LudoScience

An article on Gamasutra about Game Design tools Damien Djaouti | 03-12-2013 | 16:12

The famous website Gamasutra has just published one of our article about the potential use of Game Design tools to help designers and programmers communicate within a game development studio. You can read it online:

 

 

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Leave a comment | Category : Game Design, | Keywords : game design tools, industry,

CALL FOR PAPERS - e-virtuoses 2013 Julian Alvarez | 02-11-2013 | 08:50

 

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International Scientific Symposium "Games for all purposes? Appropriation, Repurposing and Rejection"

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On 4 and 5 June 2013 in Valenciennes, during the "e-virtuoses" scientific convention, dedicated to the use of games and play (digital or not) for utilitarian purposes, we will host a scientific symposium entitled "Games for all purposes? Appropriation, Repurposing and Rejection ".

 

The objects of study will include in particular:

•Serious Game : the combination of a serious intention - education, information, communication, marketing, ideology, coaching or data collection - with a game including rules and targets.

•Serious Play the combination of a serious intention - education, information, communication, marketing, ideology, coaching or data collection - with a toy.

•Serious Gaming : the process of repurposing a game via all kinds of different methods, in order to offer activities that go beyond mere entertainment and that had not been initially intended by the author of the game.

• Gamification : use of game design to gamify objects and originally non-playful contexts.

 

These objects challenge the notions of prevention, training, knowledge assessment, coaching, communication, data collection, etc. in various fields such as education, healthcare, marketing, safety, culture... 

 

The purpose of this Symposium is to present approaches, paradigms and feedbacks using theoretical frameworks and methodologies that help observe, measure and analyse the impact of these objects and of the resulting transformations: acceptance, appropriation, resistance, repurposing, rejection... 

 

Different types of analyses can be suggested for different types of purposes, uses and scopes: 

• Analysis of products

• Analysis of policies

• Analysis of designs

• Analysis of practices

• ...

 

This Symposium is intended to encourage reflection that will be fuelled by inputs from various disciplines such as education, information and communication sciences, management, IT, neurosciences, psychology, sociology, medicine, arts... 

 

The best contributions will be associated to publication projects in renowned scientific journals.

 

Tag words :

Serious Game, Serious Play, Serious Gaming, Gamification, Evaluation, Uses, Organisation, Transformation

 

Schedule :

• Paper submission (2,000 to 3,000 words): 15th April 2013

• Reading committee announcement of selected papers: 31 March 2013

• Symposium: 4 and 5 June 2013

 

The proposals submitted to the Scientific Committee may be:

• a long presentation (20 minutes and 10 minutes of questions & answers) 

• a short presentation (10 minutes and 5 minutes of questions & answers)

 

Format :

The proposed papers may be submitted in English or in French in Word or PDF formats. Please follow the template included in the document Art-modèle-Impact SG-2012.doc downloadable here: http://bit.ly/xjCLye 

 

Scientific committee :

Serge Agostinelli (Marseillle University, France)

Julian Alvarez (PRL CCI Grand Hainaut / Université Lille-Nord de France, France)

Sylvester Arnab (Coventry University, UK)

Per Backlund (University of Skövde, Sweden) 

Raquel Becerril Ortega (Lille Nord de France University, France)

Philippe Bonfils (Sud Toulon-Var University, France)

Gilles Brougère (Paris 13 University – Sorbonne Paris Cité, France)

Pierre-André Caron (Lille Nord de France University, France)

Christophe Chaillou (Lille Nord de France University, France)

Damien Djaouti (Montpellier II University, France)

Pascal Estraillier (La Rochelle University, France)

Patrick Felicia (Waterford Institute of Technology, Irlande)

Maurizio Forte (University of Californie, USA)

Sara de Freitas (Conventry University, UK)

Abdelkader Gouaich (Montpellier University, France)

Sylvain Haudegond (PRL CCI Grand Hainaut)

Maurice Hendrix (Coventry University, UK)

Jean Heutte (Lille Nord de France University, France)

Pamela Kato (Utrecht Medical center University, Pays-Bas)

Catherine Kellner (Loraine University, France)

Christophe Kolski (Lille Nord de France University - UVHC, France)

Michel Lavigne (Castres University, France)

Sandy Louchart (Heriot Watt University, Ecosse)

Hélène Michel (Grenoble School of Management, France)

Denis Mottet (Montpellier University, France)

Louise Sauvé (Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada)

Gilson Schwartz (São Paulo University, Brasil)

Pascal Staccini (Nice-Sophia Antipolis University, Segamed, UMVF-UNF3S, France)

Franck Tarpin-Bernard (Grenoble University, France)

André Tricot (Toulouse University, France)

Philippe Useille (Lille Nord de France University - UVHC, France)

 

Partners :

CIREL, Université de Lille 1 - College Polytechnique - ARMIR - Pole Images - Conseil Régional Nord-Pas-De-Calais - CCI Grand HAINAUT – De Visu – GEM – SGI - University of Coventry - I3M – CREM – LARA - EXPERICE – Pictanova - Université Nice-Sophia Antipolis, Segamed, UMVF-UNF3S

 

 

 

Contact :

Julian Alvarez : j.alvarez@grandhainaut.cci.fr

http://www.e-virtuoses.net 

Twitter : @evirtuoses 

 

 

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Leave a comment | Category : Conferences, | Keywords : Serious Game, Serious Gaming, Gamification, Serious Play, Evaluation, Uses, Organisation, Transformation,

Update: publications and projects Damien Djaouti | 11-13-2012 | 08:11

A quick update on the website to add some new publications and projects in which we were involved.

 

Regarding publications, you'll find a couple of posters displayed at the VS-Games 2012 conference to present two ongoing research projects. The first one is titled "TBL3D: Towards Serious Applications for Telescope Maintenance and Control", and presents a Serious Games project about the giant Telescope of a french observatory (download the poster).

 

The second poster details a quite theoretical work: a framework listing  "game mechanics" and "learning mechanics" so that Serious Games designers can model how "game" and "learning" are related in their games. It's still an ongoing project with our colleagues from the Heriot-Watt university (Edimburg), and the poster is titled "Introducing the Serious Games Mechanics: A Theoretical Framework to Analyse Relationships Between Game and Pedagogical Aspects of Serious Games" (download poster).

 

Regarding projects, through the Game And Learning Alliance (an European research network dedicated to Serious Games), we worked on a contest to reward the best creations and research works about games for learning : the European Serious Games Awards. The winners were announced recently on the official contest website.

 

We also participated in the kickoff the Generic-SG project. It's a french R&D project lasting 2 years that aims to create a platform that would allow university teachers to quickly and simply creates Serious Games for their courses. The project targets any kind of university course (healthcare, science, humanities, law...). This projects involves all the public french universities (through their "technology" department), and should outcome in very interesting results for the field...

 

As all these projects are still ongoing, we will certainly talk more about them in the future through this blog.

 

P.S. : The Craftyy's Kickstarter campaign was a success (goal reached with 300$ of surplus), so we are really looking forward for the next version of this tool!

 

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Leave a comment | Category : News, | Keywords : projects, publications,

Craftyy: an online tool geared towards collaborative game design Damien Djaouti | 09-16-2012 | 16:44

Craftyy is a tool designed to ease the creation of videogames without requiring any kind of technical skills. Paired with an online sharing platform, it's designed to foster collaborative game design. Any game created with it is place under a Creative Commons licence (BY-NC). Hence, anyone can pick any of the game hosted on the platform, and easily create its own "remix", then share it again to the plaform.

 

 

Still under construction, Craftyy needs you to continue. If you are interested in the project, do not hesitate to show support to the developers through their Kickstarter campaign. You can also try the beta version, to see how great it is!

 

If it's not the first tooldesigned around the idea of collaborative game design (we can for example think about The Sims Carnival, Sharendipity, Craftstudio and GameBrix), most of these tools are now dead because they were lacking a solid economical model. The only exception is CraftStudio, who also relied on Kickstarter. But, after all, isn't it logical that collaborative funding can help collaborative game design tools to live?

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Leave a comment | Category : News, | Keywords : game design, gaming 2.0,

Book chapter: Classifying Serious Games with The G/P/S Model Ludoscience | 07-12-2012 | 15:11

We just uploaded in the list of our publications a book chapter related to the classification of Serious Games. This chapter presents the classification system used on the site http://serious.gameclassification.com/ to classify more than 2600 Serious Games. It was published last year in a book titled Handbook of Research on Improving Learning and Motivation through Educational Games: Multidisciplinary Approaches, and it's now freely available on our website (draft version).

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Leave a comment | Category : Thoughts, | Keywords : serious games, classification,