Geoff's proposal

Objectives

Technical: To acquire skills to model, rig and animate cellular characters for the purpose of 3D gaming.

Theoretical: To explore character design conventions in games as well as educational materials.

Practical: To conceptualize and storyboard a set of characters for an immunology-themed educational game. To model one or two such characters to have it interact with it's environmental surrounding, engage with characters, and respond to scripted cues.

Research Questions

1) How to design a character at the cellular level within a three-dimensional tissue environment? What considerations must a game artist take, and do these considerations change from a biomedical communicator's point of view?

Hypothesis:

• As with animated biomedical visualizations of microscopic or cellular events, true character dynamics are often replaced with a more exaggerated or stylized set of behaviours. For example, cellular collisions may not result in morphological changes in vivo, but on screen, compression and deformation upon impact may appear more realistic and organic (Thomas & Johnston). A consideration during the design process would then be to ensure that the model be able to adopt such characteristics.
• With cell-like characters, polar orientation may affect not only game-play but communication as well. While rolling, bouncing, tumbling characters may appear more realistic, they may not be easily programmable. Whereas a cell with a defined head and foot may be easier to integrate and have it interact with it's surrounding.

How does character appearance and behaviour affect user attraction, useability and playability? Would an anthropologic character be more accessible to a wider audience than organic cell-like characters?

Hypothesis:

• The appearance of a character can greatly attract or deter specific audience groups. Even in the case where two games may adopt the same character, their behaviours and movements, for example one with more bounce and exaggeration versus one with stiffer joints, may greatly affect a game's attractiveness to different people.
• An anthropological character may be more attractive and more relatable to its target audience. Having the option to choose between male and female would attract a greater audience than a single sex-defined one. Must now consider how different sexes or genders may potentially affect interpretation of the seriousness of the game.
• A cell-shaped character may be universally more acceptable because there would inherently be less gender bias. Androgyny, however, may have other limitations.

Does character design affect credibility and communication of scientific material?

Hypothesis:

• Continuing from the previous point, an anthropological character may not only serve to attract a wider audience, it may help to communicate scientific material. Unlike a cell that exocytoses a protein for example, an anthropological character may through a particular protein or weapon. Visually, this action taken by the main character may be more readily registered by a human player who can more easily fathom throwing an object than projecting endocytic contents. In essence, it is like how a professor or educator may make an analogy of a complex biochemical reaction in order to better communicate a point. Visualizing human-like interactions may help users make associations between such biological processes.
• The detractor of using an anthropological character may be a decrease in credibility. Even if much care is taken to render and create a highly accurate biological environments and events, the use of a human-like character may cause viewers to distrust the material.

Does character-appearance customizability and evolution affect replay value? Does appearance morphology and evolution help communicate biochemical or cellular change?

Hypothesis:

• For the purpose of replay, having an expansive character customizability system may serve to promote replay. Users may be enticed to try different outfits, acquire different abilities and assume different roles.
• Ensuring that customizability serves more than to increase replay with be important. Appearance changes may serve to explain morphological changes at the cellular level. Character evolution may help players understand profound intracellular changes that may not be visually evident otherwise.

Can character-environment interactions affect a player's spatial or overall understanding of biochemical and organic processes?

Hypothesis:

• By creating an explorable 3D environment, games can help foster players' spatial skills. By navigation through the world, players can gain an understanding of the anatomical function of an organ. Through event triggers and visual cues, they may then make associate functions with structure.

Methods

(See group methods)

Wensi's proposal

Objective:

Technical: To learn skill design, and to model and animate a dynamic 3D biological environment for 3D gaming project.

Theoretical: To explore conventional scene design for improving learning process of biological knowledge.

Practical: To provide the basic design for the entire gaming map of lymph node; select one scene from the map and sketch it in detail; model subjects in the scene by Maya; finally, organize them by Unity and experiment with more realistic rendering skills.


Research Questions:

(1) How to organize biological information of an anatomical structure (lymph node) in a form of a 3D environment that can be more user-friendly?

Hypothesis:

• Compare to the anatomical structure which contains millions of closely packed cells/molecules with a variety of scale differences, the design of the gaming environment intends to be organized as a city, countryside or other common real life scenes. It is believed that by creating interactions with the real world, it will strengthen the game by building on users’ pre-existing knowledge of their everyday life. (Horn, 2007). For example, the highway with red pavement will indicate blood vessels; the river with clear water will indicate lymph vessels.

• The downside of using real life scenes to mimic anatomical structure of lymph node is that it may decrease the credibility of scientific material. Although the real life scenes can convey the basic concept of each biological components, such using highway to represent blood vessel as a mean to demonstrate the concept of “transportation path,” some information’s accuracy will be lost, such as the scale proportion of different biological components and the real spatial distance between them.

(2) How to enhance user’s understanding of knowledge by designing a 3D environment of the game?

Hypothesis:

• Continuing from previous point, organizing the game environment as real life scenes may increase usability but also decrease the credibility of scientific material. So in order to enhance user’s understanding of the scientific material, the design of the appearance of each component in game will be closely related to its appearance in the real lymph node. Also, the conventional appearances of these anatomical structures in the textbook or other forms of educational materials will be adopted to help users to make the connection between objects in the 3D environment and biological components. For example, B cell could appear as a round shape fruit on the tree.
• To further enhance user’s understanding of the scientific material, the movements/changes of the objects in 3D environment may simulate the real reaction of the biological components in lymph node. This may help the game to deliver the concept of how biological components function in lymph node. For instance, once the B cell, which appears as a round shape fruit on the tree, is activated by the primary antibody, the Y-shaped secondary antibody will pop out from its surface and the fruit will mature, fall from the tree, and roll around to other places.

• Finally, creating the interaction between the main character and 3D environment may enhance user’s understanding of the scientific material. The main character may trigger events such as bringing an antibody to a non-differentiated B cell (immature fruit in the tree) and activate its differentiating process (fruit maturation process). By doing that, user can gain understanding of the cell’s functional mechanism when they are exploring the anatomical structure of the lymph node.

(3) How to balance out the difficulty level and replay value of the game?

Hypothesis:

• As an interactive 3D environment, the complexity may increase the game’s replay value, because it would offer users extra areas to explore while completing the tasks.

• However, the disadvantage of increasing the complexity of the 3D environment is that it may increase the difficulty level of the game, and hence hindering users from completing the tasks. Therefore, the complexity of the game should balance the difficulty level in order to maximize the replay value of the game.

Discussion:
As one of the essential parts of game creation, the game world development provides the venue for characters to interact with the environment as the storyline unveils. Furthermore, as a scientifically educational game, the game’s environment has its unique contribution to users’ learning process. It will help users to remember anatomical structures more easily as they explore the game world, and it will enhance users’ understanding of the scientific mechanism based on the character-environment interaction.

I hope during the designing and developing process of the game world, I can learn to incorporate scientific content into a visually attractive and entertaining realm of accurately depicted scientific facts. In addition, I will also gain skills of game modeling and texture techniques.

Krista's proposal

Objectives

Technical: To acquire a basic understanding of programming languages (html, actionscript, php), sharing documents and interactive applications on the web, and creating user-friendly and accessible applications.

Theoretical: Research into whether interactive technologies can be valuable education tools. Can an interactive encyclopedia make a game more didactic, and credible? What are the merits of informal and experiential learning, and do games have a role to play in this model?

Practical: To conceptualize a game manual that describes rules and concepts of the game; this will also act as an interactive textbook. Create visual images and 2D animations for this application.

Please see Methods section for a goal timeline.

Research Questions

1. How does complexity affect the education or entertainment value of a game? What considerations must designers make, in both the game interface and its content?

Hypotheses:

Simplicity may be more valuable in the interface, as elegant and uncluttered designs are easier to navigate (Mullet and Sano, 1995; Gehrke and Turban, 1999; Tufte, 2006).

When considering scientific content to include, researchers suspect that over-simplification of concepts presented in classrooms negatively affects student learning (Koschmann et al 1996).

Complexity may thus be valuable in the content, and concepts of the game. This may include a complex amount of information embodied by the 3D environment, characters, and in the game manual.

Similarly, individually-tailored curriculums aid learning (Meltzoff, et al 2009), and an application of this could be customizability in the game interface.

2. How can interface design affect a user’s ability to learn? Can games be designed to evoke emotional responses in players, and how does this affect learning?

Hypotheses:

Visually pleasing designs are thought to improve heuristic processing and creativity (Norman, 2003); the aesthetic quality of an educational game may therefore impact learning. Also, emotions are intimately tied to memory (LeDoux, 1996, Frijda, 1988), and research suggests there are many avenues of interaction between humans, their emotions, and computers (Brave and Nass, 2008; Kim et al, 2003).

Customizability and the emotional mood of the game may also affect learning, as people tend to remember mood-congruent information better (Matt et al, 1992).

Persuasion is needed to change student view points, and computer programs are emerging as powerful persuasive tools (Fogg et al, 2008). In order to be persuasive, designs need to be perceived as credible; please see the group literature review, and Stanford's Web Credibility Research for elements that improve credibility.

3. What are the benefits of informal learning? How informal can a game be to be still considered educational? If it’s no longer an ‘educational game’, can the game still ‘teach’?

Hypotheses:

According to Wellington, and many proponents of constructivism, informal learning is embodied by voluntary, haphazard, unstructured, open-ended, learner-led and learner-centred activities that occur outside of the classroom (see Table 1, from Wellington, 1990).

Informal learning may increase student attention, (please see literature review in group proposal for elaboration on how games may affect motivation, can tailor curriculums to a student, increase self-efficacy, and incorporate emotional and social aspects into the learning experience).

The repetitive, and problem-based qualities of games may also make them valuable teachers, as spaced repetition improves recall (Bahrick et al, 2005), and elaborative processing (making deeper connections) improves short-term memory (Craik et al, 1973). Actively solving problems in the game may encourage elaborative processing.

Computer games, as tools in informal learning, may be powerful and cost-effective alternatives to classic, classroom teaching.

4. How can the integration of an encyclopedic module enhance or detract from a game’s playability? Will it be used? And how may its design and usability serve to educate?

Hypotheses:

Game manuals incorporated directly into a game, in the form of interactive encyclopedias (for example, the Civilization games' civilopedia), not only prove anecdotally useful according to game afficianados, but considerable evidence in the literature celebrates their instructive value (Squire, 2005; Squire, 2009; Alvarado, 2008).

Such a tool should enhance the credibility, and playability of the game, by providing accurate scientific references and the knowledge needed to succeed in game challenges.

Methods

Please see methods section in the group proposal.

Discussion

Educational games hold much promise in improving students' learning experiences.

Games may tap into and encourage social, aesthetic, emotional, problem-solving, motivational, esteem, and self-efficacy elements that more formal methods of learning do not. They also represent an economically-efficient way to provide students with a tailored learning experience.

It is my hope that in producing an interactive game manual, researching the elements of effective game design, and working to incorporate accurate, scientific content in a visually pleasing, and entertaining format, I will gain some of the skills needed to contribute to this growing industry.