Effectiveness of serious games and impact of design elements on engagement and educational outcomes in healthcare professionals and students: a systematic review and meta-analysis protocol
Introduction: Serious games (SGs) are interactive and entertaining digital software with an educational purpose. They engage the learner by proposing challenges and through various design elements (DEs; eg, points, difficulty adaptation, story). Recent reviews suggest the effectiveness of SGs in healthcare professionals’ and students’ education is mixed. This could be explained by the variability in their DEs, which has been shown to be highly variable across studies. The aim of this systematic review is to identify, appraise and synthesise the best available evidence regarding the effectiveness of SGs and the impact of DEs on engagement and educational outcomes of healthcare professionals and students.
Methods and analysis: A systematic search of the literature will be conducted using a combination of medical subject headings terms and keywords in Cumulative Index of Nursing and Allied Health, Embase, Education Resources Information Center, PsycInFO, PubMed and Web of Science. Studies assessing SGs on engagement and educational outcomes will be included. Two independent reviewers will conduct the screening as well as the data extraction process. The risk of bias of included studies will also be assessed by two reviewers using the Effective Practice and Organisation of Care criteria. Data regarding DEs in SGs will first be synthesised qualitatively. A meta-analysis will then be performed, if the data allow it. Finally, the quality of the evidence regarding the effectiveness of SGs on each outcome will be assessed using the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation approach.
Ethics and dissemination: As this systematic review only uses already collected data, no Institutional Review Board approval is required. Its results will be submitted in a peer-reviewed journal by the end of 2018.
Contribution to an article by Marc-André Maheu-Cadotte et al. published in full open access in BMJ Open. DOI: 10.1136/bmjopen-2017-019871.
“It taught me to hate them all.”: Toxicity through DOTA 2’s Players, Systems, and Media Dispositive
‘Toxicity’ has become a pervasive term for describing and discussing online game communities,but exactly what constitutes toxicity remains loosely defined. This project seeks to uncover how toxicity is constructed and understood within a game community described from inside and out as toxic.
After situating toxicity within prior academic literature on toxicity’s constitutive elements such as griefing, trolling, flaming and racism online, this project focuses on the DOTA 2 community. It examines how the game’s culture operates throughout what Mirko Tobias Schäfer referred to as the media dispositive, or the collection of sites and discourses that the community engages with that overlap with the in-game experience. Throughout the dispositive certain voices are sanctioned by the game’s company, Valve, while others are silenced by the affordances of the dispositive’s sites and game’s culture.
The final section of this work explores the in-game experience through ethnographic, interview, and participant observation data, to uncover how players perceive toxicity in-game. This work finds that toxicity is in part reflective of and formed by the broader culture of the game as discovered through an analysis of the dispositive, but that players possess highly subjective ideas about what constitutes toxicity that they tend to universalize, which strengthens toxicity as a rhetorical rather than descriptive term. The impact of toxicity on players and community members is uneven as some players are put into conflict with others while others, particularly women, are erased from the game space and community discussions. In conclusion, this project finds that toxicity in DOTA 2 is constructed by overlapping cultural and mechanical elements and is as much about what players perceive to be toxic as it is about actual player behaviors.
LEGO Batman and the Licensing Network
As the 20th Century drew to a close, storm clouds gathered on the horizon for the Lego Group: not only was digital culture threating to shift the focus of toy buyers and shrink Lego’s market, but the company also had to contend with the approaching expiration of its US patent in 2011. The plastic toy giant looked ahead and saw a future, very shortly approaching, where its only advantages on the toy aisle would be brand recognition and established territory—an established territory that was already shrinking as videogame cartridges crept down the aisle. So that left the brand, and there, the company saw the potential in licensed theme sets: partner with trendy pop culture properties and appeal to multiple markets simultaneously. And so, in 1999, the Lego Group partnered with LucasFilm Ltd. in anticipation of The Phantom Menace to release Lego: Star Wars.
Since then, the Lego Group has developed more than 60 licensed themes from two dozen other companies ranging from Columbia Pictures and Viacom to Warner Bros. and Lamborghini. Meanwhile, they’ve expanded into every other conceivable media form: amusement parks, merchandise, apparel, breakfast cereal, film…and video games. Now, they not only retain their dominance in the toy aisle over all other pretenders: they’re on our TV screens and bed linens and backpacks, too. This was a paradigm shift for the Lego Group, where the company’s top management began considering the LEGO brand, rather than its actual products, as its top asset.
Developing digital games to address airway clearance therapy in children with cystic fibrosis: participatory design process
Background: Children affected with cystic fibrosis do respiratory exercises to release the mucus stuck in their lungs.
Objective: The objective of our study was to develop prototypes of digital games that use breath pressure to make this daily physiotherapy more fun.
Methods: We used a participatory design approach and organized short events to invite contributors from different disciplines to develop game prototypes. From the 6 prototypes, 3 were tested by 10 children during a prestudy. The source code of the games, of which 2 continue to be developed, has been released on the internet under fair use licenses.