With the continued application of gaming for training and education, which has seen exponential growth over the past two decades, this book offers an insightful introduction to the current developments and applications of game technologies within educational settings, with cutting-edge academic research and industry insights, providing a greater understanding into current and future developments and advances within this field. Following on from the success of the first volume in 2011, researchers from around the world presents up-to-date research on a broad range of new and emerging topics such as serious games and emotion, games for music education and games for medical training, to gamification, bespoke serious games, and adaptation of commercial off-the shelf games for education and narrative design, giving readers a thorough understanding of the advances and current issues facing developers and designers regarding games for training and education. This second volume of Serious Games and Edutainment Applications offers further insights for researchers, designers and educators who are interested in using serious games for training and educational purposes, and gives game developers with detailed information on current topics and developments within this growing area.

The recent re-emergence of serious games as a branch of video games and as a promising frontier of education has introduced the concept of games designed for a serious purpose other than pure entertainment. To date the major applications of serious games include education and training, engineering, medicine and healthcare, military applications, city planning, production, crisis response, to name just a few. If utilised alongside, or combined with conventional training and educational approaches, serious games could provide a more powerful means of knowledge transfer in almost every application domain. Serious Games and Edutainment Applications offers an insightful introduction to the development and applications of games technologies in educational settings. It includes cutting-edge academic research and industry updates that will inform readers of current and future advances in the area. The book is suitable for both researchers and educators who are interested in using games for educational purposes, as well as game professionals requiring a thorough understanding of issues involved in the application of video games technology into educational settings. It is also applicable to programmers, game artists, and management contemplating or involved in the development of serious games for educational or training purposes.

Games have been part of the entertainment industry for decades. Once only considered viable for personal entertainment, virtual gaming media is now being explored as a useful tool for learning and student engagement. The Handbook of Research on Serious Games for Educational Applications presents a comprehensive examination of the implementation of gaming in classroom settings and the cognitive benefits this integration presents. Highlighting theoretical, psychological, instructional design, and teaching perspectives, this book is a pivotal reference source for researchers, educators, professionals, and academics interested in the innovative opportunities of game-based learning.

"This book presents research on the most recent technological developments in all fields of knowledge or disciplines of computer games development, including planning, design, development, marketing, business management, users and behavior"--Provided by publisher.

This textbook provides an introduction to the fundamentals of serious games, which differ considerably from computer games that are meant for pure entertainment. Undergraduate and graduate students from various disciplines who want to learn about serious games are one target group of this book. Prospective developers of serious games are another, as they can use the book for self-study in order to learn about the distinctive features of serious game design and development. And ultimately, the book also addresses prospective users of serious game technologies by providing them with a solid basis for judging the advantages and limitations of serious games in different application areas such as game-based learning, training and simulation or games for health. To cater to this heterogeneous readership and wide range of interests, every effort was made to make the book flexible to use. All readers are expected to study Chapter 1, as it provides the necessary basics and terminology that will be used in all subsequent chapters. The eleven chapters that follow cover the creation of serious games (design, authoring processes and tools, content production), the runtime context of serious games (game engines, adaptation mechanisms, game balancing, game mastering, multi-player serious games), the effects of serious games and their evaluation (player experience, assessment techniques, performance indicators), and serious games in practice (economic aspects, cost-benefit analysis, serious game distribution). To familiarize the readers with best practice in this field, the final chapter presents more than 30 selected examples of serious games illustrating their characteristics and showcasing their practical use. Lecturers can select chapters in a sequence that is most suitable for their specific course or seminar. The book includes specific suggestions for courses such as “Introduction to Serious Games”, “Entertainment Technology”, “Serious Game Design”, “Game-based Learning”, and “Applications of Serious Games”.

This volume on virtual and augmented reality (VR/AR) and gamification for cultural heritage offers an insightful introduction to the theories, development, recent applications and trends of the enabling technologies for mixed reality and gamified interaction in cultural heritage and creative industries in general. It has two main goals: serving as an introductory textbook to train beginning and experienced researchers in the field of interactive digital cultural heritage, and offering a novel platform for researchers in and across the culturally-related disciplines. To this end, it is divided into two sections following a pedagogical model developed by the focus group of the first EU Marie S. Curie Fellowship Initial Training Network on Digital Cultural Heritage (ITN-DCH): Section I describes recent advances in mixed reality enabling technologies, while section II presents the latest findings on interaction with 3D tangible and intangible digital cultural heritage. The sections include selected contributions from some of the most respected scholars, researchers and professionals in the fields of VR/AR, gamification, and digital heritage. This book is intended for all heritage professionals, researchers, lecturers and students who wish to explore the latest mixed reality and gamification technologies in the context of cultural heritage and creative industries. It pursues a pedagogic approach based on trainings, conferences, workshops and summer schools that the ITN-DCH fellows have been following in order to learn how to design next-generation virtual heritage applications, systems and services.

The author explores the ways in which games can be used to instruct and inform as well as provide pleasure. He uses innovative approaches to problem solving through individualized game techniques.