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The editorial of this issue of the International Journal of Serious Games is the last one signed by our Editor in Chief and Founder, Prof. Alessandro De Gloria. Alessandro passed away in Genova, Italy, on March 20th, few days after his 68th birthday.He founded the Serious Games Society and served as its first President, then as Honorary President. He founded also the Games and Learning Alliance Conference, of which he was the first General Chair and Honorary Chair.We mourn a great friend, and a pioneer researcher and creative teacher, with a broad, constructive vision and outstanding team-building skills. The good he made will remain in time.

International audience; This special issue of the International Journal of Serious Games offers very valuable extensions to the best papers of the 2020 edition of the GaLA conference. The local organization committee was composed of computer scientists of Laval (France), affiliated to Le Mans Université. From the 9th to the 10th of December 2020, 500 participants attended to a well-organized conference, through their virtual avatars, and listened to 37 presentations on Serious Games and Gamification. A special session was related to Virtual Reality, in a pedagogical and gaming context. The four extended papers, published in this journal, significantly extend their original work, and were accepted through a regular peer-review process for this special issue.

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.

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.

Serious games offer the potential to not only entertain and educate, but can also operate as a diagnostic tool. While designing a game with the goal of a diagnostic tool, we faced many challenges. In this paper, we share our experiences in dealing with these challenges in the iterations of designing, implementing, and evaluating such a tool.

We have created and executed a separate plan for the transition of GALA to the Serious Games Society for securing the conditions in the post-project phase. For assessing the effectiveness of the dissemination efforts we have devised 5 outward- looking KPIs. All KPI requirements were met. Also, additional targets revealing more detail were met.

Accumulating evidence indicates that game-based learning is emotionally charged. However, little is known about the nature of emotions in game-based learning. We extended previous game-based learning research by examining epistemic emotions and their relations to flow experience and situational interest. Sixty-eight 15–18-year-old students played the Antidote COVID-19 game for 25 min. Epistemic emotions, flow, and situational interest were measured after the playing session. These measures indicated that the game engaged students. Students reported significantly higher intensity levels of positive epistemic emotions (excitement, surprise, and curiosity) than negative epistemic emotions (boredom, anxiety, frustration, and confusion). The co-occurrence network analyses provided insights into the relationship between flow and situational interest. We found an asymmetrical pattern of the “situational interest-flow” co-occurrence. When situational interest occurred, the flow was always co-occurring. This co-occurrence suggests that situational interest could be a prerequisite or a potential trigger for flow experience but not an adequate state ensuring a high flow experience. Further, flow and situational interest co-occurred mainly with positive epistemic emotions. The findings imply that flow and situational interest are similar constructs and share several characteristics. The study also demonstrated that epistemic emotions, flow, and situational interest can be used as proxies of engagement. Implications of the findings are discussed.

Virtual reality (VR) technologies are becoming more and more popular, not only as a gaming console, but also as a viable training tool. Especially for health and safety training programmes, VR can be very useful to train people in dangerous environments and situations without imposing real danger on them or others. Chemical laboratories are environments where risks of severe injury or even fatality are always present. For this, we developed a VR serious game, called VR LaboSafe Game, as a tool for laboratory safety training. However, designing a VR serious game is a challenging task. There are many factors to consider for an optimal game design. In this study, we discuss important design considerations and we present the game design of VR LaboSafe Game. Preliminary tests of an early version of the game show usability issues and minor discomforting symptoms for some participants. Nevertheless, participants do agree that VR LaboSafe Game is useful for learning laboratory safety; is more active and responsive in their learning process and makes safety training more engaging. ispartof: pages:23-33 ispartof: Games and Learning Alliance vol:1 pages:23-33 ispartof: 10th International Conference on Games and Learning Alliance location:Online date:1 Dec - 2 Dec 2021 status: published

As dynamic inductive power transfer for electric vehicles is growing in relevance, it is important to analyze solutions towards its deployment and integration in the cloud-based services for electric mobility. In this paper we present an Internet-enabling platform for Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment, which features a high-level Charging Station Control Unit and a Power Electronics Controller. The platform is a middleware that controls the charging process taking into account outside world information. Tests were performed in a safe driving track, in Italy, to verify the effectiveness and robustness of the installation, for one year, for a total of 120 drive hours, under various weather conditions. Tests showed the suitability of the platform in terms of ability to authenticate and authorize a vehicle even through a remote service, sequentially control each coil in a lane, monitor the charging process, assist the driver in keeping the vehicle aligned so as to maximize the energy exchange and deliver charging session information to the cloud (e.g. for billing).

For this study, we designed a serious game to engage Danish gymnasiumstudents when reading the novellaALove Story, written by the prize-winningDanish author Naja Marie Aidt. The novella is mandatory reading in postmodernism.The study included 41 students from two Danish gymnasiums, who weredivided into three classes. Two classes were included in the experimental study,which employed the serious game as part of reading the novella. One class servedas the control group and engaged only in an analog reading of the novella. The evaluation criteria, which were assessed through a questionnaire, were based on items from the reading engagement index, the user engagement scale, and the narrative engagement scale. Furthermore, the evaluation consisted of in-depth interviews with teachers and students. The findings revealed a positive effect on students’ engagement in the experimental group and the possibility for future work in the field of serious games implemented in high school curricula. The serious game developed for this study balanced challenge and skills appropriately, but it could be improved in terms of the story world and controls. For this study, we designed a serious game to engage Danish gymnasium students when reading the novella A Love Story, written by the prize-winning Danish author Naja Marie Aidt. The novella is mandatory reading in postmodernism. The study included 41 students from two Danish gymnasiums, who were divided into three classes. Two classes were included in the experimental study, which employed the serious game as part of reading the novella. One class served as the control group and engaged only in an analog reading of the novella. The evaluation criteria, which were assessed through a questionnaire, were based on items from the reading engagement index, the user engagement scale, and the narrative engagement scale. Furthermore, the evaluation consisted of in-depth interviews with teachers and students. The findings revealed a positive effect on students’ engagement in the experimental group and the possibility for future work in the field of serious games implemented in high school curricula. The serious game developed for this study balanced challenge and skills appropriately, but it could be improved in terms of the story world and controls.

Publisher Copyright: © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG. Critical reading - the ability to critically evaluate information - has become a crucial skill in our modern information society and the rise of fake news. Games might be able to help to address this rather new field of education. Therefore, we first conducted a literature analysis on the use of games that aim at supporting critical reading and media literacy. We found that most of the used games improved participants’ critical reading skills, were mostly targeted at adults, and the games focused on written information and fake news, but omitted graph literacy. Next, we ran an empirical study to investigate adolescents’ competencies in critically reading and interpreting graphs. In a storified setting, adolescents acted as fact checkers and were supposed to interpret graphs and identify misleading graphs. Our results revealed that adolescents struggled in both the identification of misleading graphs as well as the interpretation of graphs. Consequently, based on our literature review and empirical results, we developed a game to support graph reading. The design of the game is presented.

The purpose of this study was to investigate flow experience and situational interest in a math learning game that included adaptive scaffolding. Fifty-two Finnish 5th graders played the game about fractions at home during COVID-19 enforced distance learning. The results showed that flow experience correlated positively with situational interest. Importantly, a deeper analysis of the Flow Short Scale (FSS) subscales revealed that only absorption by activity but not fluency of performance explained variance in situational interest. That is, at least in game-based adaptive learning, situational interest is mostly related to immersive aspects of flow. Results also revealed that students with better in-game performance had higher flow experiences, but their levels of prior knowledge were not related to flow levels. In contrast, students with lower prior fraction number knowledge showed higher situational interest, which might be partly attributed to the additional game elements provided to struggling students in the form of adaptive scaffolds. Moreover, the study demonstrated that the developed adaptive scaffolding approach and in-game self-reporting measures worked well. Finally, the implications of these findings for flow experience and situational interest research in game-based learning context are discussed. acceptedVersion

Leaderboards are a popular way to implement competition, trigger social comparison, increase participation, and provide goals and performance-based feedback to the players. Even though game-based learning has become more common in education, relatively little is known about the motivational power of leaderboards in team-based educational settings. This paper aims to contribute to this gap by exploring to what extent leaderboards motivate players in collaborative and competitive game-based learning context. The meaning of leaderboards was studied in a team-based math game competition relying on intra-classroom collaboration and inter-classroom competition. The findings suggest that the team rank, team commitment, and enjoyment of the game predicted leaderboard motivation. The results revealed that even though leaderboards were motivating in general, players whose team did not succeed well in the competition were less motivated. It seems that leaderboards may facilitated collaboration but the collaborative element of the competition did not totally reduce the negative effects of the used infinite leaderboard. These findings disclose some drawbacks of an infinite leaderboard design. To overcome this problem, we suggest some ways to redesign leaderboards for educational use. Finally, we discuss implications of the research for using leaderboards in game-based learning settings, factors affecting leaderboard motivation, and leaderboard design in general. acceptedVersion

For this study, the authors designed a serious game to increase leisurereading engagement in H. C. Andersen’s fairy tale, The Little Mermaid. The objectives were to increase leisure reading engagement among young Danish adults and to familiarize the group with original version as a supplement to the Disney version. The novelty within this study is the focus on leisure reading engagement and having participants read a story in its original 1837 language. 25 participants were included in a formative evaluation. The evaluation was based on three questionnaires at various stages of the game play, and six participants were selected for in-depth interviews. The findings reveal increased engagement and interest in the story throughout the game. There was a very high level of interest in the story and some good indicators that the users read the entire story. In conclusion, when designing a serious game to promote increased leisure reading engagement, intrinsic motivation is of high importance. Telling the original story of The Little Mermaid in a serious game is, to a large extent, about transforming the fairy tale into a digital storytelling with meaningful skills and knowledge for the users. For this study, the authors designed a serious game to increase leisure reading engagement in H. C. Andersen’s fairy tale, The Little Mermaid. The objectives were to increase leisure reading engagement among young Danish adults and to familiarize the group with original version as a supplement to the Disney version. The novelty within this study is the focus on leisure reading engagement and having participants read a story in its original 1837 language. 25 participants were included in a formative evaluation. The evaluation was based on three questionnaires at various stages of the game play, and six participants were selected for in-depth interviews. The findings reveal increased engagement and interest in the story throughout the game. There was a very high level of interest in the story and some good indicators that the users read the entire story. In conclusion, when designing a serious game to promote increased leisure reading engagement, intrinsic motivation is of high importance. Telling the original story of The Little Mermaid in a serious game is, to a large extent, about transforming the fairy tale into a digital storytelling with meaningful skills and knowledge for the users.