Tag Archives: serious games

Assassin’s Creed in the Classroom

3D and game editors, Academic, Announcements, archaeology, Architecture, augmented reality, Book, book chapter, digital heritage, Digital Humanities, game, heritage, publication, serious games, virtual heritage, Virtual Reality, Virtual travel, , , , , ,

Assassin’s Creed‹ in the Classroom History’s Playground or a Stab in the Dark? HAS been published by De Gruyter, on 18 December. Thanks to my co-editor Dr Juan Hiriart, and our authors.

https://degruyter.com/document/isbn/9783111250724/html

Erik Champion and Juan Hiriart
Introduction: History’s Playground or a Stab in the Dark?

Marc-André Éthier and David Lefrançois
Chapter 1: Historical Video Games and Teaching Practices

Chu Xu, Robin Sharma and Adam K. Dubé
Chapter 2: Discovery Tour Curriculum Guides to Improve Teachers’ Adoption of Serious Gaming

Ylva Grufstedt and Robert Houghton
Chapter 3: Christian Vikings Storming Templar Castles: Anachronism as a Teaching Tool

Julien A. Bazile
Chapter 4: Ludoforming the Past: Mediation of Play and Mediation of History through Videogame Design

Nathan Looije
Chapter 5: Exploring History through Depictions of Historical Characters in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey

Juan Hiriart
Chapter 6: Empathy and Historical Learning in Assassin’s Creed Valhalla Discovery Tour

Kevin Péloquin and Marc-André Éthier
Chapter 7: The Discovery Tour as a Mediated Tool for Teaching and Learning History

Angela Schwarz
Chapter 8: Discovering the Past as a Virtual Foreign Country: Assassin’s Creed as Historical Tourism

Hamish Cameron
Chapter 9: Classical Creations in a Modern Medium: Using Story Creator Mode in a University Assignment

Kira Jones
Chapter 10: Assassin’s Creed @ The Carlos: Merging Games and Gallery in the Museum

Manuel Sánchez García and Rafael de Lacour
Chapter 11: From the Sketchbook to Assassin’s Creed Valhalla: An Experiment in Architectural Education

Ear Zow Digital
Chapter 12: Assassin’s Creed As Immersive and Interactive Architectural History

Digra 2017 Workshop: Playtesting

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This workshop proposal has only been provisionally accepted for Digra2017 international games conference in Melbourne Australia, on 3 July 2017, we need to convince the organisers on how it will run.

What do you suggest? It should be more generic, more hands on? More focused or more open and free-ranging? We’d love our CAA2017 participants to attend, but we’d also be more than happy if those who can’t attend Georgia Atlanta in March can attend this start of July, in Melbourne Australia (not Melbourne Florida!)

Playtesting, Prototyping & Pitching History & Heritage Games

This half-day workshop brings together history and heritage experts, interested game designers, and designers of game prototyping tools. The approach is to playtest each idea presented and provide an avenue for feedback by audience, organisers, and other presenters. It will follow on from a game mechanics workshop run at CAA2017 in Atlanta in March but will aim to extend and polish game prototypes.

Keywords

Playtesting, pitching, prototyping, archaeology, heritage, history, archaeogaming, serious games.

INTRODUCTION

In March 2017 in Georgia Atlanta for the Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (http://caaconference.org/) conference, the two workshop organizers will run a session (Mechanics, Mods and Mashups: Games of the Past for the Future Designed by Archaeologists) on the initial topic, how to playtest pitch and present archaeology games. At DiGRA, with some of the initial presenters but also with new presenters, we will focus on how to pitch and prototype to and with game developers and potential clients, as well as how to perform game scenarios to reach new potential audiences and markets. The general field of research has become known as archaeogaming (Reinhard 2013), which “can include, but is in no means limited to: the physical excavation of video-game hardware, the use of archaeological methods within game worlds, the creation of video-games for or about archaeological practices and outcomes or the critical study of how archaeology is represented in video-games.(Wikipedia contributors 2016). There may be specific issues that distinguish heritage (Champion 2015) and history (Chapman 2016) games but there are also common themes, authenticity, accuracy, imagination and how interaction helps learning.

As it is for DiGRA, we are also interested in theoretical papers that examine and suggest answers for issues in converting history, heritage and general archaeology projects into potential games.

Relation to DiGRA themes: Game cultures; games and other cultural forms; communication in game worlds; games criticism; gaming in non-leisure settings; game studies in other domains; hybrid and non-digital games; history of games; game design.

The major objectives and expected outcomes of the workshop

Improved prototypes, enhanced critical discussion and feedback of prototypes, and potential open access book.

Justification for the workshop informed by current trends and research

Despite the increasing range of courses (Schreiber 2009), books (Fullerton 2014) and presentations (Lewis-Evans 2012) on game design prototyping, there is still a paucity of available game design prototype tools (Manker 2012) (Neil 2016, 2015) and a lack of venues for archaeogaming developers and related experts to present, pitch, playtest and perform their game prototypes (Ardito, Desolda, and Lanzilotti 2013, Unver and Taylor 2012, Ardito et al. 2009).

The format and activities planned for the workshop

Presentation and playtesting of games, feedback from audience and one of the other presenters.

Potential tools: Gameplay cards, game prototyping tools, scenes or videos from a 3D editor or game editor (Unity, Unreal, Blender), board games as prototypes, playing cards, physical artifacts that are role-played by the presenter, illustrations, slideshows, game editors (like the SIMS: https://www.thesims.com/en_GB) used to make films (Machinima), roleplaying videos, flowcharts, interactive fiction (like https://twinery.org/). We will provide a fuller list of tools and examples to potential attendees before the workshop.

The duration (half- or full-day) of the workshop

Half-day for 6 presenters.

The anticipated number of participants

Participants: 26 maximum (ideally) where 6 present. We require half an hour a presenter so three hours for 6 presenters, 6 hours a whole day if we want to go to 12 presenters. Ideally the non-presenting audience is not too large, preferably up to 20.

How participants will be recruited and selected

Via an online website we will create, and mailing to digital archaeology and heritage and serious games groups.

Publication plans arising from the workshop activities

We will approach a creative publisher (Liquid Books, University of Michigan Press or other) to provide an online or printable output of the demonstrations and the audience feedback.

Citations and References

Ardito, Carmelo, Paolo Buono, Maria Francesca Costabile, Rosa Lanzilotti, and Antonio Piccinno. 2009. “Enabling Interactive Exploration of Cultural Heritage: An Experience of Designing Systems for Mobile Devices.” Knowledge, Technology & Policy 22 (1):79-86. doi: 10.1007/s12130-009-9079-7.

Ardito, Carmelo, Giuseppe Desolda, and Rosa Lanzilotti. 2013. “Playing on large displays to foster children’s interest in archaeology.” DMS.

Champion, E. 2015. Critical Gaming: Interactive History and Virtual Heritage.

Chapman, A. 2016. Digital Games as History: How Videogames Represent the Past and Offer Access to Historical Practice.

Fullerton, Tracy. 2014. Game design workshop: a playcentric approach to creating innovative games: CRC press.

Lewis-Evans, Ben. 2012. “Introduction to Game Prototyping & research.” Slideshare, Last Modified 16 December 2012, accessed 24 January. http://www.slideshare.net/Gortag/game-prototyping-and-research.

Manker, Jon. 2012. “Designscape–A suggested game design prototyping process tool.” Eludamos. Journal for computer game culture 6 (1):85-98.

Neil, Katharine. 2015. “Game Design Tools: Can They Improve Game Design Practice?” PhD PhD, Signal and Image processing. Conservatoire national des arts et metiers, CNAM.

Neil, Katharine. 2016. How we design games now and why. Gamasutra. Accessed 24 January 2017.

Reinhard, A. 2013. “What is Archaeogaming?” archaeogaming, 24 January. https://archaeogaming.com/2013/06/09/what-is-archaeogaming/.

Schreiber, Ian. 2009. ““I just found this blog, what do I do?”.” Game Design Concepts – An experiment in game design and teaching, 9 September 2009. https://gamedesignconcepts.wordpress.com/2009/07/02/level-2-game-design-iteration-and-rapid-prototyping/.

Unver, Ertu, and Andrew Taylor. 2012. “Virtual Stonehenge Reconstruction.” In Progress in Cultural Heritage Preservation: 4th International Conference, EuroMed 2012, Limassol, Cyprus, October 29 – November 3, 2012. Proceedings, edited by Marinos Ioannides, Dieter Fritsch, Johanna Leissner, Rob Davies, Fabio Remondino and Rossella Caffo, 449-460. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Wikipedia contributors. 2016. “Archaeogaming.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 24 January. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Archaeogaming&oldid=729472193.

report on trip to Italy, Malta (abridged)

Conference, Digital Humanities, talks, , , , ,

Erik Champion was awarded a small school grant of $2000 to present conference papers at Genoa Italy in October 2016.

GENOA ITALY
He presented two conference papers which are now in the Eurographics Digital Library.

  1. Champion, Erik Malcolm; Qiang, Li; Lacet, Demetrius; Dekker, Andrew. https://diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/2630933/browse?value=Champion%2C+Erik+Malcolm&type=author3D in-world Telepresence With Camera-Tracked Gestural Interaction (The Eurographics Association, 2016) While many education institutes use Skype, Google Chat or other commercial video-conferencing applications, these applications are not suitable for presenting architectural or urban design or archaeological information ..
  2. Champion, Erik Malcolm, The Missing Scholarship Behind Virtual Heritage Infrastructures (The Eurographics Association, 2016). This theoretical position paper outlines four key issues blocking the development of effective 3D models that would be suitable for the aims and objectives of virtual heritage infrastructures. It suggests that a real-time …

At the presentation in Genoa he was invited to discussion collaboration with the world heritage lab: HIVE, University of California Merced:

VENICE ITALY
He was also invited to present at Ca Foscari Venice (picture above) -apart from being the guest speaker on a digital humanities panel at the academic year opening of Ca Foscari, University of Venice and he was interviewed by their student paper.
VALETTA MALTA
He was also invited to present at the National Centre of Creativity, organised by the University of Malta and the talk was announced in the national paper, Times of Malta. He also met Heritage Malta and another institute who are keen to collaborate in cultural heritage projects.

He’d like to thank MCCA-Curtin, Arianna and Milena for organising his talks in Venice and Malta respectively and Eurographics for the GCH conference in Genoa.

CFP Gala 2016, 5-7 December Utrecht

Conference, ,

http://conf.seriousgamessociety.org/2016/

Games and Learning Alliance conference

Papers (10 pages) submission deadline: July 10, 2016
Notification date for Papers: September 11, 2016
Camera Ready Papers and Registration Due: October 16th 2016
Conference: 5-7 December, 2016, Utrecht, the Netherlands

The Games and Learning Alliance conference (GALA 2016) is an international conference dedicated to the science and application of serious games.

The conference aims at bringing together researchers, developers, practitioners and stakeholders. The goal is to share the state of the art of research and market, analysing the most significant trends and discussing visions on the future of serious games.

The conference also includes an exhibition, where developers can showcase their latest products.

The GALA Conference 2016 Proceedings will be published on Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) and the best papers in a special issue of the Int.l Journal of Serious Games, as per the previous years.

Two new full papers added

Academic, publication, virtual heritage, , , , ,

I have been given permission to upload these two journal articles to my website. Click the paper title to go to the PDF in question:

Champion, E. (2015). Defining Cultural Agents for Virtual Heritage Environments. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments-Special Issue on “Immersive and Living Virtual Heritage: Agents and Enhanced Environments,” Summer 2015, Vol. 24, No. 3: pp. 179–186. MIT Press. URL: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/pres/24/3

Champion, E. (2015). Entertaining The Similarities And Distinctions Between Serious Games and Virtual Heritage Projects. Special Issue in the Journal of Entertainment Computing on the theme of Entertainment in Serious Games. Volume 14, May 2016, Pages 67–74. Elsevier. Online.

 

Virtual Heritage Article free to download until 21 April 2016

archaeology, Conference, digital heritage, Digital Humanities, game, heritage, virtual heritage, , , , ,

Elsevier have kindly let me and others download the below article from the Journal Entertainment Computing, (Volume 14, May 2016, Pages 67–74) up until 21 April 2016. From 22 April it will be behind the Elsevier paywall again.

http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1Se406gYiZRYG4
No sign up or registration is needed – just click and read!

Title: Entertaining The Similarities & Distinctions Between Serious Games & Virtual Heritage Projects

Abstract:
This article summarizes past definitions of entertainment, serious games and virtual heritage in order to discuss whether virtual heritage has particular problems not directly addressed by conventional serious games. For virtual heritage, typical game-style entertainment poses particular ethical problems, especially around the simulation of historic violence and the possible trivialization of culturally sensitive and significant material. While virtual heritage can be considered to share some features of serious games, there are significantly different emphases on objectives. Despite these distinctions, virtual heritage projects could still meet serious games-style objectives while entertaining participants.

Int. Competition on Educational Games

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The Fourth International Competition on Educational Games will be held this year in conjunction with the European Conference on Game-Based Learning (ECGBL), which is being held in Paisley, Scotland, UK on 6-7 October this year. The aims of this competition are:

  • To provide an opportunity for educational game designers and creators to participate in the conference and demonstrate their game design and development skills in an international competition.
  • To provide an opportunity for GBL creators to peer-assess and peer-evaluate their games.
  • To provide ECGBL 2016 attendees with engaging and best-practice games that showcase exemplary applications of GBL.

The closing date for submissions is the 17th of June.

Games submitted to the competition are expected to accomplish an educational goal. We welcome contributions relevant to all levels of learning (primary, secondary, tertiary or professional. Both digital and non-digital games are encouraged. Competitors should be prepared to explain their design and evaluation process, why it is innovative (the game itself or its educational setting) and how they achieved (will achieve) the impact they seek. The game should be in a development state that engages the player for at least 10 minutes. For further details see: http://www.academic-conferences.org/conferences/ecgbl/ecgbl-international-educational-games-competition/

In the first instance authors should submit details of the game using the online abstract submission form http://www.academic-conferences.org/conferences/ecgbl/ecgbl-international-educational-games-competition/ecgbl-games-submission/

What has pushed me towards Open Access, or at least, more open and scholar friendly publications

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I was asked to help manage a special session of Entertainment Computing on Entertainment in Serious Games and Entertaining Serious Purposes, UTS, Sydney 2014.
Then I was asked to help edit a special issue of Entertainment Computing on Serious Games. I accepted, nice people.
My paper “Entertaining The Similarities And Distinctions Between Serious Games and Virtual Heritage Projects” also went through review (by reviewers unknown) and after some serious defense of my essay which I think is relevant to virtual heritage people in general, it was accepted.
And now today Elsevier the publisher asked me to sign online forms.
This is what dumbfounded me:

Open Access: No, I do not want to publish my article gold open access, and would like my final published article to be immediately available to all subscribers.

I have to sign this and agree to this, OR pay. No alternatives.
I do want my journal article to be open access but as I helped edit the special issue FOR FREE, wrote the article FOR FREE, and have to sign away all my rights to a journal publisher that did nothing except create a huge amount of work for me, I am rather UPSET that I am forced to sign that I DON’T WANT OPEN ACCESS. I do, I JUST DON”T WANT TO PAY FOR IT.

So if you are reading this Elsevier, I suggest you change your dictatorial and deliberately misconstruing forms. I suggest you give people more options AT THE START.

With a profit from 2014 of 955 million pounds ($1.27 billion) and 1.18 billion pounds the year before, I think you can afford to!

It saddens me that there are no established open access journals in my research area of virtual heritage (well, unless the author pays for it).
But I will keep looking.

DiGRAA paper, 29-30 June 2016 (abstract)

Conference, game, , ,

URL: DiGRAA [http://digraa.org/2015-digra-australia-conference/]

Title: Algorithms Pushed Me to the Dark Side: Questions for Procedural Rhetoric

ABSTRACT

Ian Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric is a tantalising theory of the power and potential of computer games, especially serious games. Yet does this concept really distinguish games from other media? Can this concept be usefully applied to the design and critique of serious games? This paper explores the ramifications of games (particularly serious games) as procedural rhetoric and whether this concept is problematic, useful, inclusive, or better employed as a recalibrated meta-epistemic theory of serious games that persuade or suggest to the player that the game mechanics, game genre, or digitally simulated world-view is open to criticism and reflection.

Keywords

Gamification, procedural rhetoric, game theory.

INTRODUCTION

While Michael Mateas has spoken of procedural literacy, and before him Janet Murray noted one feature of digital games was their procedural nature, Ian Bogost is probably most famously associated with this phrase. Ian Bogost (Bogost 2007) defined procedural rhetoric as ‘a practice of using processes persuasively.’ While procedural rhetoric combines a humanities discipline with something that is obviously a key component of games, I have reservations. Bogost himself raised the first potential flaw; he admitted that for many people rhetoric has a negative connotation. In the book Arguing well, John Shand (Shand 2002) declared ‘Logic must be sharply distinguished from what might generally be called rhetoric… rhetoric is not committed to using good arguments.’

I am not convinced that the rules of the game are the rules of the designer or even the rules of the player. The negotiation, changes, and misunderstandings as to what are the rules exactly are, by the player, is in my opinion an important and creative part of games, and by extension, computer games. While it might be reasonable to think that if the essence of the game is rules, it is another thing entirely to not even contemplate the possibility that a rule-based system could be random, changing, or open to change by the player. For example, Mary Flanagan (Flanagan 2013) looked at critical game play as wilful subversion of the rules and she provided avant-garde art as exemplars.

While Bogost seems to be saying we have to understand procedural rhetoric, astute critics and game designers do not seem sure as to how they can implement these theoretical notions. In an otherwise complementary review of Unit Operations, Zach Whalen (Whalen 2006) wrote ‘I’m eager to try my own hand at unit analysis, but I’m not sure how to proceed.’

Miguel Sicart (Sicart 2011) wrote, ‘Proceduralists claim that players, by reconstructing the meaning embedded in the rules, are persuaded by virtue of the games’ procedural nature.’ Sicart argued that meaning is more than just the learning of rules through play, the value of gameplay becomes subservient, and if rules are all that matter why should the designers have to explain them?

Computers follow procedure, and designers design procedures, (although Bogost carefully explained the term procedural rhetoric is not referring directly to programming). So how does or how can the player know that the system of rules that they (may have) a mental model of is the system of rules intended by the designer or the system of rules followed by the computer? And just because computers work by computation, by processing, does that mean the definition, the essence and the ideal of game-play is to follow and comprehend that system of rules?

Adherence to the altar of ‘procedural rhetoric’, whether intended by Bogost, or not, can lead to people thinking that the designer’s idea of the game rules are what matters. If so we may be faced with debates invoking the ‘Intentional Fallacy’, and ‘death of the Author’ could be resurrected, only this time the debates would be over computer games, not literature. For rhetoric involves the art of persuading, not necessarily the art of opening up games as vehicles of critical discourse (Chaplin 2011).

Bogost used the example of the book Guns, Germs, and Steel, and declared ‘Such an approach to history goes far beyond the relation between contemporaneous events, asking us to consider the systems that produce those events.’ Should the player be led to ‘consider the system that produce those events’ as well? Must the theory really force the player to consider the overall system, or is this statement dangerously close to the coercion-by-play approach of gamification? For gamification is a phenomenon that Bogost has excoriated (Bogost 2011).

In this presentation I will explore whether gamification and procedural rhetoric really are as different as Bogost appears to believe, and whether procedural rhetoric runs the risk of creating what Bogost has termed ‘exploitationware’ (see also (Bogost 2013)). To help in this quest, I suggest that a theory should be falsifiable (if possible); it should eliminate other fields the theory also applies to, and explain if it is prescriptive or descriptive. It should avoid similar terms with overlapping meanings or conflicting connotations as the overall name for the theory. Given these general guidelines, we should approach the term procedural rhetoric with caution.

Bio

Erik Champion is Professor of Cultural Visualization at Curtin University, and researches virtual heritage, but he also writes on game design, virtual places, architectural computing and interaction design. His recent books are Playing with the Past (Springer, 2011), and he edited book Game Mods: Design, Theory and Criticism (ETC Press, 2012). His next book Critical Gaming and Digital Humanities will be published in the Ashgate Publishing Group’s Digital Humanities Series.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bogost, I. (2007). Persuasive games: The expressive power of videogames. Massachusetts, USA, MIT Press.

Bogost, I. (2011) “Gamification Is Bullshit.” The Atlantic.

Bogost, I. (2013). “Preview: Why Gamification Is Bullshit.” from http://bogost.com/writing/blog/preview_why_gamification_is_bu/.

Chaplin, H. (2011) “I Don’t Want To Be a Superhero-Ditching reality for a game isn’t as fun as it sounds.” Slate, Online.

Flanagan, M. (2013). Critical Play Radical Game Design. Cambridge MA, The MIT Press.

Shand, J. (2002). Arguing well. London, Routledge.

Sicart, M. (2011) “Against Procedurality.” Game Studies the international journal of computer game research 11, online.

Whalen, Z. (2006). “Review of Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism.” gameology: A scholarly community dedicated to the study of videogames http://www.gameology.org/node/1066 Accessed 7 April 2014.

“Critical Gaming: Interactive History and Virtual Heritage” Ashgate Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities series

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I have written Critical Gaming: Interactive History And Virtual Heritage (Ashgate Publishing, Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities series ), it has now gone to their production team and I hope it will be published roughly mid 2015.

Introduction: Critical Gaming: Interactive History And Virtual Heritage can be seen as a collection of chapters designed to provoke thought and discussion, or it can be seen and used as separate chapters that may help class debate in courses dealing with the Digital Humanities, Game Studies (especially in the areas of Serious Games and Game-based Learning), or aspects of Virtual Heritage. While there are very few books in this intersecting area, the range of topics that could be investigated and debated is huge. My primary target groups of readers are those academics and students who wish to investigate how games and virtual environments can be used in teaching and research to critique issues and topics in the humanities. In particular I want to investigate re-occurring broad issues in the design, playtesting and evaluation of serious games/ playful learning/game-based learning for interactive history and for virtual heritage.

Chapter 1: Digital Humanities And The Limits of Text provides a reasoned argument for the preponderance of text-based research in the digital humanities but argues for the importance and relevance of non-text based projects and three-dimensional media that augments rather than replaces text. It also proposes ways of improving classroom knowledge via spatial media.

Chapter 2: Game-based Learning And The Digital Humanities asks if there should there be a manifesto and singular definition of ‘game’? Should we be more open-minded in defining games and applying them totally or in part to historical and heritage-based simulations? Do definitions of ‘games as systems’ or as ‘procedural rhetoric’ offer enough guidance in developing and evaluating historical simulations and virtual heritage projects? In answering this question, the chapter includes suggestions gleaned from three case studies.

Chapter 3: Virtual Heritage focuses on intersections between Virtual Reality, Games and Digital Humanities. Is Virtual Reality still relevant? I argue that the increasing power and superior accessibility of computer games has already absorbed much of traditional Virtual Reality. Has Virtual Reality merged into games, is Virtual Reality within the financial and technical reach of non-expert users? If so which Virtual Reality techniques have become mainstream and accessible? What is the future of Virtual Reality and how will it affect Digital Humanities, are there specific areas we should focus on?

Chapter 4: Game-based History And Historical Simulations surveys games used for history and historical learning. Which theories can help us design and critique for history and heritage-based projects? Serious games research typically use modified computer games as virtual learning environments. Virtual heritage projects typically aim to provide three-dimensional interactive digital environments that aid the understanding of new cultures and languages rather than merely transfer learning terms and strategies from static prescriptive media such as books. As an intersection between the two fields, game-based historical learning aims to provide ways in which the technology, interactivity, or cultural conventions of computer gaming can help afford the cultural understanding of the self, of the past, or of others with mindsets quite different to our own.

Chapter 5: Virtual Heritage And Digital Culture covers definitions and major issues in Virtual Heritage. I propose six general aims for virtual heritage and I suggest three key concepts, inhabited placemaking, cultural presence and cultural significance. I also suggest objectives that a scholarly infrastructure should undertake to improve the field.

Chapter 6: Worlds, Roles And Rituals explores the nature, purpose and attributes of worlds, role-playing and rituals. Why are definitions of world so difficult to find? How can worlds be realised via digital simulations, can role-playing in computer games be developed further? Who should be able to read and interpret and perform rituals and why? Part of this chapter was initially published as an essay in the International Journal of Role Playing (Champion, 2009) and the passage has been considerably modified.

Chapter 7: Joysticks of Death, Violence And Morality is a theoretical attempt to outline types of violence in computer games and develop a short framework for types of interaction in virtual heritage projects. What is violence, how is it portrayed in games and are there particular issues in virtual simulations? This chapter sketches out both factors leading to violence in digital heritage projects and reasons involving their widespread occurrence. Finally I will suggest alternatives to violent interaction when applied to digital heritage projects.

Chapter 8: Intelligent Agents, Drama and Cinematic Narrative discusses Selmer Bringsjord’s ideas on interactive narrative and whether we can provide alternatives that help develop dramatically compelling interactive narrative. Why has storytelling been so difficult? Why is the Star Trek Holodeck so widely cited but no one has come close to building anything remotely similar?

Chapter 9: Biofeedback, Space And Place discusses ways in which biofeedback and brain controlled interfaces and theories of empathy and embodiment can be used to develop games and simulations for history and heritage based games. How can we better integrate new research into the body and the brain and recent technologies that incorporate the senses or further integrate recent technologies with the environment?

Chapter 10: Applying Critical Thinking And Critical Play summarizes the arguments and findings of the chapters and proposes a quick way of validating critical theories about gaming. Can game-related projects and teaching leverage critical thinking skills? The chapter includes a sample checklist to determine whether a critical position and argument about gaming has merit.