Performance of newly-formed project teams is often limited, or at least delayed, when team members refrain from sharing their ideas due to unfamiliarity with their peers. A variety of ice-breaking methods can help overcome this cold start, but mostly they need to be deployed and moderated by experienced facilitators. This setup is rarely an option for most undergrad project courses at university level, typically carried out in small teams. In order to help breaking the ice in this context, we developed Maze Maestro, a collaborative tabletop game in which the board is made up by attaching the displays of the team members' mobile phones to form a large maze. Each member controls a character in the maze, and the whole team has the common goal of leaving the maze together; however, this is only possible with timely communication and much cooperation. While playing, team members are encouraged to confer possible plans and share their ideas, which is the fertile ground for breaking the ice. Play testing has shown that Maze Maestro was perceived as a fun and original collaborative game. So far, results of a preliminary user study are optimistic about the ability of Maze Maestro to break the ice within newly-formed teams, without requiring any facilitator.@en

Adding energy-saving products to your house can benefit the economy, the environment and your living comfort. However, these products are very costly, and many people cannot afford them using their own savings. There exist several options for funding these projects, but people do not take advantage of such due to lack of information and the common negative view on using external funding. Psychological objections on taking loans include future time perspective, perception of short time rewards and connotation of loans itself. This paper presents a serious game aimed at changing people’s mindset on taking loans to retrofit energy into their homes; Supreme Green Time Machine is a tycoon game in which you can acquire energy-saving products for your home. A main mechanic in the game is the opportunity to take loans to fund the purchase of these upgrades. Combined with other underlying mechanics, such as the time progress and social feedback, the game targets the different psychological objections to long term loans for home retrofitting. From a preliminary evaluation, we conclude that Supreme Green Time Machine effectively succeeds in making players more positive towards using loans to retrofit their homes.@en

In recent years there has been an increasing shift from traditional work to knowledge work. Students are not always well prepared for such a work mode and struggle with time and energy management, leading to stress and long unhealthy study sessions. There are many applications aimed at developing productivity habits. A few of them are somewhat gamified, although they are especially focused on real-world to-do lists, lacking a strong narrative and appeal, especially to students. We present the serious game BusyBusy, specifically designed for college students. The game revolves around the capture and reflection steps of David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology. By simulating aspects of student life, BusyBusy facilitates students to practice capturing action-related thoughts in their real life and reflect upon study activity choices in an entertaining and engaging environment.@en

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 roleTaleForge. 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.@en

Several datasets of stories and text have been proven useful for a variety of research fields. Yet, many of these datasets have suffered from the burden of being manually authored and/or annotated, affecting their size and potential to grow. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel database of stories collected from TaleMaker, an online multiplayer game that facilitates the playful co-creation of a story in order to eliminate the tedious task of authoring and annotating a dataset of stories. TaleMaker's database relational schema provides a simple story representation, in which stories are named and clearly annotated. A story is composed of a sequence of plot points, each with several slots (e.g. action, character, location) filled with sense-annotated tokens (words) associated with a WordNet synset. In this paper, we describe in detail the database schema of TaleMaker's stories repository. In addition, we suggest some of the potential applications of this repository of stories, including fostering research in fields such as story generation, narrative world generation, and word sense disambiguation. @en

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.@en

Most storytelling games bring people together to co-create stories. However, they often require considerable creative effort and skills from all players, possibly discouraging less resourceful participants and impairing stories' quality. Moreover, most stories created within these games are usually only kept in players' minds rather than on storage, despite being a valuable and original asset, with a large potential for the narrative research community. We address these challenges with a novel mixed-initiative approach aimed at supporting a group of players to incrementally co-create a story, one sentence at a time. Our method features a hand generator that offers a unique set of tokens (words) to each player in each turn. This generator carefully combines tokens relevant to the ongoing story, to each individual player, to the group as a whole and random. We implemented this method in TaleMaker, a multiplayer online game that stimulates playful co-creation of a story. TaleMaker gives players considerable creative freedom to compose their sentences, combining a gentle structural steering with the wisdom of the group to determine the best direction for the story. The collected output of TaleMaker consists of annotated stories, with slots (e.g. action, character, location) filled with words associated with a WordNet synset. From a preliminary evaluation, players reported that TaleMaker effectively stimulated story authoring, and perceived TaleMaker-created stories of considerable quality. In addition, a first analysis of the collected tokens confirms that players mostly collected story-related tokens, rather than those randomly offered. @en

In recent years, the use of Augmented and Virtual Reality (ARNR) has taken a larger role within training and education of various fields, but not every individual experiences the benefits that AR and VR technology are thought to provide. The perspective taking skill of an individual may be a good indicator of the effectiveness that AR and VR training can achieve. However, we found that the tests in other research targeting small scale perspective taking are few and limited, as perspective taking is often hard to distinguish from mental rotation. Therefore, we designed and developed A Hole New Perspective, a serious game created specifically to test and train an individual’s perspective-taking ability. A Hole New Perspective focuses on the relationship between a 3D object floating in the air and a 2D hole on a moving wall. The core game mechanics consists of having the player rotate the object so that it fits in the hole, before the wall hits the object. Because players do not always have an aligned view with the hole, they have to call on their spatial perspective-taking abilities, in addition to mental rotation. We tested the game with a variety of test subjects, and compared these test results with the Perspective Taking/Spatial orientation Test. Early results have shown that performance in the game corresponds to mental rotation ability. Furthermore, there are indications that improvement in spatial ability through the game is selectively present for those with lower spatial abilities. This further substantiates the need for a more individualized approach when offering AR and VR in education. Additional training may be needed for some, but not all students.@en

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. @en