Serious Game Design And Development Technologies For Training And Learning

"With an increasing use of vido games in various disciplines within the scientific community, this book seeks to understand the nature of effective games and to provide guidance for how best to harness the power of gaming technology to successfully accomplish a more serious goal"--Provided by publisher.

This textbook provides an introduction to the fundamentals of serious games, which differ considerably from computer games that are meant for pure entertainment. Undergraduate and graduate students from various disciplines who want to learn about serious games are one target group of this book. Prospective developers of serious games are another, as they can use the book for self-study in order to learn about the distinctive features of serious game design and development. And ultimately, the book also addresses prospective users of serious game technologies by providing them with a solid basis for judging the advantages and limitations of serious games in different application areas such as game-based learning, training and simulation or games for health. To cater to this heterogeneous readership and wide range of interests, every effort was made to make the book flexible to use. All readers are expected to study Chapter 1, as it provides the necessary basics and terminology that will be used in all subsequent chapters. The eleven chapters that follow cover the creation of serious games (design, authoring processes and tools, content production), the runtime context of serious games (game engines, adaptation mechanisms, game balancing, game mastering, multi-player serious games), the effects of serious games and their evaluation (player experience, assessment techniques, performance indicators), and serious games in practice (economic aspects, cost-benefit analysis, serious game distribution). To familiarize the readers with best practice in this field, the final chapter presents more than 30 selected examples of serious games illustrating their characteristics and showcasing their practical use. Lecturers can select chapters in a sequence that is most suitable for their specific course or seminar. The book includes specific suggestions for courses such as “Introduction to Serious Games”, “Entertainment Technology”, “Serious Game Design”, “Game-based Learning”, and “Applications of Serious Games”.

With the continued application of gaming for training and education, which has seen exponential growth over the past two decades, this book offers an insightful introduction to the current developments and applications of game technologies within educational settings, with cutting-edge academic research and industry insights, providing a greater understanding into current and future developments and advances within this field. Following on from the success of the first volume in 2011, researchers from around the world presents up-to-date research on a broad range of new and emerging topics such as serious games and emotion, games for music education and games for medical training, to gamification, bespoke serious games, and adaptation of commercial off-the shelf games for education and narrative design, giving readers a thorough understanding of the advances and current issues facing developers and designers regarding games for training and education. This second volume of Serious Games and Edutainment Applications offers further insights for researchers, designers and educators who are interested in using serious games for training and educational purposes, and gives game developers with detailed information on current topics and developments within this growing area.

Leaders in the field of serious games share practical guidelines and lessons learned from researching and developing learning games.

During the last few years, a new area of creative media industry, namely Serious Games, has started to emerge around the world. The term serious games has become more popular for example in the fields of education, business, welfare and safety. Despite this, there has been no single definition of serious games. A key question, what the concept itself means, has stayed unsolved though most have agreed on a definition that serious games are games or game-like interactive systems developed with game technology and design principles for a primary purpose other than pure entertainment. In this book, serious games are understood as games which aim at providing an engaging, self-reinforcing context in which to motivate and educate the players. Serious games can be of any genre, use any game technology, and be developed for any platform. They can be entertaining, but usually they teach the user something. The central aim of serious games is to raise quality of life and well-being. As part of interactive media industry, the serious games field focuses on designing and using digital games for real-life purposes and for the everyday life of citizens in information societies. The field of serious games focuses on such areas as education, business, welfare, military, traffic, safety, travelling and tourism.

The multiple, related fields encompassed by this Major Reference Work represent a convergence of issues and topics germane to the rapidly changing segments of knowledge and practice in educational communications and technology at all levels and around the globe. There is no other comparable work that is designed not only to gather vital, current, and evolving information and understandings in these knowledge segments but also to be updated on a continuing basis in order to keep pace with the rapid changes taking place in the relevant fields. The Handbook is composed of substantive (5,000 to 15,000 words), peer-reviewed entries that examine and explicate seminal facets of learning theory, research, and practice. It provides a broad range of relevant topics, including significant developments as well as innovative uses of technology that promote learning, performance, and instruction. This work is aimed at researchers, designers, developers, instructors, and other professional practitioners.

Are you interested in learning more about gaming? Are you trying to determine whether it might be an appropriate training and development solution, but aren’t sure where to start? While games have long been an important part of human social development—think learning to take turns in a board game, and strategizing about future moves in chess or checkers—we are only now beginning to understand how games can be a powerful tool in learning. This issue of TD at Work will: • define games, gamification, and simulation; and discuss the types of games people play • walk you through the process of creating a game by outlining its design and gaming framework • describe how to get stakeholders and sponsors to support the gaming solution. This TD at Work includes a sidebar that offer guidance on how traditional delivery methods could be turned into gaming elements, a sample feedback form for the game testing phase, and a game design worksheet job aid.

"This 10-volume compilation of authoritative, research-based articles contributed by thousands of researchers and experts from all over the world emphasized modern issues and the presentation of potential opportunities, prospective solutions, and future directions in the field of information science and technology"--Provided by publisher.