While most research shows positive effects of gamification, the focus on its adverse effects is considerably smaller. Having this in mind, we conducted a systematic mapping study of the negative effects of game design elements on education/learning systems. The study revealed 77 papers reporting undesired effects of game design elements. We found that badges, competitions, Ieaderboards, and points are the game design elements most often reported as causing negative effects. The most cited negative effects were lack of effect, lack of understanding, irrelevance, motivational issues, and worsened performance. The ethical issue of cheating was also often reported. As part of our results, we map the relations between game design elements and the negative effects that they may cause. Our mapping study can help gamification designers make more informed decisions when selecting game design elements to be included in education/learning systems, raising awareness on potential negative effects.

Quests are a fundamental storytelling mechanism used by computer role-playing games to engage players in the game's narrative. Although role-playing games have evolved in many different ways in the last years, their basic narrative structure is still based on static plots manually created by game designers. In this paper, we present a method for the generation of dynamic quests based on hierarchical task decomposition and planning under non-determinism. The proposed approach combines planning, execution, and monitoring to efficiently handle nondeterministic events and support quests with multiple endings that affect the game's narrative and create interactive and dynamic story plots. These plots are directly or indirectly affected by player's actions and decisions. Furthermore, this paper presents the concept of hierarchical quests.

The development of interactive narratives with the quality of feature films is the central challenge of what we can name Video-Based Interactive Storytelling. A promising approach to this question is the use of prerecorded videos with real actors. Amongst several technical challenges, this approach firstly requires automatic video editing methods for interactive narratives. However, this is a critical issue not fully covered in the literature. In this paper, we present a real-time editing method for interactive storytelling systems, which automatically generates the most adequate shot transitions, swaps video segments to avoid jump cuts, and creates adequate looping scenes. Moreover, these features consider the characteristics of the ongoing story.

This paper presents a new approach for finding camera shot transitions in the compressed stream of MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 videos. False transitions patterns on the compressed data are considered to be related to the choices made by the encoder, which has the freedom of making several decisions without violating the MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 standards. These choices contaminate the similarity metrics with patterns that are called encoder signatures in this paper. The present work proposes a video segmentation method that filters the encoder signatures, through a step-wise refinement process using multiple similarity metrics. This process is general and can be easily adapted to MPEG-4 videos

This paper presents a distributed dynamic object model that is aligned with the concept of design history in the context of design problem solving activities. A distributed object model is proposed as an enabling feature for distributed CAD (computer-aided design) allowing teams to work cooperatively, accessing and exchanging information at run time in a distributed engineering environment. The architecture of the proposed CAD environment allows for the artefact properties to be associated with any relevant aspect of the design process, including those related with the artefact specification, but also with the organisation hierarchy, planning and process workflow.