The authors provide a deep reading of the fictional small American town of Possum Springs in the 2017 adventure game "Night in the Woods" ("NiTW") to demonstrate how game architecture and environments have become richer and more complex spaces for narrative development and storytelling. The act of navigating the game's town,…

The author retells the origin story of Sierra On-Line and its historic first product, the graphical adventure game "Mystery House." She reviews the academic and journalistic writing that placed the story almost exclusively inside a narrative about early computer games, treating it as a saga of the competition between the graphic…

Background: Research into digital practices and cultures repeatedly calls attention to the complexity of communication spaces and meaning-making practices. With the blurring of boundaries between online and offline, these entangled practices involve the interweaving of human, material, semiotic, and discursive practices. Purpose: This introductory…

eSports is a rising modality of sports entertainment in the United States and has growing implications for education. Providing competitive eSports teams in schools satisfies the growing desire to train and educate students on the skills emphasized in STEM and Career Technical Education (CTE) education, as well as in programs such as English and…

The use of videogames in the foreign language (FL) classroom seems to be gradually increasing nowadays. TICs are making the lives of educators easier and their teaching methods more effective; these positive experiences make that researchers in this field are constantly introducing and developing new teaching methods and electronic applications.…

This article examines two communities of youth who play an online game that integrates physical activity into virtual game play. Participating youth from two research sites--an urban middle school and a suburban junior high school--wore FitBits that tracked their physical activity and then integrated their real-world energy into game-world…

Single and multiplayer serious Kinect games have been used in many different areas, including education. Due to its relative newness as a technology, a dearth of literature exists concerning the requirements for the use of Kinect games in educational settings. A comprehensive review was conducted to include various perspectives in order to provide…

Basic social interaction and executing certain tasks can be difficult for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The symptoms of such behaviour include inappropriate gestures, body language and facial expressions, lack of interest in certain tasks, cognitive disability in coordination of limbs, and a difficulty in comprehending tasks'…

In a previous work the author created the Education and Entertainment Grid by combining various taxonomies from the fields of play and learning. In this paper, a section of this grid known as the Entertainment Grid will be extended by including previously unused elements of Richard Bartle's online player types and Robert Caillois' play complexity.…

Drawing on game-design principles and an underlying situated theoretical perspective, we developed and researched a 3D game-based curriculum designed to teach water quality concepts. We compared undergraduate student dyads assigned randomly to four different instructional design conditions where the content had increasingly level of…