Developing a game concept to tackle complex problems is a challenging process. It requires the collaboration of experts from different fields, from game design to technological development, and from content matter experts to pedagogical knowledge holders. Many books and articles have been written about the design of Simulation Games – from Richard Duke’s seminal 40-steps game design process to recent approaches from 1981 to Freese and Lukosch’s Funnel of Game Design in 2023, and many in between. All these approaches have carefully reviewed related work and analysed game design processes to learn from. As game researchers and developers, we have faced some challenges in applying the existing models when working with content-matter experts without any knowledge of game design. We have therefore developed a new tool, based on the Triadic Game Design Philosophy [ 1 ], which we used for participatory game design. We call this tool a GameStorm and describe how we developed it and what we have learned so far.

Due to the level of immersion and differences in the user interface, there can be a very large discrepancy in the user experience between users in immersive systems and non-immersive systems when playing games together. To investigate the impact of the cross-reality experience, which refers to the asymmetric use of eXtended Reality, we aim to understand the different affordances and experiences in an asymmetric setup, where one participant uses a desktop setup with a mouse and keyboard, and one uses a virtual reality (VR) headset and controller in two different task modes, Competition or Collaboration. In our research, a pair of participants played a game in real-time, using either the VR setup or the desktop setup. In Competition mode, the two participants were asked to defeat each other. In Collaboration mode, the pair of participants played as a team and were asked to defeat a pair of AI enemies. Our results show the VR group reported a better gaming experience and perceptual responses compared to the desktop group regardless of game mode, but that the desktop group showed superior gaming performance compared to the VR group in Competition mode.

Social interaction is part of the fabric of society and is essential to challenge many types of social barriers. Location-based games (LBGs) provide a means to foster such interaction in local communities. The design of such games is currently based primarily on designer experience and on the literature on game design in general, and not on an understanding of user requirements. This article explores the preferences and desires of adolescents in neighborhoods of Rotterdam South to socially interact with others and engage with their own neighborhood via LBGs. Adolescents are informants in the exploration of gaming activities for social interaction, which, when subjected to expert review with the mechanics-dynamics-aesthetics framework, produce gameplay requirements for the desired purpose: social interaction in public space. Such requirements provide researchers and game designers insights on the game dynamics best suited to foster location-based social interaction.

Recent research showed that augmented reality (AR) technology is a promising approach to support distributed teams in crime scene investigation. This paper reports on the development and evaluation of a handheld AR system to support team situational awareness and collaboration among co-located and remote forensic investigators. The AR system runs on a smartphone strapped to the wrists of the local investigators and on a laptop for the remote investigator. The AR system has been evaluated with three experienced forensic investigators and was carried out in two rounds: (1) with one local and one remote investigator and (2) with two local and one remote investigator. The evaluation focused on the usability of the AR system and its effect on situational awareness as well as collaboration quality. Compared to earlier experiments using head-mounted devices (HMDs), the findings suggest that the handheld AR system addresses limitations of current HMD based AR system, but the necessary division of attention between smartphone AR system and real environment impacts the situational awareness.

This paper reports on an iterative design process for a serious game, which aims to raise situational awareness among different stakeholders in a logistics value chain by introducing multi-user role-playing games. It does so in several phases: After introducing the field of logistics as a problem domain for an educational challenge, it firstly describes the design of an educational board game for the field of disruption handling in logistics processes. Secondly, it describes how the board game can be realized in an open-source mobile serious games platform and identifies lessons learned based on advantages and issues found. Thirdly, it derives requirements for a re-design of the mobile game and finally draws conclusions.

For operational units in the security domain that work together in teams, it is important to quickly and adequately exchange context-related information to ensure well-working collaboration. Currently, most information exchange is based on oral communication. This paper reports on different scenarios from the security domain in which augmented reality (AR) techniques are used to support such information exchange. The scenarios have been designed with a User Centred Design approach, in order to make the scenarios as realistic as possible. To support these scenarios, an AR system has been developed and evaluated in two rounds. In the first round, the usability and feasibility of the AR support has been evaluated with experts from different operational units in the security domain. The second evaluation round then focussed on the effect of AR on collaboration and situational awareness within the expert teams. With regard to the usability and feasibility of AR, the evaluation shows that the scenarios are well defined and the AR system can successfully support information exchange in teams operating in the security domain. The second evaluation round showed that AR can especially improve the situational awareness of remote colleagues not physically present at a scene.

For operational units in the security domain that work together in teams it is important to quickly and adequately exchange context-related information. This extended abstract investigates the potential of augmented reality (AR) techniques to facilitate information exchange and situational awareness of teams from the security domain. First, different scenarios from the security domain that have been elicited using an end-user oriented design approach are described. Second, a usability study is briefly presented based on an experiment with experts from operational security units. The results of the study show that the scenarios are well-defined and the AR environment can successfully support information exchange in teams operating in the security domain.