May 022023
 

Gostava de ler este artigo “The Pursuit of Fun in Digital Games: From the Sandpit to the Console and Beyond” d eDiego Fellipe Tondorf, e Marcelo da Silva Hounsell

“Fun has long been considered inherent in the act of playing. Some authors argue that it is an element always present in games, and others that it is not, that there are several types of fun and several factors that change the perception of fun, but fun has always been associated with positive effects on players. As a subjective concept, and dependent on context and player experience, understanding fun in games is a challenge for developers. With the development of the industry and the research on digital games, it became necessary to create new artifacts for the design and validation of fun. Understanding fun is also essential for serious games, which have been criticized for not being fun. Thus, better understanding fun and how to achieve it is a big challenge where crucial outcomes could benefit application areas such as education, health, and others. But the roadmap for such an area of research has not been established. This chapter presents fun as a grand challenge in games and digital entertainment and proposes a path for future research.”

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Gostava de ler este artigo “Platform for Interactive Audiovisual Productions and Generative Art Using Processing” de P. D‘Amato e Diana Karina Leon

“Through computers, artists have found a way to enhance their production, discovering new ways for communicating their productions and devising new forms of expression. Being able to make the most of these facilities requires interdisciplinary groups that seek to enhance creativity and at the same time generate new forms of creation. In particular, an artist takes advantage of the different tools available, from sound to draws in order to provide immersive experiences. This paper presents a platform that implements image and audio processing algorithms, to facilitate the artist’s task, in what is called generative art. With the platform it is possible to create animated digital images in real time that adapt to the sound’ properties and that can be used in live audiovisual performances.”

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Dec 282022
 

Gostava de ler este artigo “Video Game Play Any Association With Preteens’ Cognitive Ability Test Performance?” de May Jadallah, C. Shawn Green, e Jie Zhang

“This exploratory study examined the video gaming experience of 160 urban public-school preteen-age students as well as the association between video game play and students’ performance on a standardized cognitive ability test (CogAT), which includes verbal, quantitative, and nonverbal/spatial batteries. Overall, neither duration of play nor video game genres played had significant correlations with the CogAT measures. Similarly, when using an “extreme-groups” approach to examine relations with playing a subset of games previously linked with certain enhancements in cognitive skill (i.e., action video games), no significant effects were observed. These results are thus inconsistent with theories that predict diminished cognitive performance in children who play a great deal of video games, but they are also inconsistent with previous work suggesting possible enhancements in those who play certain types of games. The potential contribution of this null finding and an alternative explanation are discussed..”

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Sep 242022
 

Gostava de ler este artigo “Introduction on THINKING: Bioengineering of Science and Art” de Nima Rezaei e Amene Saghazadeh

“THINKING: Bioengineering of Science and Art is inclusive of the philosophy of thinking by using different knowledge works. This chapter is, therefore, no longer an attempt to introduce the book. Rather, we notice thoughts of different contexts and many relations among them, giving rise to various sets of integrations. One important result of this introduction is that integrated thinking represents the highest level of development, and scientific thinking may be only one of many integrant elements and a range of integrative relations—the point to which we devote our attention in THINKING: Bioengineering of Science and Art.”

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Sep 242022
 

Um Journal que publica online as contribuições de vários âmbitos!

“IxD&A aims to offer an interdisciplinary arena where everybody can present top level researches and discuss ideas on the future of technology mediated experiences in the field of communication, learning, working, entertainment, healthcare, etc…) a future that can be made possible by a joint effort in research and education.
IxD&A, indeed, offers the ideal forum for meeting among frontier research, education, cutting edge technology development and application.
Indeed, there will be no future if research and education will not be able to meet the world of production, or, in other words if we will not be able to transfer the ‘lab’ into real life.”
“IxD&A is an open access journal that implements the Gold Open Access (OA) road to its contents (full, short, position papers, interviews and reviews) with no charge to the authors.”

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Aug 272022
 

The War on Terror beyond the barrel of a gun: The procedural rhetorics of the boardgame Labyrinth
Thomas Ambrosio, Jonathan Ross

“Utilizing Bogost’s procedural rhetoric framework in his book Persuasive Games, this article examines Labyrinth, a boardgame that simulates the conflict between the United States and global terrorism. The authors systematically integrate ludology (rules/gameplay) and narratology (narratives/representations) to illustrate how Labyrinth was intentionally designed so that players became active participants in a narrative about how good governance undermines the sources of terrorism and the counterproductive nature of militarized counterterrorism, as well as bear witness to the agency of the Muslim world and the region’s political dynamism on the tabletop. This is a very different account of the War on Terror than has previously been studied in the literature, which has focused overwhelmingly on first-person shooter videogames and, in turn, has provided a very limited range of how this conflict can be represented in ludic form. However, Labyrinth is not alone, and the wargames that many players grew up with have given way to a variety of boardgames which approach complex historical or contemporary situations and environments beyond simply killing one’s enemies. This represents a diverse, but largely untapped, resource already in the public space and ready to be investigated. Media studies can therefore benefit from considering how boardgames similar to Labyrinth present alternative ways in which the ‘real world’ has been, and indeed can be, translated through popular culture objects.”

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Aug 272022
 

“The theme of the special issue is the Futures of Games and Game Studies.

During its around 20 years of existence, game studies has put computer games on the academic map. The field has provided a response to effect studies by demonstrating that games are social arenas of intrinsic value to the individuals that use them, and that they are cultural products able to comment on society in new ways. From a more practical perspective, technical oriented game studies has driven developments in artificial intelligence and virtual reality.

But where will game studies go in the future? What are the challenges that game studies will face as computer games mature and become a medium not only for entertainment but also for politics and activism? What will happen to games as technological developments take new and unforeseen directions? How can we as a scholarly community be able not only to respond to these rapid developments but also be able to define what games should be in the future? This special issue will be an attempt to illuminate potential avenues for the future of game studies.

This special issue call is based on the Futures of Games and Game Studies symposium and doctoral consortium organized at the IT University of Copenhagen in April 2022. Participants who attended the event are encouraged to submit, but with this call we also invite submissions from the larger academic community. ”

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Aug 272022
 

Top-down Design of a CS Curriculum for a Computer Games BA
Nuno Fachada e Nélio Códices

“Computer games are complex products incorporating software, design and art. Consequently, their development is a multidisciplinary effort, requiring professionals from several fields, who should nonetheless be knowledgeable across disciplines. Due to the variety of skills required, and in order to train these professionals, computer game development (GD) degrees have been appearing in North America and Europe since the late 1990s. Following this trend, several GD degrees have emerged in Portugal. Given the lack of specialized academic staff, not uncommon in younger scientific areas, some of these degrees “borrowed” computer science (CS) programs and faculty within the same institution, leading in some cases to a disconnect between CS theory and practice and the requirements of GD classes. In this paper, we discuss our experience in adapting the CS curriculum of a three-year computer games BA in accordance with GD requirements. We used a top-down approach, where the game engine used for GD informs the choice of CS topics and programming languages lectured in the CS curriculum. The discussion is centered around the choices taken and the theoretical and empirical rationale behind our decisions. Preliminary empirical results indicate a substantial increase in GD project quality and a clear improvement in the students’ technical skills, as well as in their experimentation and adaptation capabilities.”

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Aug 052022
 

SonifyIt: Towards Transformative Sound for All Robots
Brian J. Zhang; Noel Sigafoos; Rabecka Moffit; Ibrahim Syed; Lili S. Adams; Jason Fick; Naomi T. Fitter

do resumo consta:
Transformative robot sound yields perceptual, functional, and social benefits in human-robot interactions, but broader research and implementation related to this topic is impeded by the lack of a common sound generation system for robots. Such a system could enable a wide array of situated robot sound studies, smoother collaborations with sound designers than current state of the art methods, and broader adoption of transformative robot sound. Based on other successful open-source projects in the robotics community, we integrated Robot Operating System, a popular robotics middleware, and Pure Data, a visual programming language for multimedia, to enable live sound synthesis and sample playback for robots. This sound generation system synthesized sound in an in-the-wild pilot study with positive qualitative results. Furthermore, an online within-subjects survey study with N=96 showed that the proposed sound system made the robot seem warmer, happier, and more energetic. This work benefits robotics researchers by providing the current sound system as a validated artifact and demonstrating its potential impact on broader robotics applications. We plan to develop this software into an open-source package: SonifyIt.

Jul 262022
 

Gostava de ter acesso a estes artigos:
Nintendo® WII? For the Elderly, Yes! : Contributions to a Better Inclusion and Quality of Life for the Elderly
“Video games are aimed at a younger audience, however, with this study we intend to demonstrate that they can also be leveraged with the elderly. The main objective was to investigate whether the Nintendo® Wii has characteristics that allow promoting and improving the inclusion and quality of life of the elderly. In methodological terms, an exploratory study was chosen, because the confinement constraints associated with the pandemic did not allow the participation of a larger group, in which the participant observation method was applied. Data collection was carried out at the Activities Center of a municipality in the district of Castelo Branco, with the participation of three users. After the activities carried out, it appears that video games contribute to the inclusion and quality of life of the elderly, due to the fact that a collaborative environment is felt among the participants, the relaxed and mutual environment and the smiles and laughter that were heard. The fact that they mastered a technological resource was also emphasized because it gave them a feeling of inclusion in a technological world to which, in most cases, they feel on the sidelines. In short, the use of the Nintendo® Wii made it possible to verify that it can promote and contribute to a healthier and more inclusive life for the elderly.”
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Algorithmic Interactions in Open Source Work
“This study focuses on algorithmic interactions in open source work. Algorithms are essential in open source because they remedy concerns incompletely addressed by parallel development or modularity. Following algorithmic interactions in open source allows us to map the performance of algorithms to understand the nature of work conducted by multiple algorithms functioning together. We zoom to the level of algorithmic interactions to show how residual interdependencies of modularity are worked around by algorithms. Moreover, the dependence on parallel development does not suffice to resolve all concerns related to the distributed work of open source. We examine the Linux Kernel case that reveals how algorithmic interactions facilitate open source work through the three processes of managing, organizing, and supervising development work. Our qualitative study theorizes how algorithmic interactions intensify through these processes that work together to facilitate development. We make a theoretical contribution to open source scholarship by explaining how algorithmic interactions navigate across module rigidity and enhance parallel development. Our work also reveals how, in open source, developers work to automate most tasks and augmentation is a bidirectional relationship of algorithms augmenting the work of developers and of developers augmenting the work of algorithms..”
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Developing Games with Data-Oriented Design
“Data-Oriented Design (DOD) is a software design process used in the commercial game industry for medium to large scale (AAA) games that revolves around data as the central design focus. Since DOD grew organically from industry practices, it has been viewed primarily as a set of tools and design patterns without a cohesive core. After studying data-oriented design, it has become clear that there is one core motivating concept behind DOD and that is that software exists to input, transform, and output data. In order to demonstrate the core concept and tools of DOD, examples are shown. The history and focus of DOD are discussed as well as how DOD is used in current commercial software..”
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Dec 312021
 

Gostava de ter acesso a:
“M. Kuwahara and N. Umezu, “Learning Environment based on an Interactive Projection Table for Children,” 2021 IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality (AIVR), 2021, pp. 109-113, doi: 10.1109/AIVR52153.2021.00026.
Abstract: This paper proposes a tabletop learning environment for children. Some physics-based phenomena such as reflection and refraction of light are difficult for children to understand. Our interactive projection significantly help children understand behaviors of light through watching simulated light particles and interacting with them by moving real objects on the table. Our system consists a PC, video projector, and depth sensor. Depth-based object detection is performed with each of captured frames at 60 FPS. In the prototype of our implemented system for learning behaviors of light, simulated light particles reacts in realtime with actual objects moved by a user hand, which would greatly help people including children understand behaviors of light such as propagation and reflection. Our future work includes to conduct a series of user experiments in local museums to evaluate usability of the proposed system. Development of other learning applications are also of high importance”

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