Research oriented teaching in universities provides opportunities to support the student's desire to explore. A student's learning success can benefit from gamified project work, especially when students face self-guided learning processes in demanding educational activities. Gamification is defined as the use of game elements in a non-game context. Games offer the chance to improve the motivation of students, support group work, train communication skills and introduce the capacity for experime
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Carmageddon. A video game known by people even if they never played it, thanks to its scandalous reputation. However, this game is far from solely being the "nasty racing game where you have to crush pedestrians" that many media and politicians wanted to ban. Carmageddon is first and foremost an excellent game, featuring many technological and gameplay innovations that deeply influenced the racing game genre. We interviewed Neil Barnden, co-founder of Stainless Software gam
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Keywords : history, carmageddon, stainless software, violence, scandal, censorship, fun
"Data mining" is the science dedicated to the creation of knowledge through the analysis of large quantities of data, such as establishing customers habits by tracking how they use their loyalty cards. A few time ago, we were contacted by a computer science student, Axel RB, who desired to perform such analysis over video games, using the data about 38.000 video games collected on our website GameClassification. Thus, we gave him a dataset, and he just published his first findings on h
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Keywords : data mining, game classification, research, computer science, video games
Special session about serious gaming during the 6th Global Conference: Video Games Culture Project, from Thursday, 17th July to Saturday, 19th July 2014, Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom. Key words: serious games, serious gaming, education, projects with students, level design, case studies SimCity in geography lessons, Civilisation V for non-violence education, Read Dead Redemption as a means of addressing the history of the Far West… These
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Keywords : Call for papers, Serious Gaming, Serious Game, education, projects with students, level design, case studies, Modding
Eric Chahi, a famous video games designer (Out of this World, anyone?), recently took part in the Retro Game Jam, a 32h video game creation competition held during november 2013 in Montpellier (France). In the video below, he discusses his feelings about this experience and presents the various prototypes of his game in order to explain his personal game creation process. A rare and very interesting testimony from a living videogame legend about the recent "Game Jam" phenomena (video i
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Keywords : eric chahi, game jam
The first part of a non-official biography of Shigeru Miyamoto, famous creator of Mario and Zelda. William Audureau, a keen expert of his works, invites us to a journey through his life, from his childhood to the release of the first Zelda episode in 1986. In the absence of a direct involvement from Miyamoto in the book, the author relies on more than 150 of his interviews published in press, alongside with a trip to Japan. Very easy and pleasant to read, this book manages to go beyond "ins
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Keywords : biography, shigeru miyamoto, nintendo, mario, zelda
ABSTRACT Use of Design Thinking methodology is becoming common in business, services and products creation, particularlyin interactive media generation. This methodology consists in dividing development process into a number of regular steps: problem definition, target audience, brainstorming, prototyping, solution selection and implementation. The aim of this paper is to present the use of Design Thinking properly adapted to the creation of serious games, indicating advantages and disadvan
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Keywords : Design thinking, Games, Business administration, Serious games
The biography of Markus "Notch" Persson, and his world famous creation: Minecraft (2011). This books details the birth of this legendary game, and it begins with the end of the story: the MineCon convention held up in 2011 to celebrate the official release of the 1.0 version of the game. At this date, the game was already played by 16 millions people in the world, making both Markus Persson and his company, Mojang, millionaires. The book then goes back to Notch's childhood, from his pa
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Keywords : minecraft, notch, markus persson, mojang, indie, biography
This book details the captivating story of the scandalous game series "Grand Theft Auto". Over 300 pages, the author tells us about the most epic moments of this saga: humble beginnings as a small arcade game made in Scotland by DMA Design; hiring Max Clifford to use media scandal as a marketing campaign; the hijacking of the series leadership by the Houser brothers and their studio Rockstar during the creation of GTA III; the first legal actions against the game series and the rise of
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Keywords : grand theft auto, history, dma design, rockstar, jack thompson, david jones, sam houser, esrb
Abstract Serious games have been receiving a lot of interest in the recent years and have been increasingly used for educational, military and business purposes. One of the positive sides of serious games is the fact of being tools that allow the creation of an environment where players are immersed in a playful activity, and are much more receptive to knowledge acquisition. Through serious games players are more likely to retain information for a longer period of time. The terrain instabil
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