DreamFeel

A lot of the modules and research I'm doing at Abertay this semester have recently overlapped in interesting ways, in particular looking at the positive, educational power of games. This culminated in a game design presentation I gave on the 21st of October called Kinect Worlds.

Firstly, as part of our Games Programming module and to get into the research mindset, we had to write a short paper. This included an experiment proposition and hypothesis, and had to build from a number of given games related papers on topics such as violence in games and the impact of gender. The most interesting papers to me were those centered around education. One studied metrics for analyzing the effectiveness of educational games, and what the successful games had in common, and another how games excel at teaching their semiotic rules and play over and above their, one could almost say, arbitrary content, that may be at odds with the gameplay itself.

My paper, after a brief historical perspective on educational games, specifically looked at the Self-Theories of learning. How this school of thought might apply to games, it fit nicely with the properties of successful games in the first paper and also the theories proposed in the second paper, as well as how this could be leveraged to make more engaging and effective educational games. You could read it here, if so inclined!

Next, as part of the games research and innovation module we were split into teams and assigned a rough area to research, propose a research paper, present and create a poster for within two days. We looked at Augmented Reality, to fit the 'reality' topic given, as it's a quickly growing and interesting space. Specifically, we looked at how AR may be applied to learning, given its effectiveness in marketing from current research, to make learning more engaging, interactive and thus stronger.

For example posters could dot a historical or heritage site, and by using an AR device users can interact with a 3D avatar of, for example, a medieval farmer or knight who, through a series of selectable questions, will give information that makes it come alive. We also proposed a possible experiment using a controlled space such as a museum to measure the benefits, if any, it can have, including metrics and potential issues. The 5 min presentation went well; you can see the slides and references we used here, and click the picture above to see the full poster.

Finally, I had to recently develop and give a 5 minute pitch on an original game concept. Kinect Worlds is a game primarily concerned with communication and aimed at preschool, young children and their parents, playable, as you might surmise, through the Kinect. Essentially, you explore space as a small astronaut crash landing on unique alien worlds and meeting then learning to understand and communicate simply with lots of fun, fluffy and weird alien creatures.

The kids must first learn to greet the aliens back, a combination of a dancing game and making noises in the vein of 'Hey you, Pikachu', before moving and experimenting with other movements and vocabulary. This could build up to potentially solving simple puzzles for the slightly older children. While it's key that the Kinect recognition works extremely well, it's most important that the aliens not understanding and getting it wrong leads to hilarious and fun reactions. As the game progresses minigames are unlocked to provide rewards and surprises. These may be co-operative, competitive or simply just interactive toys such as an alien sound creating harp.

One of the driving motivations behind the concept is in demonstrating the positive force games can be, and promoting parents playing video games with their kids. You can find a lot more details in my presentation slides here: such as inspirations, context, market analysis, USPs, potential issues and even transmedia potential.