Bullying is a serious social problem at schools, very prevalent independently of culture and country, and particularly acute for teenagers. With the irruption of always-on communications technology, the problem, now termed cyberbullying, is no longer restricted to school premises and hours. There are many different approaches to address cyberbullying, such as school buddies, educational videos, or involving police in counseling; however, awareness continues to be insufficient. We have developed Conectado, a serious game to be used in the classroom to increase awareness on bullying and cyberbullying in schools. While playing the game, students gain a first-hand immersive experience of the problem and the associated emotions, fostering awareness and empathy with victims. This paper describes Conectado and presents its validation with actual students using game analytics.
Serious Games can benefit from the commercial video games industry by taking advantage of current development tools. However, the economics and requirements of serious games and commercial games are very different. In this paper, we describe the factors that impact the total cost of ownership of serious games used in educational settings, review the specific requirements of games used as learning material, and analyze the different development tools available in the industry highlighting their advantages and disadvantages that must be taken into account when using them to develop a serious game.
Pervasive gaming has experimented a huge commercial growth with location-based game successes such as Pokémon GO or Ingress. The serious game industry has an opportunity to take advantage of location-based mechanics to better connect games with the real world, creating more authentic immersive learning environments. Games such as historical tours, story-based exploration, laboratories, or flora explorations can greatly benefit from location-based mechanics. Location-based games usually include an augmented map to provide game context, which combines both traditional game-dependent elements such as avatars, and location-based elements such as areas or points of interest. For players, interacting with location-based elements may involve entering or exiting specific areas; or reaching a certain location and looking in a specific direction. To include standardsbased learning analytics for location-based serious games (SGs), we have added support for player movement and location-based interactions to the pre-existing xAPI serious game profile. We have validated this approach through a case-study example that guided players through different sports-related facilities within a large outdoor area. This work have been carried out and it is available as part of the analytics infrastructure used in EU H2020 RAGE and BEACONING serious game projects.
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