Example: Battle Zone

This game is widely considered to be the first computer-based serious game. 

Everything in this arcade is rendered in full 3-D graphics with vectors graphics. It was endorsed and used by the US military while some atari staff members refused to work on the project because of this. 

Paper: Expressive AI: Games and Artificial Intelligence

Michael Mateas. Expressive AI: Games and Artificial Intelligence (2003). Proceedings of International DiGRA Conference.

In this paper, Michael argues that game AI should be considered as an interdisciplinary agenda linking games studies, design practice, and technical research. The author call this new interdisciplinary agenda expressive AI.

A good example is how Space Invaders enemies behave. They move purely mechanically and appear to shoot randomly – they don’t require a psychological read (goals, emotions, and so forth) in order to make sense of them. From this perspective, the enemy ships in Space Invaders are really part of the physics of the game, not AI. Game AI lies at the intersection of player perception (the player is able to read part of the game behavior as alive) and the game code that supports this perception.

Example: PlayMancer

PlayMancer is a platform for rapid development of serious games, with a special focus on therapeutic support games for behavioral and addictive disorders. It is modular and combines techniques from multimodal interaction (speech, touch, biosensors and motion-tracking), 3D engines, virtual and augmented reality, speech recognition and natural language processing.

http://youtu.be/8AS4p_YYxMk
http://youtu.be/SPSFDvVYa_s

Paper: State of the Art Report on Serious games: Blurring the lines between recreation and reality

Eirik Vik. State of the Art Report on Serious games: Blurring the lines between recreation and reality. 2009. INF358 Seminar in Visualization, The Eurographics Association.


This paper provides a general overview of Serious Games. What I liked more of this paper was:

Serious Game taxonomy
Eirik Vik propose three different ways to classify Serious Games:

- Approach in terms of play:
     * Based Some: There are clear goals to reach.
     * Play-based: There are not defined goals. There is no real sense of winning or losing.

- Approach in terms of game play:
     * Turn-based
     * Real-time: The real-time option is by far the more realistic of the two.

- Via what domain it is intended for:
     * Health care
     * Defense
     * Education
     * Management
     * Government

Paper: Serious Games for Rehabilitation A Survey and a Classification Towards a Taxonomy

Rego, P.; Moreira, P.M.; Reis, L.P., "Serious games for rehabilitation: A survey and a classification towards a taxonomy," Information Systems and Technologies (CISTI), 2010 5th Iberian Conference on , vol., no., pp.1,6, 16-19 June 2010


This paper presents fundamental concepts relating to Serious Games followed by a survey of relevant work and applications on Serious Games for Rehabilitation.

As a reference, they  adopted the RehaCom System (see example link). This is a serious game application widely used for cognitive rehabilitation and well grounded in neuro-scientific theory.

Based on the literature reviewed they identify as important main criteria for the classification of Serious games in the rehabilitation area the following ones:

     * Application area
     * Interaction Technology
     * Game interface
     * Number of players
     * Adaptability
     * Performance Feedback
     * Progress monitoring
     * Game portability


Next table displays the classification.

Example:
http://anatomicalconcepts.com/index.php/products/gloreha-hand-rehabilitation#

Paper: Motivation based difficulty adaptation for therapeutic games

Hocine, N.; Gouaich, A.; Di Loreto, I.; Joab, M., "Motivation based difficulty adaptation for therapeutic games," Serious Games and Applications for Health (SeGAH), 2011 IEEE 1st International Conference on , vol., no., pp.1,8, 16-18 Nov. 2011

This paper presents presents a difficulty adaptation technique dedicated to a family of therapeutic games for post-stroke rehabilitation based on therapeutic serious game, they focus in upper limb rehabilitation.

As introduction they talk about studies that suggest intensive training (many repetitions) while giving feedbacks and motivating the patients can have an important impact on the patients’ skills recover.  And a person who enjoys what he is doing spends more time developing his skills in a given activity.

They developed a game that is based on the Wii-balance from Nintendo. This game aims to improve player’s equilibrium capabilities while achieving the game goals.

Paper: Understanding the Power of Augmented Reality for Learning

Gail Carmichael, Robert Biddle, David Mould. Understanding the Power of Augmented Reality for Learning (2012). World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education. Conference Paper

This paper provides a theoretical grounding that explains the underlying value of AR for learning and identify when it is a suitable interface. Also, they define four main categories of advantages of AR:

Reality for Free
* Content

* Behavior

* Multiple Senses

Virtual Flexibility
* Customization
* Impossibility

Invisible Interface
* Natural movement

* Single focus

Spatial Awareness
* Adjust to surroundings
* Align spatially

These advantages can be used to decide whether augmented reality is a good interface for a particular type of learning scenario.

Design Questions
The more questions a designer can answer yes to here, the stronger the case for using AR becomes.
 * Is there a real-world environment that the application or associated task is or should be set in?
 * Is there a strong, non-arbitrary association between the virtual data and objects your application uses and some aspect of the environment?
 * Is it important that details of the environment, from content to behavior, be preserved?
 * If the application supports learning a specific task, is this a non-abstract task that is already performed in the real world?
 * Does the application benefit from real-world context?

Paper: Augmented Reality Games for Upper-Limb Stroke Rehabilitation

Burke, J. W.; McNeill, M. D J; Charles, D.K.; Morrow, P.J.; Crosbie, J.H.; McDonough, S.M., "Augmented Reality Games for Upper-Limb Stroke Rehabilitation," Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications (VS-GAMES), 2010 Second International Conference on , vol., no., pp.75,78, 25-26 March 2010

In this paper they present some serious games that use augmented reality for upper limb stroke rehabilitation.

Demos:

- It is interesting how they adapt the game depending on the initial calibration results.

- I like the idea of the game but not the AR markers they have to use.
- I don't like that this AR game doesn't adapt to the environment

They  identified three aspects of game design which are important for the user experience in a rehabilitation game:
* meaningful play
* challenge
* conservative handling of failure

Paper: Player Modeling for Intelligent Difficulty Adjustment

Olana Missura and Thomas. 2009. Player Modeling for Intelligent Difficulty Adjustment. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Discovery Science (DS '09).

In the other articles I read this week I focused on the interface design. I like this article because is very important to provide players the appropriate and increasing difficulty. Wrong choices can easily lead to players stopping to play the game as they get bored or frustrated.

Paper: Pervasive Games: Bringing Computer Entertainment Back to the Real World

Carsten Magerkurth, Adrian David Cheok, Regan L. Mandryk, and Trond Nilsen. 2005. Pervasive games: bringing computer entertainment back to the real world. Comput. Entertain. 3, 3 (July 2005), 4-4.


Este artículo me gustó porque es una buena introducción a los Pervasive Games. En este género, juegos tradicionales o real-world games son aumentados con la ayuda de computadoras. Otra forma de verlos es como si videojuegos puramente virtuales son traídos al mundo real.

Algunos de los subgéneros de los pervasive games son: smart toys, affective games, tabletop games, location-aware games, y augmented reality games. De estos subgéneros, los que más me llamaron la atención son los Augmented Tabletop Games. Y lo que más me atrae de estos juegos es su componente social, que pueden ser jugados por varias personas a la vez, y de no tener el hardware necesario, pueden jugarse con interfaces tradicionales como un ratón y teclado.

A continuación anexo una imagen de un ejemplo de Augmented Tabletop Games. 

Paper: A Case Study of Augmented Reality Serious Games

A Case Study of Augmented Reality Serious Games by Fotis Liarokapis, Sara De Freitas.

Este artículo se centra en examinar los problemas que involucra el diseñar e implementar un serious game que haga uso de ambientes de Realidad Aumentada (AR). Sobre este tema, proponen que todo framework para diseñar videojuegos serios en ambientes AR, deben de considerar las siguientes 4 dimensiones:

También da varios ejemplos de aplicaciones, pero se centra en dos: ARPuzzle y ARBreakout.

Para conocer cómo recibían estos juegos los alumnos de la escuela, fue que comenzaron con un programa piloto con 60 estudiantes. Las partes a evaluar los juegos fueron: visualización, colaboración y aprendizaje. En general les fue bien a los dos juegos en todos los apartados excepto la visualización.

Liga al paper:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.158.7434&rep=rep1&type=pdf