Ludic Approach Research Articles

A Speedrun within a Rock Show

Bit Brigade is a five-piece band that combines hard-rock adaptations of classic-era Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) soundtracks with live speedruns of the game, performed in concert as a rock show. This article uses Bit Brigade as a case study to develop a conceptual model for multimedia analysis that investigates audiovisual integration in novel ways. The essay comes in four theoretical sections followed by a full analysis of Bit Brigade’s speedrun of The Legend of Zelda. The first section explores Johan Huizinga’s magic circle and Kofi Agawu’s region of play to describe types of semiotic play that involve the gamer, band, and audience at a show. The second and third sections focus on intertextuality and how adaptation and nostalgic recycling of the past yield meaning in this unique artform. The fourth segment unpacks intertextually enhanced agency and investigates audience immersion through the social act of performance. After developing this multi-part framework, the latter half of this article presents an analysis of Bit Brigade’s performance of The Legend of Zelda at MAGFest (2022), chosen because of the group’s unique musical and ludic approach to the game. Throughout, the goals of this study are to show how gaming performance parallels music making and to clarify the ways in which concepts associated with music theory can be reexamined through the study of video game performance art.

Unlocking Learning: The Impact of an Educational Escape Room on Energy Transition

Since the first escape room opened in 2007, the industry has grown to attract people from all over the world and is expected to continue to grow. This trend of rising social and recreational interest has, in turn, being introduced in the education sector in many countries. The use of escape rooms for educational purposes has become increasingly popular across different levels of education, including higher education institutions. This innovative and ludic approach involves students in their learning environment, encourages the use of numerous soft skills (creativity, problem solving, teamwork, etc.), and provides opportunity to escape the ‘routine’ of traditional and less student-centered learning methods. Although Educational Escape Rooms (EER) are becoming more prevalent in formal education, initiatives related to the topic of energy transition are scarce. As a result, there is limited information on the impact of these strategies to promote youth motivation and learning towards the energy transition. Exploring this issue is particularly relevant as young people have the potential to play an active and important role in achieving a sustainable future. This case study employs a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design with mixed data. The sample consist of 32 students playing an EER, designed by higher education students, on energy transition. The study aims to assess the quality of the resource design and its impact on students’ knowledge, motivation to learn, soft skills utilization, and engagement. The study results show a noteworthy improvement in self-perceived knowledge regarding the energy transition after playing the EER. This increase is associated with new knowledge gained by the players about energy consumption, production and transformation. The results indicate that the EER is ineffective in increasing or decreasing motivation to learn among players. Engagement is perceived as positive with respect to the experience of playing the EER. However, there is no correlation between motivation to learn and engagement. The study also suggests that the EER has the potential to improve various soft skills, especially teamwork, communication, and problem-solving. Finally, the EER was generally praised by the players for its engagement, on both quantitative and qualitative data in the study. On the other hand, the thematic analysis revealed some design issues that may have affected the players' experience and learning outcomes. These included excessive difficulty in some puzzles, lack of guidance, and insufficient time to complete. These issues need to be addressed in order to improve the overall impact of the EER, despite players' generally positive perceptions of it. In relation to the four puzzles that compose the EER (which relate to energy consumption, production, storage and transformation), they were generally positively rated by the participants, with the energy consumption puzzle being the highest rated for its practical application.

A Gamification Approach to Teaching Cybersecurity in CPS

With the implementation of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) in modern manufacturing environments, Cybersecurity has become an outstanding challenge in the design and daily operation of networked Industrial Control Systems (ICS). While Cybersecurity is an expert domain on its own, designers and operators of such Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) need to acquire at least a fundamental understanding of Cybersecurity concepts in order to contribute to the integration of such concepts both in design and operational processes. The fact that such Cybersecurity concepts have been originally established in the Information Technology (IT) domain makes knowledge transfer to stakeholders in the mostly mechanical and Operational Technology (OT) an educational challenge on its own. This paper proposes a ludic approach to teaching fundamental Cybersecurity concepts to stakeholders without any or only little prior IT knowledge. The key methodology relies on designing game scenarios that help convey Cybersecurity terminology and concept knowledge in a ludic form before letting students actually apply them in a physical CPS environment. While this basic idea is not new, the originality of our proposed approach lies in the novel combination of existing, validated Cybersecurity teaching resources to design and implement such scenarios, and in complementing those with learning on real CPS environments. The feasibility of our approach has been demonstrated in a case-study that has delivered very promising results with respect to the potential power and effectiveness of our method.

Reading hotspots: a method to evaluate reader and mediator’s experience with children’s digital books

One of the main reasons why children’s reading is compromised in digital books are poorly designed hotspots – interaction areas. This study describes the development of a method to evaluate children’s and mediators’ experience while reading digital books on mobile interaction devices (MIDs). We reviewed and extended a set of metrics to assess the readers’ experience through ludic approaches and data-gathering methods. Building on previous research we extended the Multimodal Analysis model. The method was validated through empirical tests with 6 dyads of parent-child involved in joint reading in a total of 18 sessions. The results corroborate the effectiveness of the method informing the design and development of children’s books for MIDs.

The Playing’s the Thing: A Ludic Approach to Diversifying Digital Shakespeare

An examination of the potential for diversifying digital Shakespeare scholarship through a ludic approach. After arguing for game-making as a scholarly activity, a survey of the history of Shakespeare and digital games is followed by a discussion of how two interactive digital works—Golden Glitch's Elsinore and Lapin Lunarie Games's Elsinore: After Hamlet—offer models for thinking through creative/critical ways of diversifying digital Shakespeare.Il s'agit d'une étude du potentiel de diversification de la recherche numérique sur Shakespeare par une approche ludique. Après avoir défendu la création de jeux en tant qu'activité scientifique, une étude de l'histoire de Shakespeare et des jeux numériques est suivie d'une discussion sur la manière dont deux œuvres numériques interactives - "Elsinore" par Golden Glitch Studios et "Elsinore : After Hamlet" de Lapin Lunarie Games - offrent des modèles de réflexion sur les moyens créatifs et/ou critiques de diversifier le Shakespeare digital.

Predicting user types with symbolic images: An empirical validation based on two card-sorting studies

In gamification, personalization is considered an important field of research since it can improve user engagement and motivation. Particularly, effective gamified learning needs to strike a balance between gameful design that promotes engagement and does not negatively affect content comprehension and absorption. The existing traditional user-type questionnaires approaches are time-consuming and intrusive, hampering the user’s focus. Previous research in gamification demonstrated how to automate player profile creation through log file analysis of gameful systems instead of traditional approaches, however, psychological archetypes and motivational groups can simplify the process of collecting data to achieve a balanced level of personalization for gamified systems, which are grounded on the user’s profile and preferences which can help with their immersion. To attend to the needs of a wide range of fields that introduce gamification to systems that are not classified as games, a new ludic approach was created to define user types based on user interaction using symbolic images. In this exploratory research, we tested this approach in two card-sorting studies (N=35 and N=19). Our results show that the images can be used to predict the users’ archetypes and motivational groups accurately. Thus, we contribute with validating an image-based user type classification method that is easier to deploy in systems that do not aim to behave as a game but are looking to reap the benefits of personalizing a user’s content and gameful experience where relevant. Our second contribution is delivering guidelines to replicate this validation method to other existing approaches. We expect that with this guideline, we facilitate personalization with other user typologies without disrupting the gameful experience.

Ukraine's Quest for Identity: Embracing Cultural Hybridity in Literary Imagination, 1911–2011

Ukraine's Quest for Identity: Embracing Cultural Hybridity in Literary Imagination, 1911–2011

The Impact of Serious Game on the Nursing Students' Learning, Behavioral Engagement, and Motivation

Digital game-based learning is a ludic approach that has evolved through the development of information and communication technologies (ICT), making the learner an active participant in the virtual learning environment instead of a mere observer. It is an electronic simulation tool suitable for improving learning efficiency as well as learner engagement and motivation. The integration of this educational technology in the teaching and learning process can contribute to the construction of knowledge, the development of new skills and attitudes among students.
 The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of serious game on the learning, behavioral engagement, and motivation of nursing students. To do this, we first conducted a study with a sample of 58 polyvalent nursing students divided into two groups; one experimental and the other as a control. Both groups benefited from the same content taught at a distance, however, the experimental group benefited from an online serious game after the course. By comparing the summative scores of the two groups using the Student's t-test, the results show that the serious game improved the students' clinical knowledge of pediatric nursing (t= -2.706,p=0.009). However, it did not have an effect on clinical skills (t= -0.373, p=0.711). As a second step, we have studied the impact of the game on the learners' behavioral engagement based on the analysis of the digital traces of the students' work. Meanwhile, the motivation is analyzed using a questionnaire developed from the ARCS scale of Killer (2010), which is distributed to the experimental group. By comparing the means and deviation standards, the results show that the students give the satisfaction factor the highest score (4.71±0.34) followed by the relevance, attention, and confidence factors.
 To obtain reliable results, however, it is necessary to repeat the serious game experience in several nursing modules. In addition, the impact of combining serious game with simulation on the learning of nursing students should be studied.

Overcoming the Pandemic through Viral Poetry Games: The Phenomenon of Coronavirus-Inspired Digital Acrostic Poetry in South Korea

Following the outbreak of COVID-19 in South Korea in winter 2019, acrostic poems on the three-syllable word “Corona” became viral on major search engines and social media platforms across the country. The composition of acrostic poems, particularly in three lines, has been a popular cultural phenomenon in Korea since the 1980s when it became a participatory literary exercise and game featured on television entertainment shows. The digital revolution in the 2000s allowed the writing and sharing of these short and whimsical poems to expand into various digital platforms. Since 2010, PC and mobile games have been developed to further enhance the ludic approach to acrostic poetry composition and contests. While facilitating individual creativity, and as an interactive and ludic way of community building and branding, acrostic poetry contests have also been used to promote social and political campaigns and consumer products. This paper will investigate poetry games and contests of acrostic poems on the Coronavirus featured on South Korean digital platforms. It will analyze the various games and contests organized by schools, communities, consumer product brands, and social media circles. The poems, composed by children and adults, display a wide range of messages involving self-reflection, social campaign, political criticism, and subversive wordplay. Together, these viral poems and contests promoted values of collaboration, competition, and social exchange during the pandemic. All in all, the paper explores the viral powers of language and language art in the digital world, as well as digital poetry’s connections to networked self, social mobilization, and online activism.

Playing with Religion: Delight at the Border between Epistemological Worlds

AbstractThis article builds on conversations that began here in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion in 2019 on Jonathan Z. Smith’s legacy to the study of religion. Specifically, in this article I take up and elaborate on Heather Blair’s tentative proposal for thinking about religious studies as a kind of play. Beginning with Blair and engaging with the work of Sam Gill, Tyler Roberts, Robert Orsi, and others, I put forward a strong argument for adopting a playful approach to the study of religion. A programmatic alternative to reading religion against the grain and between the lines, a ludic approach to religious studies enables the scholar to engage with religion in ways that fruitfully combine at least provisional commitment to its rules with ironic disavowal, inviting the scholar to play between the incommensurate epistemologies of enchanted religious worlds, on the one hand, and the disenchanted modern academy, on the other. It is here, I argue, in this frictive space between these mutually exclusive and logically incompatible positions that religious studies finds its niche (or should), trafficking—and delighting—in the creative insights generated by the oscillation between fit and no-fit.

The ludic lives of memoryscapes: Skateboarding post-Soviet peripheries

Post-Soviet cities vary dramatically yet share common elements desired by skateboarders and filmers as ‘spots’; assemblages of objects, obstacles and surfaces offering the chance to perform difficult skateboard tricks in public space. Memoryscapes are desired as spots for their scale, smooth surfaces, in-built obstacles and aesthetic appeal on video. As more skateboarders travel to post-Soviet cities in Central Asia and the Caucuses, their reinterpretation of memoryscapes reveal the ludic lives of memoryscapes, the interplay between memory and place, and the tension between hegemonic memory practices of state and state-like agents and the seemingly apolitical reinterpretation by skaters. This article explores two contrasting post-Soviet memoryscapes as seen on skate video, Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan) and Sukhumi (Abkhazia) to make three arguments. First, while battles are fought over public memory online and offline, skaters approach the landscape as ludic space; as playgrounds for unsanctioned performance, capture and circulation. Second, these memoryscapes are enrolled in global circulations of skate culture, giving memoryscapes an adjacent existence online detached from their intended meanings and counter-meanings. Third, in some cases the friction between ludic approaches and the power of memory unravels the singular focus on spots, even for skaters with limited knowledge of the context.

KOMPETENCJE PROFESJONALNE NAUCZYCIELI JĘZYKÓW OBCYCH Z PERSPEKTYWY PODEJŚCIA LUDYCZNEGO W GLOTTODYDAKTYCE – PROJEKT BADANIA

In the pedagogical and glottodidactic literature numerous publications have been devoted to the competences of the teacher, their roles, functions, ways of working with the learner, teaching strategies, teaching styles, class management styles, and finally, models of teacher education. However, it seems that in the vast majority of these publications the authors concentrated on the so-called hard competences, valuing them more than soft skills , and neglecting, or even marginalising, the range and particular components which possibly play a crucial role in the initiation and development of didactic cooperation between the teacher and the learner. At the same time these soft skills are perhaps able to some extent compensate for what is lacking in the range of the teacher hard competences. This article presents the theoretical background and an outline of a research project concerning FL teacher competences. The glottodidactic process is treated as a kind of game where the most important for the teacher in this ludic approach is ludic competence. The article presents hypotheses and research questions which are to be verified in a research planned for the coming year.

Precarious, fragile and temporary interactions between the public sculpture collection of Santo Tirso and its non-specialized audience

The following article depicts ongoing research from the project Quiet Dialogues, part of a Ph.D. thesis in artistic education in the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto. Quiet Dialogues is a project that aims to map, explore and materialize the interactions that occur between the passer-by audience of the city and the International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture of Santo Tirso. The project’s resulting map will be in a public online archive showcasing all the interactions collected during the research. As the museum displays its artworks in the public space, this research explores three behavioural categories the audience may react towards the artwork. They are as follows: a mental relationship (a stand-off with the memory), a physical relationship (using the sculpture as shelter or support) and a playful interaction (using the sculpture as a game or in a ludic approach).

‘La Nouvelle Vague, elle t’emm---!’ Louis Malle, Zazie dans le métro and the French New Wave

ABSTRACTZazie dans le métro (1960) appears as a quintessentially New Wave film with its youthful protagonist, its location shooting and its many references to cultural history. In addition, the self-conscious play with film technique in Zazie can be seen as a way of exploring the formal specificities of cinema. The film’s deployment of popular genre equates to Raymond Queneau’s use of demotic register and director Louis Malle takes a ludic approach to film grammar (as Queneau does to French grammar) in order to confuse or elide space and time. Yet the film did not meet with the success of other New Wave films and has not been canonized in the same way. This article suggests one explanation may be the comparative lack of indexical connection to a society in a period of acute social change. Indeed, the film challenges the very concept of indexicality through its proliferation of copies and eerie visual jokes about sameness. Zazie dans le métro is a self-contained circuit that seems, at times, almost to mock the New Wave itself.

Aplicación Web como plataforma de gamificación para una asignatura de licenciatura a través de una red social

In our days, social networks are used daily for a huge amount of people, which are used for communication and socialization. Some of these people, are university students, reason why those technologies can be used in education. In present work, the use of Facebook API in the development of a web application, is presented. This application allows to share class related content, to set challenges, peer evaluation activities and others. The purpose of the application is to support professor in teaching-learning process, using a gamification technique helping in the acquisition of knowledge taking advantage of the ludic approach of the technique, generating a positive experience in the students. The combination of the above and the use of one of the favorite social networks motivates students, generating a greater commitment to the subject. The development of the software application included the use of PHP, JavaScript, Bootstrap and MySQL. The developed application was used in a course obtaining favorable results, due to the raising in the level of participation of the students.

Binsex: uma proposta de bingo como recurso didático em abordagem crítica da educação sexual

We present bingo as a proposal of didactic-pedagogical resource in approaches on sexuality and sexual health. Based on the Declaration of Sexual Rights and the paradigm of emancipatory sexual education, the game aims to promote access to information, scientific knowledge and enlightening sex education. It also aims to stimulate the creation of differentiated methodologies that promote the overcoming of banking education and potentiate the pedagogical practice of Biological Sciences teachers when approaching themes of sex education in a creative way. From a qualitative perspective, his planning was based on Design General Research (DBR), in addition to the guiding documents: National Curricular Parameters (1997), Declaration of Sexual Rights (2014) and Curricular Proposal of Santa Catarina (2014). Simulations and evaluations have shown that Binsex can encourage these teachers and stimulate dialogic, critical-reflexive and ludic approaches to sexuality and sexual health, enhancing communication, interaction and student learning.

Affective Game Planning for Health Applications: Quantitative Extension of Gerontoludic Design Based on the Appraisal Theory of Stress and Coping.

User retention is the first challenge in introducing any information and communication technologies (ICT) for health applications, particularly for seniors who are increasingly targeted as beneficiaries of such technologies. Interaction with digital technologies may be too stressful to older adults to guarantee their adoption in their routine selfcare. The second challenge, which also relates to adoption, is to supply empirical evidence that support the expectations of their beneficial outcomes. To address the first challenge, persuasive technologies such as serious games (SGs) are increasingly promoted as ludic approaches to deliver assistive care to older adults. However, there are no standards yet to assess the efficacy of different genres of games across populations, or compare and contrast variations in health outcomes arising from user interface design and user experience. For the past 3 decades, research has focused either on qualitative assessment of the appeal of digital games for seniors (by game designers) or on the quantitative evaluation of their clinical efficacy (by clinical researchers). The consensus is that interindividual differences play a key role in whether games can be useful or not for different individuals. Our challenge is to design SGs that retain their users long enough to sustain beneficial transfer effects. We propose to add a neuropsychological experimental framework (based on the appraisal theory of stress and coping) to a Gerontoludic design framework (that emphasizes designing positive and meaningful gaming experience over benefit-centric ones) in order to capture data to guide SG game development. Affective Game Planning for Health Applications (AGPHA) adds a model-driven mixed-methods experimental stage to a user-centered mechanics-dynamics-aesthetics game-design cycle. This intersectoral framework is inspired by latest trends in the fields of neuroimaging and neuroinformatics that grapple with similar challenges related to the psychobiological context of an individual's behaviors. AGPHA aims to bring users, designers, clinicians, and researchers together to generate a common data repository that consists of 4 components to define, design, evaluate, and document SGs. By unifying efforts under a standard approach, we will accelerate innovations in persuasive and efficacious ICTs for the aging population.

Dancing Teachers Into Being With a Garden, or How to Swing or Parkour the Strict Grid of Schooling

AbstractThe co-authors, collaborators in garden-based teacher education, question the hegemony of grids in Western time, space and relationship structures in education, while also delving into our own complicity and entanglement with these grids. We ask: (1) Can we reject the grid in environmental education and in garden-based learning when it is an intimate part of our way of being in the world? (2) Can we be teachers who are at once within and not-within the regime of the Western Enlightenment/Modernist grid? (3) How can we take a ludic approach to the grid? Can we ‘swing’ and ‘parkour’ the strict grid of schooling? Pleasures and failures of the grid and experiences of alternatives to the grid are documented and exemplified through stories from garden-based teacher education. Considering parallels with principles of the alter-global movement and with the performative, embodied practices of swing dance, parkour and clowning, we meditate on becoming ecological teachers together beside the grid — neither within nor without it, but with a deep awareness of its presence and structure. In uncertain, unchanging times, we want to take a playful, artistic approach to the old certainties and structures, swinging and parkouring from them rather than accepting or rejecting binary formulations.

Modelo físico para a determinação de epicentro: uma ferramenta para o ensino da Sismologia

This paper presents a small-scale physical model illustrating the determination of earthquake epicenters, which aims to contribute to the teaching of Geosciences in basic education. The model may be used as a didactic support in a ludic approach to the teaching of Seismology concepts in the classroom, as well as in laboratories, exhibitions, and museums. The experiment is built from accessible materials. The paper presents details about the construction of the model, the used materials, and the computer program used for data acquisition and processing. This model is part of the work done at the Analog Modeling Laboratory of the Geophysics Faculty at the Federal University of Pará, Brazil. The models developed there are presented yearly at the “What is Geophysics?” exhibition, which has aroused the interest of the general public. For the multidisciplinary character of its construction, the experiment may be used as didactic support for teaching concepts of Geology, Physics, Electronics, Mathematics, and Computing.

Drawing as a Way of Knowing: Visual Practices as the Route to Becoming Academic

This case study illustrates what happened when we took a playful approach in a first year undergraduate academic skills module and a graduate Facilitating Student Learning module asking our students to “draw to learn.” We found that they not only enjoyed the challenges we set them, but also that they “blossomed” and approached their academic writing with more confidence and joy. Hence we argue for a more ludic approach to learning and teaching in Higher Education to enable Widening Participation students and their tutors to become the academic writers they want to be. In particular “blind drawing” seems to be a powerful tool for diminishing the fear of failure and for fostering deep understanding as well as self-confidence.