Among the elements to consider when designing a video game, narrative stands out due to its importance in contextualizing and motivating. However, there are no standard processes for creating interactive digital narratives. In educational video games, a suitable narrative is even more essential to captivate players with a story, which serves as a vehicle for transmitting and evaluating knowledge. Consequently, this article proposes a narrative design process for video games, developed for general application but particularly useful for educational games. It defines a narrative structure, a set of design steps, and the documents generated during the process, each one representing a different perspective of the game’s narrative. To validate the proposal, a narrative-rich game called Time Invaders was designed to teach reading comprehension. It was tested with 237 school-age children, measuring their experience and satisfaction. The study revealed that the narrative was the most valued element of the game.

Abstract Pervasive computing has become a key element to build applications that use fun as a motivating component because it allows exploring new interaction schemes by making the concept of space and time ambiguous and confusing. The present research describes a pervasive social gaming experience, using as a reference SocialPG, which is a model that describes social expansion as a strategy to improve gaming experiences supported by pervasive computing. In this article a description of the model is offered, software architecture is proposed to support it and a case study related to the process of error resolution and detection of improvement opportunities in software products is developed, finally, a general idea about the final software product that will support the game experience is offered together with an evaluation performed by a set of users, where some important findings are highlighted, such as the importance of the missions as a unit of cooperative work and the spectator's participation.

Currently, few studies focus on analysing the degree of the Player eXperience (PX) in video games. Video games have now become interactive entertainment systems with a high economic impact on society; these are interactive systems characterised by their subjectivity, which differ from other systems in that their main objective is to entertain and amuse the user (player). This work discusses the analysis and evaluation of the User eXperience (UX) in interactive entertainment systems, exploring how usability, given its definition, objectives and the fact it is one of the main dimensions of UX, is not sufficient to characterise the PX, giving rise to a new concept: Playability. In this paper, we present a framework for the analysis and evaluation of the UX in video games. The results show the need and importance of a framework to help us understand and measure the experience that players feel using these types of interactive systems, in order to improve the experience during play time. The proposed framework characterises the experience using attributes to identify and properties to measure UX. It thus provides a multifaceted analysis mechanism to assess the impact of the gaming experience and its relationship with the elements of a video game. We therefore present a system to represent UX based on this framework, with the aim of ensuring and measuring a satisfactory experience of the entertainment system. Finally, we discuss a practical experiment in which an evaluation of the playability of a commercial video game was carried out using the methods proposed in this work.

New Technologies have been incorporated to schools as learning tools some time ago. In this paper we remark some advantages of video games as educational systems and how we can use them as a tool of CSCL (Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning) into classrooms. Moreover, we consider that learning process is important enough to be measured in addition to the solution. So, we are interested in this scope and we present a first step towards our method of collaboration analysis in VGSCL (Video Game - Supported Collaborative Learning): a messages categorization

Systems for cooperative design are inherently complex and their development requires specific methods and modelling techniques with capacity to accurately specify their requirements. This paper presents the importance of social organization modelling of cooperative processes to describe more precisely the responsibilities to be assigned to each member and, therefore, guide the software analysis and design. Organizations have static and dynamic aspects that are relevant to identify in order to predict the group behaviour such as changes in member roles. This paper proposes a pattern-based approach to describe and identify these organizational structures. This method is incorporated in AMENITIES, a complete methodology for collaborative systems design developed in our research group.