One of the more exploratory and experimental forms of output in the games research community involves authors utilising games they have developed in the academic context. Whether fully embodying the role of a designer-researcher in communicating the development process, or presenting the data that derives from a complete game artefact, academics can use games as an integral part of their research. The academic game making context is distinct from other forms of game creation, with academia allowing for certain freedoms while also enforcing its own strict constraints. Our understanding of academic games derives from how they have been reported in the literature, as there is limited preservation of these games as playable experiences. For the 20th Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) conference, we analysed its corpus of 1,437 articles to take examine their historical development and identify some of the developmental trends of academic games as reported over nearly two decades. Through this study, we identify the diverse purposes of these games and examine how they have contributed to advancing research efforts.

As the game industry expands, an increasing number of students and hobbyists are entering the game development field, eager to create their own titles. However, there is a lack of structured training programs that effectively prepare them for industry demands. Games convey meaningful messages through stories, assets, and mechanics, yet how early-stage developers make creative decisions while building production skills remains unclear. We explored skill development and cultural representation in game design during a 10-week professional development program at MassDigi with early-stage developers from the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Our findings reveal three observed strategies as themes through which developers incorporate their personal experiences and cultural backgrounds into game development to achieve cultural representation, as well as four themes that address developers' skill set improvement and personal growth during this process. We recommend structuring programs by considering these themes to enhance self-expressive game design and support skill development through a peer learning community.

Game companies and degree-granting colleges with game design programs create numerous games annually, with lessons learned from the development process holding significance for developers and game developer communities. Usually, game developers write postmortems to reflect on what went right and wrong in their game development process. Existing studies on video game postmortems have been primarily of games from professional studios that take years of development effort. Our work analyzes 36 student-created game postmortems spanning 9 years, all for mobile games shipped after 3-month development cycles in a summer internship program organized by the Massachusetts Digital Games Institute (MassDigi). We identify common themes and topics in these student postmortems and contribute to a greater understanding of student game-creation practices and project-based learning for game education.

The demand for remote learning and virtual tours increased significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic. While virtual reality training simulations and digital twins have been used in educational settings for a long time, user-friendly methods of designing effective simulations and digital twins have been less studied. Our study adopts the research through design (RtD) framework and the virtual tours iterative development model (VT-IDM) to explore the possibilities and challenges in designing and creating virtual tours for laboratories. In this paper, we present two case studies on virtual tours built with the Matterport platform in the chemistry and biochemistry laboratories to demonstrate how to enact the discovering and designing phases from the first iterative cycle within VR-IDM. Further, we provide a discussion on adopting game design concepts in our design principles. Our work contributes to using and adapting off-the-shelf technology for developing evidence-based serious games for educational purposes.

Standard power wheelchair training is considered inadequate by clinicians and users due to insufficient means to evaluate user performance in varying environments. Virtual environment training offers a promising alternative by providing users with more practical opportunities while reducing the time demands on clinicians. However, there is a need to further explore and optimize game design elements and strategies to ensure engaging and effective training experiences for a diverse range of users. This paper presents our progress of WheelUp!, an open-source electric wheelchair virtual reality (VR) simulator. The simulator offers modularity for clinician-controlled difficulty adjustment, immediate visual and audio feedback, and a visualization tool to aid in clinical assessment and monitoring of progress. This is the first step to building an interactive platform to address the inadequacy of wheelchair training.

In this paper, we explore the use of brain-computer interface (BCI)-adapted visual effects to support atmosphere in a walking simulator, and investigate its impact on player-reported immersive experience. While players were using a keyboard or joystick controller to control the basic movement of a character, their mental state was accessed by a non-invasive BCI technique called functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to implicitly adjust the visual effects. Specifically, when less brain activity is detected, the players’ in-game vision becomes blurry and distorted, recreating the impression of losing focus. With this biological indication, we designed a BCI-controlled game, in which the vision becomes blurry and distorted when less brain activity is detected, recreating the impression of losing focus. To analyze the player’s experience, we conducted a within-subjects study where participants played both a BCI-controlled and non-BCI-controlled game and completed a questionnaire after each session. We then conducted a semi-structured interview to investigate player perceptions of the impact the BCI had on their experiences. The results showed that players had slightly improved immersion in the BCI-adaptive game, with the temporal dissociation score significantly different. Players also reported the BCI-adaptive visual effects are realistic and natural, and they enjoyed using BCI as a supplemental control.