BCI control scheme. Building on a previous study, which investigated simplistic 3D based game levels, the current study investigates increased visual complexity in commercially available games from five different generations of gaming console and from different genres. We compared the visual effects of each of the five games on mVEP detection accuracy and found some of the more primitive properties of video games such as the use of primary colours, dynamic character movement, flashing imagery and the pace of the games have an influence on detection accuracies. These findings provide information relevant to design of a mVEP BCI game which is visually appealing to a wide range of users whilst maintaining mVEP accuracies.
Since the first algorithm animation interactive computer system called BALSA appeared in 1984, many algorithm animation and visualization applications have been developed for educational purposes. Modern game engines (like Unity 3D and Unreal) possess a multitude of features which are vital for algorithm animation applications. Until now, these features have not been systematically exploited for educational applications. In this paper, we circumvent conventional programming languages (such as Java, C++, etc.) and their corresponding toolkits and instead describe our design of an alglorithm animation framework built around Unity 3D and demonstrate its application to the educational realm of graph algorithm animation. This project serves as a proof of concept that modern game engines such as Unity 3D can be used to create modern and effective tools for learning concepts contained in the realm of computer science and engineering.
Serious games have been recognized in many application areas such as heath, education and training. Designing interactive games responsive to user emotions improves their effectiveness and user acceptances. A major factor in user interaction is the emotional reaction to game scenarios, which has motivated us to analyze immersive games using biofeedback. In this article, a graph-based model is presented to design interactive games in a systematic way. This model is combined with biofeedback such as autonomic nervous system variables to evaluate user emotional reaction to different stimuli. The analysis should be used as a guiding principle for designing serious games. Oculus Rift DK2 is used in experiments to provide immersive virtual reality with affective scenarios. The experiments demonstrate the ability to induce measurable and differentiate emotions.
This work in progress is focused on adapted design of a set of games for people with cerebral palsy. In the specification all the stakeholders (family, therapeutics and monitors) have participated. In the games set 4 levels of complexity have been proposed, and also the different types of interaction: touchscreen, push buttons, etc. The evaluation of the 4 prototypes will be held including not only testing the proper functionality of the games, but ensuring the accessibility and usability standards.
This paper presents an experiment in which people with intellectual disabilities played 3 apps with different levels and purposes on an iPad Air. As part of the game they were required to interact with Sphero and the activities they tried to perform required motor skills, attention and memory. We have selected two groups of participants according to their level of support needs. The results show the highest level of satisfaction in both groups in the game involving Sphero. In terms of effectiveness of activities for this profile of participant as interventions the results reveal that driving and care activities do show an adequate response, though with worse results related to memory.
