Full Panel
Panelists
Andy Keenan (panel facilitator) is a digital media researcher and doctoral student at the University of Toronto. His expertise is in player interaction in digital games.
Matt Bouchard is a doctoral student in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. His research and practice explores game building for users with low skill but high functional demands.
Sandra Danilovic is a University of Toronto doctoral student researching inclusive game design and the future potential of user-generated avatar creation in digital games.
Gabby Resch is a doctoral student at the University of Toronto whose research focuses on new media technologies and human-computer interaction in both formal and informal education.
Panel Description
What is the future of serious games made for institutional informal learning environments (IILE) like museums and science centres? This panel will explore future directions in serious game design for IILE based on previous research around best practices in game design. Specifically, our panel focuses on new forms of interaction for players that emphasize embodiment and player enjoyment. Serious games are defined as “games [that] have an explicit or carefully thought-out educational purpose and are not intended to be played primarily for amusement” (Abt 1970). Serious games (also known as educational games or games with a purpose) often place significant emphasis on learning outcomes and forget that games function most effectively as voluntary spaces of play (Koster 2004; Juul 2005; Salen and Zimmerman 2003). Our panel will discuss strategies to encourage serious games as playful and voluntary activities through new forms of interaction for players in IILEs.
We will explore serious games that feature embodied interaction – a human-computer interaction philosophy that places social and participatory concerns as core design features (Dourish 2001). In embodied interaction, players actively participate in the experience, calling upon their own skills and surrounding relationships to engage in meaningful use with technologies that emphasize the physical: wearable and haptic computing, gestural and touch-based interfaces, and interaction with tangible objects embedded with sensors or electronics. A phenomenological approach is taken toward physicality, multisensorial engagement with artifacts, and social knowledge construction in the meaning making process when embodied interaction is emphasized. While these techniques are not particularly new in science centres, they are still reluctantly considered in IILEs where artifact preservation is the limiting factor of the user experience, like museums or art galleries, where “touch with your eyes” is a mantra. Interaction with virtual objects and environments, in embodied mixed reality-based games for example, has the potential to disturb this, re-invigorating the playful and pedagogical opportunities in these IILEs.
Embodied interaction creates a playful environment by reducing the layers of mediation and abstraction between the player and the game. Using the body as a controller, also known as natural mapping, simplifies the mental models required to participate in the game and reduces barriers to play. Skalski et al. (2011) suggests that reducing the perceptual distance between the planned action and the device that mediates the action (like an XBox Controller or Mouse and Keyboard) creates a more engaging experience for players. This is consistent with existing research on presence and perceptual illusion (Lombard and Ditton 1997) and affordances in industrial design (Norman 1988). Games that reduce the layers of complexity and abstraction get players closer to the “play” activity in the game.