Design and development practitioners such as those in game development often have difficulty comprehending and adhering to the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), especially when designing in a private sensitive way. Inadequate understanding of how to apply the GDPR in the game development process can lead to one of two consequences: 1. inadvertently violating the GDPR with sizeable fines as potential penalties; or 2. avoiding the use of user data entirely. In this paper, we present our work on designing and evaluating the “GDPR Pitstop tool”, a gamified questionnaire developed to empower game developers and designers to increase legal awareness of GDPR laws in a relatable and accessible manner. The GDPR Pitstop tool was developed with a user-centered approach and in close contact with stakeholders, including practitioners from game development, legal experts and communication and design experts. Three design choices worked for this target group: 1. Careful crafting of the language of the questions; 2. a flexible structure; and 3. a playful design. By combining these three elements into the GDPR Pitstop tool, GDPR awareness within the gaming industry can be improved upon and game developers and designers can be empowered to use user data in a GDPR compliant manner. Additionally, this approach can be scaled to confront other tricky issues faced by design professionals such as privacy by design.
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Game development businesses often choose Lua for separating scripted game logic from reusable engine code. Lua can easily be embedded, has simple interfaces, and offers a powerful and extensible scripting language. Using Lua, developers can create prototypes and scripts at early development stages. However, when larger quantities of engine code and script are available, developers encounter maintainability and quality problems. First, the available automated solutions for interoperability do not take domain-specific optimizations into account. Maintaining a coupling by hand between the Lua interpreter and the engine code, usually in C++, is labour intensive and error-prone. Second, assessing the quality of Lua scripts is hard due to a lack of tools that support static analysis. Lua scripts for dynamic analysis only report warnings and errors at run-time and are limited to code coverage. A common solution to the first problem is developing an Interface Definition Language (IDL) from which ”glue code”, interoperability code between interfaces, is generated automatically. We address quality problems by proposing a method to complement techniques for Lua analysis. We introduce Lua AiR (Lua Analysis in Rascal), a framework for static analysis of Lua script in its embedded context, using IDL models and Rascal.
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Sustainability has become an important blueprint to achieve a better future for all, and as part of this process, nations are called to accelerate an energy transition towards clean energy solutions. However, an often-neglected pillar is educating individuals on the benefits and challenges of energy efficiency and renewable energy, especially among young people. Their support and willingness to use clean energies will be a significant driver in short, medium and long term. However, reality shows that attention from youth on these issues has not been sufficient yet. Formal education settings become therefore a key place to educate youth in the energy transition. In search of innovative approaches, game-based learning is gaining popularity among scholars and practitioners; it can contribute to content development of complex issues by integrating insights from different disciplines in an interactive, fun and engaging manner.In this context, we would like to present “the We-Energy Game” as an innovative educational strategy which makes use of game-based learning to create understanding on the challenges in the provision of affordable energy from renewable sources for an entire town. During the game, players negotiate, from their respective roles, which energy source they want to employ and on which location, with the goal to make a village or city energy neutral. The game has been played by students in higher education institutions in The Netherlands.In addition to introducing the game, a study is presented on the effects of the game on students´ awareness on the energy transition, self-efficacy -the feeling that they can contribute to a sustainable energy transition in their towns by themselves- and collective efficacy -the feeling that they can contribute to a sustainable energy transition in their towns together with their community-. For that purpose, we conducted a survey with 100 bachelor (Dutch and international) students aged between 18 and 30 years old, at Hanze University of Applied Sciences, before and after playing the game. We also conducted a group discussion with a smaller group of students to understand their opinion about the game. From the survey, results reveal an increase in awareness about the energy transition, as well as (slightly higher) collective efficacy compared to self-efficacy. From the group discussion, findings reveal that the game makes students reflect on the complexity of the process and need for collaboration among different stakeholders. It also shows how educational games have still a long way to go to achieve the high levels of engagement of commercial games, despite the fact that students still preferred to have this type of interactive practice rather than a traditional class characterized by a unidirectional transmission of information. Different implications must be taken into account for educators when interested in implementing game-based learning in class, including immediate feedback, appropriate length of gameplay during class, and time for a reflection and critical thinking after playing the game.
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A roundtable session for LGBTQ game developers to discuss issues that they experience working in the industry. Themes include the content of games, the team creation process, and the cultural context surrounding games.
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© Springer International Publishing AG 2016. A serious game needs to combine a number of different aspects to help the end user in reaching the desired effects. This requires incorporating a broad range of different aspects in the design, stemming from a broad range of different fields of expertise. For designers, developers, researchers, and other stakeholders it is not straightforward how to organize the design and development process, to make sure that these aspects are properly addressed. In this chapter we will discuss a number of ways of organizing the design and development process and various models that support specific design decisions during this process, concluding with a discussion of design patterns for serious games.
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A presentation about WP6 from the GAMEHEARTS Horizon Europe project. The work package attempts to bring the research of GAMHEHEARTS to life in the language of video game developers, i.e. a playable prototype game combining the interests of the Imperial War Museum, City Football Group, and the London Symphony Orchestra with the cultural interests of video games.
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Game User Research is an emerging field that ties together Human Computer Interaction, Game Development, and Experimental Psychology, specifically investigating the interaction between players and games. The community of Game User Research has been rapidly evolving for the past few years, extending and modifying existing methodologies used by the HCI community to the environment of digital games. In this workshop, we plan to investigate the different methodologies currently in practice within the field as well as their utilities and drawbacks in measuring game design issues or gaining insight about the players' experience. The outcome of the workshop will be a collection of lessons from the trenches and commonly used techniques published in a public online forum. This will extend the discussion of topics beyond the workshop, and serve as a platform for future work. The workshop will be the first of its kind at CHI, tying together HCI research and Game User Research.
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Collaboratively editing game worlds and the underlying asset version management techniques present us with many challenges when using a traditional Version Control System (VCS). This paper suggests a new method that will aid in the tracking, branching, and selection of asset versions within a game development pipeline. A prototype has been developed which demonstrated im-provements in both productivity and usability providing greater visibility of incremental asset changes and alterations to their relationships which equated to approximately a 30% better user experience when compared to an existing industry VCS.
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A panel discussing the current outcomes of R&D related to the state of video game development, content, and policy in Europe, with a particular interest in how this compares with treatment of 'traditional' cultural mediums.
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