scholarly journals Quality Criteria for Serious Games: Serious Part, Game Part, and Balance

10.2196/19037 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. e19037 ◽  
Author(s):  
Polona Caserman ◽  
Katrin Hoffmann ◽  
Philipp Müller ◽  
Marcel Schaub ◽  
Katharina Straßburg ◽  
...  

Serious games are digital games that have an additional goal beyond entertainment. Recently, many studies have explored different quality criteria for serious games, including effectiveness and attractiveness. Unfortunately, the double mission of serious games, that is, simultaneous achievement of intended effects (serious part) and entertainment (game part), is not adequately considered in these studies. This paper aims to identify essential quality criteria for serious games. The fundamental goal of our research is to identify important factors of serious games and to adapt the existing principles and requirements from game-related literature to effective and attractive serious games. In addition to the review of the relevant literature, we also include workshop results. Furthermore, we analyzed and summarized 22 state-of-the-art serious games for education and health. The selected best-practice serious games either prove their effectiveness through scientific studies or by winning game awards. For the analysis of these games, we refer to “DIN SPEC 91380 Serious Games Metadata Format.” A summarized text states quality criteria for both the serious and the game part, and especially the balance between them. We provide guidelines for high-quality serious games drawn from literature analysis and in close cooperation with domain experts.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Polona Caserman ◽  
Katrin Hoffmann ◽  
Philipp Müller ◽  
Marcel Schaub ◽  
Katharina Straßburg ◽  
...  

UNSTRUCTURED Serious games are digital games that have an additional goal beyond entertainment. Recently, many studies have explored different quality criteria for serious games, including effectiveness and attractiveness. Unfortunately, the double mission of serious games, that is, simultaneous achievement of intended effects (serious part) and entertainment (game part), is not adequately considered in these studies. This paper aims to identify essential quality criteria for serious games. The fundamental goal of our research is to identify important factors of serious games and to adapt the existing principles and requirements from game-related literature to effective and attractive serious games. In addition to the review of the relevant literature, we also include workshop results. Furthermore, we analyzed and summarized 22 state-of-the-art serious games for education and health. The selected best-practice serious games either prove their effectiveness through scientific studies or by winning game awards. For the analysis of these games, we refer to “DIN SPEC 91380 Serious Games Metadata Format.” A summarized text states quality criteria for both the serious and the game part, and especially the balance between them. We provide guidelines for high-quality serious games drawn from literature analysis and in close cooperation with domain experts.


Author(s):  
Теодор Виммер ◽  
Мария-Бернадетт Турнер ◽  
Иши Дорау ◽  
Хаймо Фриш ◽  
Оливер Ратшулер

Growing urbanization poses an enormous challenge to city planners. Noticeable effects of the increased population density in cities include housing shortages, rising real estate prices, increased traffic, air pollution, shortages of green spaces and attractive public spaces, the rising cost of urban infrastructure and the risk of social tensions. Especially in dense urban areas, public open spaces (squares and streets, urban parks and spacious recreational areas) have become increasing important. Their design, functionality and the adaption to the needs of the residents significantly influences the quality and atmosphere of urban coexistence. The consideration of quality criteria is essential for the creation of sustainable, livable and smart open spaces. Modern approaches to sustainable planning in urban areas and the versatile aspects of state-of-the-art open space design are the core themes of this article. General aspects of landscape planning in Austria and selected best practice projects in the context of urban development are presented.This article gives an overview of open space planning in Austria. To be successful, projects must consider the specific needs of city districts, which requires tailor-made approaches and an interdisciplinary planning team. To be accepted and adequately used by the public, projects must be based on a detailed analyses of the spatial, natural and social conditions.The complex and diverse challenges of open space planning in Austrian cities can be seen as representative for other cities, as certain urban trends occur (in slightly altered dimensions) all over Europe or on an even bigger scale. Selected best practice urban planning projects, which have been realized by freiland Environmental Consulting CE Ltd, based on state-of-the-art principles, demonstrate modern planning approaches to tackling these challenges.


Author(s):  
Yogesh K. Dwivedi ◽  
Elvira Ismagilova ◽  
Nripendra P. Rana ◽  
Ramakrishnan Raman

AbstractSocial media plays an important part in the digital transformation of businesses. This research provides a comprehensive analysis of the use of social media by business-to-business (B2B) companies. The current study focuses on the number of aspects of social media such as the effect of social media, social media tools, social media use, adoption of social media use and its barriers, social media strategies, and measuring the effectiveness of use of social media. This research provides a valuable synthesis of the relevant literature on social media in B2B context by analysing, performing weight analysis and discussing the key findings from existing research on social media. The findings of this study can be used as an informative framework on social media for both, academic and practitioners.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Gianluigi Guido ◽  
Marco Pichierri ◽  
Cristian Rizzo ◽  
Verdiana Chieffi ◽  
George Moschis

Purpose The purpose of this study is to review scholarly research on elderly consumers’ information processing and suggest implications for services marketing. Design/methodology/approach The review encompasses a five-decade period (1970–2018) of academic research and presents relevant literature in four main areas related to information processing: sensation, attention, interpretation and memory. Findings The study illustrates how each of the aforementioned phases of the information processing activity may affect how elderly individuals buy and consume products and services, emphasizing the need for a better comprehension of the elderly to develop effectual marketing strategies. Originality/value The study provides readers with detailed state-of-the-art knowledge about older consumers’ information processing, offering a comprehensive review of academic research that companies can use to improve the effectiveness of their marketing efforts that target the elderly market.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Michael Loster ◽  
Ioannis Koumarelas ◽  
Felix Naumann

The integration of multiple data sources is a common problem in a large variety of applications. Traditionally, handcrafted similarity measures are used to discover, merge, and integrate multiple representations of the same entity—duplicates—into a large homogeneous collection of data. Often, these similarity measures do not cope well with the heterogeneity of the underlying dataset. In addition, domain experts are needed to manually design and configure such measures, which is both time-consuming and requires extensive domain expertise. We propose a deep Siamese neural network, capable of learning a similarity measure that is tailored to the characteristics of a particular dataset. With the properties of deep learning methods, we are able to eliminate the manual feature engineering process and thus considerably reduce the effort required for model construction. In addition, we show that it is possible to transfer knowledge acquired during the deduplication of one dataset to another, and thus significantly reduce the amount of data required to train a similarity measure. We evaluated our method on multiple datasets and compare our approach to state-of-the-art deduplication methods. Our approach outperforms competitors by up to +26 percent F-measure, depending on task and dataset. In addition, we show that knowledge transfer is not only feasible, but in our experiments led to an improvement in F-measure of up to +4.7 percent.


1990 ◽  
Vol 27 (04) ◽  
pp. 237-249
Author(s):  
Anastassios N. Perakis ◽  
Bahadir Inozu

Some essential steps for the application of reliability, availability, and maintainability (RAM) techniques to marine diesel engines are presented. The paper begins with a summary of the basic concepts of reliability engineering, followed by a survey of the relevant literature on RAM applications to the marine industry and to marine diesel engines in particular. Next, the results of an informal survey of the reliability, maintenance, and replacement practices of Great Lakes operators are presented. Finally, the first two steps for a RAM application, failure modes and effects analysis and fault tree analysis, are introduced and applied for a prototype Colt-Pielstick marine diesel engine.


2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 7
Author(s):  
Bo Redder Mussmann ◽  
Mette Ramsdal Paulsen

Introduction Child abuse imaging differs from general musculoskeletal imaging in that there is exceptional necessity for high quality images. The images are directly involved in legal processes and the child and the family faces major consequences if imaging is sub-optimal. The consequences of misdiagnosis are serious. Should head trauma or fractures be overlooked, or if the radiological diagnosis is uncertain, abused children may be sent home with violent parents or caregivers. Conversely, where no abuse has taken place, but the certainty of the diagnosis is questionable, the unnecessary hospitalization of an innocent family may result. In Southern Denmark approximately 15-20 children per year are examined. The examinations are performed in four different radiology departments throughout the region. Until the autumn of 2012, a variety of imaging protocols and techniques were used in pediatric skeletal surveys. This led to difficulties, because some cases are subject to second opinion report. In many cases, supplemental images or a complete reexamination of the child was required in order to facilitate a second opinion, resulting in unnecessary exposure. Methods An initial consensus meeting with 20 participants was arranged in 2012. Pediatric radiologists, managers and radiographers with special competencies in pediatric radiology attended. Research evidence, cases and clinical experience was discussed. A follow-up meeting was arranged in 2013 with similar participants. This second meeting focused mainly on follow-up skeletal surveys in children <2 years of age Results The first meeting resulted in the agreement on which projections to acquire, image quality criteria, how to cooperate with the parents, radiologic evaluation criteria and the role of the radiographer in imaging the abused child. The second meeting resulted in consensus on the necessary projections required for follow-up skeletal surveys. Conclusion Common protocols for child abuse imaging have been established and fully implemented in the Region of Southern Denmark. Annual meetings have also been established where legal aspects, best practice and best evidence in imaging and cooperation with pediatric departments is discussed.


Author(s):  
Marco A. Gómez-Martín ◽  
Pedro P. Gómez-Martín ◽  
Pedro A. González-Calero

A key challenge to move forward the state of the art in games-based learning systems is to facilitate instructional content creation by the domain experts. Several decades of research on computer aided instruction have demonstrated that the expert has to be deeply involved in the content creation process, and that is why so much effort has been devoted to building authoring tools of all kinds. However, using videogame technology to support computer aided instruction poses some new challenges on expertfriendly authoring tools, related to technical and cost issues. In this chapter the authors present the state of the art in content creation for games-based learning systems, identifying the main challenges to make this technology cost-effective from the content creation point of view.


Materials ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (19) ◽  
pp. 4346
Author(s):  
Marzieh Kadivar ◽  
Christian Gauss ◽  
Khosrow Ghavami ◽  
Holmer Savastano

Densification processes are used to improve the mechanical and physical properties of lignocellulose materials by either collapsing the cell cavities or by filling up the pores, consequently reducing the void volume fraction. This paper focuses on an extensive review of bamboo densification process, which is achieved by compressing the material in the direction perpendicular to the fibers using mainly two different techniques: an open system, thermo-mechanical (TM), or a closed system, viscoelastic-thermal-compression (VTC). The main aim of bamboo densification is to decrease its heterogeneity, as well as to improve its mechanical and physical performance. In addition, densification may occur during the manufacturing of bamboo products in which hot-pressing processes are used to mold bamboo panels. There are over 1600 publications about bamboo, concentrated in the recent decade, mainly about engineered materials. Although several papers regarding bamboo and wood densification are available, very few studies have comprehensively investigated the densification process solely through compression of natural bamboo culms. According to the literature, applying a combination of compression of 6–12 MPa at temperatures between 120–170 °C for 8–20 min can produce materials with higher strength in comparison to the mechanical properties of natural bamboo. The majority of research on bamboo densification indicates that the modified material results in improved properties in terms of density, hardness, bending strength, stiffness, and durability. This paper provides a review that consolidates knowledge on the concept of bamboo culm densification, discusses the roles of parameters that control the process, ascertains the best practice, and finally determines gaps in this field of knowledge.


2020 ◽  
pp. 136787792097212
Author(s):  
Diego Labra

Could you truly understand contemporary Argentine culture without considering the local appropriation of The Simpsons? In this article, we argue that mass culture has been a blind spot of Argentine social sciences and humanities because of the particular development of local cultural studies. In order to articulate a critique and build upon it, we will review relevant literature, identify promising current research, and offer an outline on how to rethink the problem of production, circulation and consumption of culture in 21st-century Argentina and beyond.


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