Serious and educational gaming
RewiredState DotGovLabs Developer Weekend – Introducing Playtter
Dec 13th
Derek and I just got back from a hectic weekend spent in the company of the lovely Rewired State people at the Guardian offices in London. We were one of a select bunch of developers invited to spend the weekend hacking together apps for the DotGovLabs UK government innovation hub (closed beta, but ping us for an invite).
We took on the challenge of developing an app to support healthy living, and spent the weekend putting together Playtter – a social food diary app for improving the quality of the users’ diets.
Playtter allows users to upload pictures of food using their mobile phone camera, and then visit the website to get feedback on the quality of their nutritional intake. Web users are free to access Playtter and “tag” random meals with nutritional information, following the UK “Eatwell” healthy diet guidelines.
Nutrition data for meals is generated based on aggregation of social opinion, and Playtter can then build up a profile of a user’s typical diet over the course of their usage. Using this longer term data, it is able to provide personalised recommendations to users based on their actual diet, without the intervention of 3rd party dieticians. This opens dietary feedback to the general population, who may be at high risk of diabetes and other negative health effects based on their diet.
More information about the Playtter project is available on the RewiredState projects pages.
If you are a member of the DotGovLabs innovation hub, please visit the project page and give us comments and thumbs-up! We are very excited about the possible future of Playttr but that future won’t happen without support.
Unfortunately Playtter didn’t win any prizes on the weekend. We were beaten to the healthy living prize by the Pedalmania project, which aims to support the health of Londoners (who overdo the eels and shandy?) by getting them to redistribute “Boris Bikes” . Some other great projects included hack weekender tool RapidHackr, smoking advice calculator “Smoking is Cool” and the grand prize winner “Social Media Lite” which uses the O2 Joggler to feed Facebook images into a digital photo frame (although the presumption that all older people are luddites is more than a little un-PC!).
Derek and I were particularly impressed by the quality of the apps created by some of the younger attendees – although they were a bit segregated (“the devs” vs. “the kids”). I’m trying not to sound too patronising but their work was amongst the best there (and justly rewarded), with better ideas, better scope and better implementations than pretty much all of the professional developers.
In particular we really liked the work of Josh Pickett, who seemed to be the common member in a bunch of cool projects: Community social micro-task site FixThis, RapidHackr and our favourite, “How Healthy Is…”, a website that compares Foursquare checkins to sports centres and fast food joints, and compares that with the official government stats on healthy living for that area. Really nice, simple, well executed idea, that doesn’t seem to be online yet!
Also see the delightful “ComputerText” project from the hackers in the noisy corner. This app helps encourage people to get online by using a familiar TV-style interface to translate the web: TELETEXT! You can even type 123 to see the lottery results. Barmy but excellent, winning a special “Kudos” prize from the judges.
All in, we had a great time and will look forward to more hack weekends in the future.
p.s., sorry to whoever’s desk I was using in this image – I accidentally stained the carpet with brown sauce!
also, remember to please visit the project page and give us comments and thumbs-up!
Recently Funded ENACT project – enhancing social networks to augment cognitive behavioural therapy
Jul 29th
I have just realised that we have made no mention to the funding that we recently won from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Here’s some official information on what is involved:
Dr. Shaun Lawson, Reader at the Lincoln School of Computing Science, leads the ENACT project team which has secured just under £500K from the EPSRC for a 28-month study to explore the effectiveness of online social networks in improving the uptake, adherence and completion rates of computerised cognitive behavioural therapy. From the EPSRC’s press summary:
The primary hypothesis of the ENACT project is that Computerised Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CCBT) programmes which replicate the interactive structure of online social media will be more effective at engendering user uptake and engagement than CCBT programmes that replicate the structure of traditional one-to-one therapy sessions. In order to examine the effects of enhancing CCBT with elements of online social technology, ENACT will concentrate on the development and enhancement of a CCBT ‘package’ for the treatment of insomnia. Users of the final application will: 1) be able to interact confidentially with and receive support from other users of the service; 2) be able report completion of daily activities via Online Social Networking and mobile phone applications; 3) receive feedback in an engaging manner on targets set and met; and 4) will generally be supported in their completion of the treatment package in a manner that reflects their usage of online social technology, and which fits conveniently into their daily liefstyle.
The multi-disciplinary nature of ENACT reflects the University’s research strengths in both Computing and Healthcare: Prof. Niro Siriwardena, Foundation Professor in Primary Care at Lincoln, brings his national expertise on primary care improvement to the project. In particular, ENACT will draw on Niro’s work on sleep disorders and their treatment, which was developed in the REST (Resources for Effective Sleep Treatment) project funded by the Health Foundation.
Dr. Kevin Morgan from Loughborough University and Dr. Kate Cavanagh from University of Sussex provide expertise on Human-Computer Interaction and Cognitive science applications in ICT.
The EPSRCs official description of the project.
The Universitys Press release
Friday 16th July – Technology, Exercise and Health
Jul 19th
This week we had a great discussion based around the idea of using technology to help motivate people to increase the amount of exercise they take on a daily basis. Richard Keegan from the Universitys Department of Sport, Coaching & Exercise Science came along to contribute his expertise on the topic. There appear to be a large number of online games, mobile phone apps and social networking tools that already attempt to address these issues. However, it is a field in whcih technology has the potential to make real, lasting impacts in peoples lives. We are hoping to collaborate with Richard in designing some tools for this specific purpose in the near future.
Appropriately enough, considering we were discussing topics such as dietary behaviour, obesity and diabetes, we had some delicious sugar coated cream buns to go with our coffee.
Friday June 26th – Technology-Enhanced Mental Health Therapy
Jun 28th
This friday we had a different type of journal club – we had a visit from David Coyle – a post-doctoral research fellow working jointly with Trinity College Dublin and the University of Cambridge. David is working in an area directly related to our recently-funded EPSRC project, which is investigating ways of using online social technology to enhance the delivery of mental health interventions. David gave a very interesting talk entitled ‘Designing technologies to support mental health interventions’. Further details of David’s work are available at www.cs.tcd.ie/David.Coyle
After the talk, we sat around as usual and had a chat about the topic (although there was a disgraceful lack of cake – i expect two cakes next week). We discussed a number of papers written by david and his colleagues here and here
Thanks to david and to everyone else who came along and made this a useful and interesting session!
CHI 2010 debriefing
May 2nd
Despite Volcanoes, alleged arrests at the airport and shooting incidents, we have made it back safe from CHI2010, which was recently held in Atlanta. The conference itself was of its usual excellent standard and was a fantastic opportunity to meet similarly minded people.
Over the course of four days we presented one short paper (here), two alt.chi papers (here and here) and two posters (here and here). Ben’s short paper looking into social game engagement was nominated for best paper and drew a great deal of interest from attendees.
The two alt.chi papers were extremely well attended and we are delighted with the response of the audience to both papers. Conor described how behavioural psychology should be employed when designing feedback in persuasive technology, while Conor and Ben jointly presented the intentionally provocative Blowtooth paper.
Interestingly, Blowtooth has recently generated a lot of comments both on twitter (#blowtooth) and on blogs and online magazines (the escapist game politics gpara.com flytrap games). Remember you can check out the game on http://ww.blowtooth.com
Thanks to everyone who we talked to over the course of the conference and see you next year!
conor
MindTrek 2009
Jul 27th
LiSC are delighted to be attending the 2009 MindTrek Conference in Tampere, Finland, which takes place from 30th September to 2nd October. MindTrek is the leading Nordic digital media and business conference, focusing on social media & Web 2.0. The conference brings together entrepreneurs, researchers and practitioners from diverse disciplines that are involved in the development of media in various fields, ranging from sociology and economy, to technology.
Ben Kirman will present a paper entitled “Mario, Luigi and Dave: The Effect of Language on the Social Structure of a Bilingual Online Mobile Game.”
Abstract – In this paper, we explore the structure of a social community built in an online game that was released in two languages, specifically examining the behaviours of players involved in inter-lingual interaction. This asynchronous social game was released simultaneously in Italian and English. The player base was seeded with English and Italian players but allowed to grow organically without restriction. Despite the built-in segregation by language, we found that the entire player-base formed into a single social network and developed strategies for overcoming the challenges faced by a multi-lingual game community.
Using Network Analysis, we break down the community in the game based on language and play style. We demonstrate that the behaviour of both English and Italian players was equivalent, and that play style had no effect on the likelihood of players deliberately engaging in inter-lingual communication.
In the context of the strategies used by the players in our experiment, we discuss game design patterns that provide incentives for users to behave more socially and how to create tools to enable the players to cross the lingual and cultural barriers in online games.
Conor Linehan will be presenting a paper entitled “Developing a serious game to evaluate and train group decision making skills.”
Abstract – The success of a serious game depends on whether the skill being taught and practiced in the game is the same as that which is required in the real world. The current paper describes the building of a serious game designed to teach group decision making skills to a unique audience; people who co-ordinate responses to real-world emergencies such as floods, fires, volcanoes and chemical spills.
Eighteen participants were recruited and videotaped while playing a paper prototype of the game. Players’ actions within the game were analysed in terms of whether the challenges that are present in real world decision-making environments are also present in the game-world decision making environment. It appears that the defining characteristics of group decision making behaviour, especially the mistakes, are evident in groups that play our game. In addition, the round-based game structure allows a tutor the opportunity to deliver in-depth qualitative feedback without interrupting game play. Thus, the game design should prove to be a valid environment in which to train, practice and evaluate the decision making behaviours of groups and function as a valuable and engaging part of a group decision making skills training course.
SAGSET 2009 – 39th Annual Conference “Coaching and Learning Through Gamesâ€
Jul 13th
July 22nd to 24th, 2009
Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds, Yorkshire, UK
Formed in 1970, SAGSET is a voluntary professional society dedicated to improving the effectiveness and quality of learning through the use of interactive learning, role-play, simulation and gaming – in all aspects of education and training, from Primary School to University – and in all levels of adult, lifelong learning from the shop floor to the board room. The Coaching and Learning Through Games ’09 Confererence promises to be an interesting event for all those interested in serious games.
Conor Linehan will be presenting a paper entitled “There’s no ‘I’ in ‘Emergency Management Team:’ Designing and evaluating a serious game for training emergency managers in group decision making skills” on Thursday July 23, 2009.
ABSTRACT – Serious games are games that are designed to educate rather than entertain. The game outlined and evaluated here was commissioned and designed as a tool to improve the group decision making skills of people who manage real-world emergencies such as floods, fires, volcanoes and chemical spills. The game design exploits research on decision making groups and applies pedagogically sound games design principles. An evaluation of the game design was carried out based on a paper prototype. Eight participants were recruited and assigned to two groups of four participants each. These groups were video recorded while playing the game and the video was analysed in terms of game actions and member participation. Results indicate that the group who behaved in a more appropriate manner for a decision making group were rewarded with more positive feedback from the game state. These findings suggest that the game itself delivers appropriate feedback to players on their collaborative behaviour and is thus fit for the purposes intended in the current project.
See further details here
Future and Reality of Games Conference (F.R.O.G.) 2009
Jul 13th
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3rd Vienna Games Conference Future and Reality of Games (F.R.O.G.) 2009 “Exploring the Edge of Gaming” Vienna, Austria, Friday 25 to Sunday 27 September 2009 Vienna’s annual Games Conference FROG brings together leading game studies researchers, game designers, players, and education professionals from around the world. The main objective of FROG 09 is to explore the edge of gaming and discuss insights into how to reach beyond the limits of theory and practice of game play. LiSC are contributing to two sessions at this event. Ben Kirman is presenting a paper on “Gaming on the Edge of Good Taste: Playful Misconduct in Social Games” on Friday 25th September, Conor Linehan is presenting “A behavioural framework for designing educational computer games” on Saturday 26th. Abstract – Research has indicated that computer games can be innovative and powerful tools for education. Combining psychological research and games design principles offers a framework for developing educational games that promote learning while maintaining high motivation of the players. However, there has yet to be consensus on the most effective method of combining psychological research with games design principles. The current paper proposes that behavioural teaching methodologies already resemble game structures in some respects, and thus may be ideally suited to inform the design of educational computer games. Indeed, designing games based on behavioural teaching principles would have the reciprocal benefit of providing a medium through which these highly successful teaching programmes can be rolled out on a much larger scale than is currently possible. For more details click here |