Abstract
Serious Games represent a global revolution that promises to develop intuitive, affordable, accessible and familiar learning environments for a wide range of educational and training applications. Serious Games are computer or video games in which education is the primary goal, rather than entertainment. Serious Games offer different benefits due to the integration of simulation aspects, game aspects and pedagogical elements at the same time. Among the different assets that Serious Games provide for learning, we will focus in this paper on their ability to leverage the synergy between emotional and learning appropriation processes. We will first outline the specific features of learning opportunities offered by Serious Games considering the involvement of emotions in this learning process. The following part of the paper will be dedicated to the description of the methods for the analysis of the emotional experience of SG users. Finally, we will explore a new promising research direction concerning the use of Affective Computing in Serious Games.
Highlights
Serious Games (SG) represent a global revolution that promises to develop intuitive, affordable, accessible and familiar training environments for a wide range of educational and training applications, from medicine and healthcare to defence, from national heritage to multicultural interaction
The linkage between emotions and actions is extremely relevant in learning processes: according to widely recognized contributions [5,6], learning is best viewed as a process of participatory appropriation, where the learner acts and actively participates in doing within specific routinized contexts
Becker and colleagues [109], for example, applied in a computer card game setting the merging of two research strands of affective computing: one on an emotion simulation system for an expressive 3D humanoid agent called Max, the other one on a real-time system for empathic agent feedback that is based on human emotional This physiologic information is used to enable empathic feedback to players through non-verbal behaviors of the humanoid agent Max
Summary
Serious Games (SG) represent a global revolution that promises to develop intuitive, affordable, accessible and familiar training environments for a wide range of educational and training applications, from medicine and healthcare to defence, from national heritage to multicultural interaction. Serious Games offer different benefits for learning, among which: allowing situated “learning by doing”; making users feel responsible for their actions within a protected simulated environment; combining high-quality contents to high levels of engagement; turning mistakes into learning elements, preventing the idea that errors are irredeemable. As grounded in gaming and participatory activities, SG trigger high emotional involvement and interest in users This emotional component contributes, in turn, in significantly activating and maintaining attention resources, in improving memory and learning processes. On the one hand, the gaming aspects of SG, via emotional involvement, far from being sources of distraction, support the active participation of learners, expedite the appropriation of contents and competencies, as well as the grounding of learning in users. Some specific emotional aspects involved in SG will be introduced, focusing on positive emotions, pleasure dimensions as well as to emotions related to errors’ cognitive appraisal
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