This article presents the ways in which Muslims and Arabs are represented and represent themselves in video games. First, it analyses how various genres of European and American video games have constructed the Arab or Muslim Other. Within these games, it demonstrates how the diverse ethnic and religious identities of the Islamic world have been flattened out and reconstructed into a series of social typologies operating within a broader framework of terrorism and hostility. It then contrasts these broader trends in western digital representation with selected video games produced in the Arab world, whose authors have knowingly subverted and refashioned these stereotypes in two unique and quite different fashions. In conclusion, it considers the significance of western attempts to transcend simplified patterns of representation that have dominated the video game industry by offering what are known as 'serious' games. Read more...

Computer games become more and more important, as a tool to support education and training at school and university, as well as vocational training in industry. Contrary to the development of business software, the design of a computer game has to follow other development principles, specifically when collecting the end user (potential gamer) requirements. This paper presents two different approaches used to collect end user requirements for the development of computer games to be applied as vocational training tool in the manufacturing industry. These approaches are compared with each other, and analyzed against traditional requirements methods from software engineering. The paper presents the result of the analysis, along with the lessons learnt. Read more...

The Department of Defense (DoD) is faced with challenges in expanding technology-based solutions that can make Warfighters more efficient, effective, knowledgeable, and flexible. Of growing importance to the DoD is the potential of using Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) game-based learning in the armed forces for increasing combat readiness. The recruits of today not only understand technology in everyday use, they expect it. These young recruits are “digital natives” who were raised in a digital environment surrounded by inexpensive, yet highly interactive gaming systems. To get the most from our new “best and brightest,” new research into game-based learning needs to focus on military use. The objective of these projects was to add definitive research in the area of game-based learning. Three research studies were conducted at a national university to examine the difference in academic achievement among students who did and did not use video games in learning. Three different video games were added to approximately half the classes of freshmen Introduction to Business and Technology courses, 3rd year Economics courses, and 3rd year Management courses. Identical testing situations were used in all courses while data collected included game use, test scores, gender, ethnicity, and age. ANOVA, chi-squared, and t tests were used to test game use effectiveness. Students in classes using the game scored significantly higher means than classes that did not. There were no significant differences between genders, yet both genders scored significantly higher with game play. There were no significant differences between ethnicities, yet all ethnic groups scored significantly higher with game play. Students 40 years and under scored significantly higher with game play, while students 41 and older did not. These studies add definitive research in the area of game-based learning. The DoD now has studies proving the efficacy of digital game-based learning and how it can improve learning. Read more...

This paper proposes a model for analysing the ways in which teachers negotiate the tensions between games narratives and curriculum objectives in incorporating commercial offtheshelf computer games into formal educational practice. The paper is based on the year long Teaching with Games project which comprised surveys of over 1,000 teachers and students, and 10 exploratory case studies of teachers use of COTS games in four schools with over 300 children. The games used in the study were The Sims 2, RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 and Knights of Honor. These were used in ‘traditional’ lessons and in diverse competency and contentbased curricular environments. A key finding was that teachers focusing on encouraging competency skills such as teamwork and problemsolving were more likely to maintain the overarching narrative of the game in lesson activities than teachers who were focusing on students’ acquisition of content knowledge. Read more...

Proceedings of Digital Game Based Learning Conference: Read more...

The serious games field is rife with misconceptions because it encompasses so much. To help spread the truth about serious games, let's debunk 10 of the biggest myths about the genre. Read more...

This report discusses some issues concerning serious games, that is, (digital) games used for purposes other than mere entertainment. The starting point is the serious games concept itself, and what the actually means. Further, serious games allow learners to experience situations that are impossible in the real world for reasons of safety, cost, time, etc., but they are also claimed to have positive impacts on the players’ development of a number of different skills. Subsequently, some possible positive (and negative) impacts of serious games are discussed. Further, some of the markets such games are used in are considered here, including, military games, government games, educational games, corporate games, and healthcare games. This report also identifies some (mainly academic) actors in the North American and the European serious games market. This report is part of the DISTRICT (Developing Industrial Strategies Through Innovative Cluster and Technologies) project: Serious Games Cluster and Business Network (SER3VG), which is part of the Interreg IIIC Programme.

In the paper we describe our work in using the Source engine from the game Half Life 2 to develop a serious game - Serious Gordon. Serious Gordon is used to teach principals of food safety and food hygiene in a restaurant kitchen environment. The target users of Serious Gordon are students of catering in the DIT Faculty of Tourism and Food. The paper describes the formation of the Serious Gordon team and the development of a story for the game. It continues with a description of the features from Half Life 2 that we retained and those that we removed for the game. We then describe the process we undertook to implement the game including a description of the tools we used. We conclude with a brief evaluation of the project and present future work.

In this paper, we begin by discussing some of the statistics that reveal electronic gaming’s place as a major force in today’s economy. We next discuss two of the major problems involved with the usage of video games as a tool for teaching and learning in digital media: the issues of inconsistency and complexity. Gee’s pioneering work (2004) is used to establish some principles of gaming that transcend these problems and present a unique medium with which to examine the nature of digital media and its principles and tools. We expand upon Gee’s work to suggest specific ways that video games can be used to teach digital media students about a particular subset of digital media – in this case, that of project management, and speculate as to how this might be done in several genres of gaming. We conclude with a brief case study of our experiences in working with digital media students to build a video game that was used to teach fourth graders about African-American history and the Underground Railroad.

Given the interactive media characteristics and intrinsically motivating appeal, computer games are often praised for their potential and value in education.allHowever, comprehensive research testing these assumptions is still missing. Preliminary comparative studies on the learning effects of games versus traditional media have shown some promise. In this paper, we describe a comparative study that thoroughly investigates the effects of interactivity and media richness on science learning among college students. We also discuss important results and implications yielded from comparisons among four conditions in our experiment (game, replay, hypertext and text). Read more...