Category: DiGRA 2015

Tilak Jha,  Zhejiang University

That old generation is picking up its interest in digital games is a proven phenomenon now in most aging countries with proper digital infrastructure. China’s demographic trend also points towards an era of digital games among old generation. While targeting the older richer generation as a business model is the popular trend, free games continue to bring the push factor, indeed with parallel source of revenue from advertising or elsewhere. Amid the usual financial give and take digital gaming model that usually crowds the non-Chinese and especially the western digi-games model, there is a need for a different form of barter. This is of conceptualizing a platform like the freeware Adventure Maker that brings the older to the closer through something that may be christened “Project Old-New Digital Story” or “Being Young Digitally” or simply “Keep in Touch.” This ideational project would bring the historical usual storytellers – the old, and listeners – the young, together on a digital gaming platform. Stories and games can be recreated through animation, simulations and augmented reality. It could also link up potential old and new together to be part of their digital family – not to deny the emotional and even health benefits of a holistic digital gaming ecosystem. This paper proposes to study the existing digital gaming model to propose ideas for such a future project that brings the old and new in re-imagining life and struggles, and the world beyond inside. At a time when people are travelling on average more than their previous generational counterparts, this study proposes to look into models outside China that are likely to work here. It thus approaches this subject based on a review of old and young gamers’ interest across geographies.

Author info

Tilak Jha has done Masters in Convergent Journalism from AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi and M. Phil in Chinese Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is currently studying Public Policy on Asian Future Leaders Scholarship in Zhejiang University, Hangzhou. His research interests include communication, international relations and public policy issues.

Philip Lin, Providence University

In the last 15 years, the first-person-shooter (FPS) genre has grown to be the most recognizable genre of digital games and happened to produce several most-wanted war-themed games played by millions of global gamers. Especially after 9/11, the popular FPS game titles, e.g. the America’s Army (AA), Call of Duty (COD), Medal of Honour (MOD) and Battlefield series based on World War II stories or contemporary world conflicts were constantly monitored, supported or partly sponsored by the U.S. military authorities. With both commercial and ideological interests, the Pentagon and the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) already had enormous budgets invested in various game simulation projects, which directly encourage talented game developers/programmers to continue creating realistic virtual war simulation and producing the gaming scenarios and experiences closed to real combat-situations. Historically speaking, games of this kind bring more attention to Western gamers, who were normally defined as closely attached to crime, shooter and sport game genres. (see Kent 2004). However, recent reports have shown the number of FPS gamers and communities in the East Asian countries, such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan is increasing very intensively. This strongly reflects that, through the power of gaming, Pentagon’s ‘perception management campaigns’ begin to pay off overseas and bring more about foreign audiences’ interests in role-playing soldiers.

In this regard, this study organized several interviews with Taiwanese gamers. From examining their self-reflected experiences, it is evident that Hollywood war movies bring great influences in Taiwanese gamers’ war imagination. The war-themed FPS gamers in Taiwan construct their virtual and transnational belongings by projecting and carrying forward their previous war TV/film-viewing experience into their gaming process. Playing the war-themed FPS games, as one interviewee (Samuel Chuang, 31-year-old male sales executive) described, provides a perfect escape trajectory that “finds somewhere to let out one’s boiling emotions and feelings after watching HBO’s Band of Brother…just like the feeling you have to do something after watching porn.”

Author info

Philip Lin is Assistant Professor at the Department of Mass Communication, Providence University

TENG Yuning (滕宇宁)
北京大学视觉与图像研究中心

当今社会已经进入“图像时代”。游戏作为新的传播媒介，挑战了几千年来观看者被动接受图像信息的视觉经验，使观看方式逐渐转变为个体主动的选择：对图像的观看不再受限于唯一既定的顺序（规定顺序决定了对信息接收的先后次序，从而以固定叙事影响信息获取）或人为强化的局部（对画面局部的放大实际是对事实原有信息的放大），而是可以随机进行移动和调整画面的阅读，根据自我心境、习惯、兴趣读取不同的信息——部分地解脱了订件人（图像作用的规定者）及创作者（艺术家）作为权威的控制力，观看者本身具有对画面理解的掌控力和主动权。

风景作为艺术史中一个典型的艺术类型（genre），非常清晰地反映艺术史的演变线索；同时根据政治图像学（political iconography）的理论和方法研究，图像是复杂的社会行为的投射，背后蕴藏有人为的诉求和干涉从而实现权威对民众（观看者）的控制。本文以游戏中的风景为例，分析移动观看图像的视点改变如何影响到对画面/景象的理解，从而对图像的政治加以警惕和抵抗，从某种意义上实现信息接受的平等，以达到一种精神上的自由的可能。

移动焦点在传统静态绘画中已经有所体现，即中国古代的长卷绘画。长卷的把玩方式即是拿在手中一部分一部分的展开，画面中的风景题材或者人物在风景中的活动就在展开的运动中显现为一种叙事结构。这种方式同西方绘画的单一焦点画面非常不同，也可以看作是中国传统审美中的一种移动的倾向。电影、视频艺术（Video Art）的活动影像将这一方式推进，在运动的影像中，风景参与叙事和政治表达。特别是视频艺术作为当代艺术的一种方式，以激进的形式将移动带来的规定性明确而激烈地进行批判。

游戏带来了主动性的画面选择，游戏中的风景虽然仍然受到程序的规定，以较为固定的范式呈现，但是已经具有个体自主选择观看的空间。这种选择性是否能以视觉心理学的方法加以深化，以验证一种推论：观看者在游戏的过程中已经从被动接受者转化为主动操控者，而针对画面的选择使其强化了这种对于“操控的想象”，曾经只属于画面创造者的“权力”转换到游戏者（受众）手中。在论证过程中，也会涉及一些当代艺术家利用游戏进行艺术创作的方式（如冯梦波的作品），来探讨艺术对于人自由选择的推进作用。

Author info

Teng Yuning’s main academic responsibility at Centre for Visual Studies (CVS) is managing the Chinese Modern Art Archive (CMAA), which collects and archives Chinese Contemporary Art dating back to 1986, establishes on-line database, hosts academic study projects, professional exhibition, international forum and student seminars, etc. CVS is a national base for the research of traditional Chinese art, Chinese contemporary art and world art history, and now also the Secretariat and one of the main organizers of the 34th CIHA (the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art) which will be held in China in 2016. As the deputy director, Yuning is in charge of the organizing work and academic preparation for this international conference.

Zhang Wanyi, College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University

Nowadays  computer  and  other  electronic  equipment  have  become  highly intelligent  with  the  development  of  computer  science  and  technology. However, computer is still not smart enough to identify images automatically, and this problem has plagued the scientists for a long time. In recent years, scientists work on the Deep Learning and Neural Network Algorithm, and it helps to solve the automatically image annotation problem. However, since the operation of human brain is much more complicated than any machine learning models, the annotation results can not satisfy us sometimes, and may need the subsequent manual validation. In our work, we propose a crowdsourcing system to collect the manual annotation produced by users. We treat every single user as an independent image annotation processor, and crowdsourcing is equivalent to a Distributed Image Annotation System which helps us to accomplish the annotation of images efficiently and quickly. And most of all, the users’ language diversity leads to the multilingual annotation of the images, even the Deep Learning algorithm cannot get the multilingual results at one time. In order to improve the user engagement and behavior, we design a game system to help us to attract users’ interest and add some elements of gamification such as PBL and the mechanism of competition and cooperation. In our presentation we will introduce the detail of our game system design and discuss the role played by gamification from the perspective of computer science.

Author info

Zhang Wanyi is a master candidate in College of Computer Science and Technology of Jilin University. Zhang Wanyi received her B.Sc degree in computer science in Jilin University. Her current research interests include Data Mining in Open Science, and Gamification in Education. Zhang Wanyi have published a workshop paper in SIGCHI 2015.

 

Hao Xu, Donglei Song. Jilin University

The situation of Chinese class now is that, teacher gives homework and students just have to finish it. Everyone does the same work. It is boring enough. Students have lost their enthusiasm to this boring homework. Also it is lack of reflection, student often hand in their work without any reflection or only give them a score.

Our aim is to improve the ability of web design of the students and team work spirit through the stage mode in the course “Web Design” in Jilin University.

Stage mode changes the traditional way in the class. In the past, Student only needed to listen to the teacher and do the same boring homework. Now students can choose the homework as they like. When they are going through the difficulties, they can find out how is their learning path like and what job fits them well. After analyzing the paths of students, the system will recommend the suitable partners to finish the final task.

Some basic elements like points and leader board are also used in this program according to the quality of the work and the submission time.

The experiment will bring a large amount of meaningful date, analyzing the learning path or pattern of students is useful for both students themselves and teacher. The result can help the students to find suitable partners also can help teachers to enhance teaching.

Author info

Hao Xu
College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Changchun, China
吉林大学副教授，研究兴趣包括知识管理、人机交互、教育游戏化。

Donglei Song
College of Software Engineering, Jilin University, China

Sathya Naidu and Hanna Wirman and Daniel Shek, School of Design ,Hong Kong Polytechnic University

Schools in China and Hong Kong often ignore the importance of providing a platform for adolescents to learn and understand the core constructs of life not limited to Social Competence, Moral Competence, Self-identity, Self-determination, Bonding, and Spirituality etc. As the adolescents grow older, this lack of understanding the constructs of life often leave them unprepared for the future. This paper describes the use of PATHS Digital Games as a platform for Adolescents (secondary and senior secondary school students) to play, learn and understand the importance of life constructs. The mini games are designed to be played over three years with the constructs varying from the obvious and most expected to abstract constructs like spirituality and bonding. All government schools in Hong Kong will include the PATHS Digital Games as a part of the secondary and senior secondary curriculum.

A series of 19 mini games were designed and developed to allow students to play based on real life scenarios in a game world setting (eg: relationships at home, school, bus stop, holy places etc.). The process involved research and development of unique art styles, game mechanics, design and development and a hexagonal web based scoring system.

This paper will discuss the research, design, development and testing methodology of the games at various stages including Alpha and Beta phases. Tests were conducted with sample sizes of student groups varying from 10 – 30. The final version of PATHS Digital Games were tested with a group of secondary and senior secondary students. The results calculated had over 80% of the students understanding the importance of learning these constructs which will be detailed in this paper.

This paper will also discuss the holistic development of adolescents through positive reinforcement by helping them recognize their abilities, building bonds with others, helping them develop positive beliefs in life, and setting clear future.

Author Info

Sathya Naidu prior to completing his Master’s degree from Hong Kong Polytechnic School of Design has worked in the area of serious games for training and games for simulation. Sathya is currently working as a Project Associate at School of Design for a project known as Ubiquitous Learning and Integrated Pedagogy; a collaboration between multiple schools in Hong Kong. His primary role is to research, design and experiment the use of games for mobile platforms to help address pedagogical issues.

Li Qiang, Shenyang Aerospace University
Erik Champion, Curtin University

Traditional game design skills can be used in all kinds of fields such as education, architecture, city plan and virtual cultural heritage and we can call this kind of game as serious game. However, these kinds of user experience that traditional serious game has brought to us lack the properties of interaction between reality and virtual world. With the development of VR techniques, all kinds of motion sensing input devices sprouted out, such as Microsoft Kinect sensor, Leap motion and Oculus Rift. Using these technologies to realize the serious game has a good sense of immersion and interactivity. To create an immersive and hand-free controlling serious game and evaluate its effects we designed a serious game related with virtual cultural heritage based on Kinect and we tested the application of Leap Motion and Oculus Rift on traditional car racing game. In this paper we analyzed and discussed the application of motion sensing technique in serious game and its influence.

Author info

Li Qiang is Visiting scholar in Media culture and creative art school of Curtin University Australia. Lecturer of Design&Art School of Shenyang Aerospace University.Research direction: Virtual Reality,Digital Games,Interactive design, Industrial design.

Professor Erik Champion (PhD Melbourne) is Professor of Cultural Visualisation at Curtin University. A past ARC SPIRT PhD scholarship holder, he has received Fulbright and Greece-NZ scholarships, a Distinguished Lecturer Invitation from UC Berkeley, funding from the Danish government and Apple, and facilitated major grants and awards in Europe and America from organisations such as the EU and COST, ERASMUS, European Digital Humanities, Mellon Foundation, Digital Heritage Centre funding (York, Leiden, Uppsala, Aarhus), and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). He was a team leader of Research and Engagement for DARIAH (www.dariah.eu) and project leader of DIGHUMLAB Denmark, a 5-year 30 million DKK national infrastructure project. He writes in the area of game design and virtual heritage, books include Playing With The Past and Critical Gaming: Interactive History and Virtual Heritage.