Presently, one of the greatest challenges of humankind is climate change. It is usually assumed that its mitigation will require an extensive adaptation in many human habits. As every fourth ton of carbon dioxide emitted can be attributed to the food chain, it is argued that one of the most effective actions an individual can take is changing towards a more sustainable diet, like a plant-based one. Serious games have proved to be a successful means for achieving behavior change. We present Veganity, your journey, a mobile serious game aimed at assisting players in their transition towards a more plantbased diet. The game combines the characteristics of the idle game genre with diet tracking: in the game, as you progress in adapting your personal diet, you spare energy that can be spent in making the game world more sustainable. Personal factors, like changing your ecological or social norms, your habits and your behavioral costs and benefits, are targeted by different game mechanics. These include, among others, a currency mechanism for stimulating habit change, in-game actions building up selfefficacy, and tips raising problem awareness. Besides describing our game design, we also present the main features of the game implementation. From a preliminary evaluation, we conclude that Veganity, your journey successfully engages players in pursuing their own diet goals, and increases their reflection on, and acquaintance with, sustainable diet behaviors.

Within citizenship education, a new focus is being laid upon what is expected of citizens within a diverse and lightning-fast society: more emphasis is placed on teaching students how to understand and respect other people's opinions, regardless of how they may contrast with one's own. However, learning to be tolerant with others' viewpoints comes with hurdles, as currently it is quite easy to become stuck within one's own worldview. We developed Diermocratie, an in-classroom game aimed at encouraging a more open conversation, which breaks through these hurdles and addresses key competencies such as empathy and argumentation. By role-playing metaphors that parallel real-world events, students explore their own predispositions, are made aware of the perspectives of others, and are enabled to discuss issues objectively. From a preliminary evaluation, most students could identify the parallelism between the in-game metaphor and real-world situations. They also indicated that the game motivates them to further talk to each other, approaching sensitive topics among them.

No abstract

A narrative world (NW) is an environment which supports enacting a given story. Manually creating virtual NWs (e.g. for games and films) requires considerable creative and technical skills, in addition to a deep understanding of the story in question. Procedural generation methods, in turn, generally lack in creativity and have a hard time coping with the numerous degrees of freedom left open by a story. In contrast, mixed-initiative approaches offer a promising path to solve this tension. We propose a mixed-initiative approach assisting an NW designer in choosing plausible entities for the locations, where the story takes place. Our approach is based on a recommender method that uses common and novel associations to narrative locations, actions and entities. Our method builds upon a large dataset of co-occurrences of disambiguated terms that we retrieved from photo captions. Building on this knowledge, our solution deploys entity (un)relatedness, offers clusters of semantically and contextually related entities, and highlights novelty of recommended content, thus effectively supporting the designer's creative task, while helping to stay consistent with the story. We demonstrate our method via an interactive prototype called TaleForge. Designers can obtain meaningful entity suggestions for their NWs, which enables guided exploration, while preserving creative freedom. We present an example of the interactive workflow of our method, and illustrate its usefulness.

No abstract