Adolescents are particularly vulnerable to developing gaming disorders due to brain changes during their development. Despite alarming prevalence rates, the video game industry often overlooks or fails to formally address these risks.
Current frameworks for game design focus mainly on business goals and player engagement, neglecting players’ well-being.
To address this gap, this project proposes a multi-perspective framework for video game development. By integrating psychological insights and other perspectives, the framework aims to guide developers in creating games that engage adolescents while minimizing the risk of gaming disorders.
A premier tech event featuring workshops, inspiring talks, and networking opportunities for developers and innovators. The workshop “Next Level: Reshaping the Gaming Design for Adolescents”, led by Prof. Tania Di Mascio, is one of the event’s highlights, aiming at engage and obtain valuable insights from junior/senior video game developers, whether independent and from company, toward the proposed framework.
Lectio Magistralis and Q&A session conducted by Prof. Tania Di Mascio, Dr. Sara Peretti, and Dr. Federica Caruso, designed to engage and obtain valuable insights from Master’s students in Computer Engineering toward the proposed framework.
Virtual Reality (VR) is increasingly applied in diverse fields, including clinical settings, with sedation and pain management as notable examples.
VR can reduce pain perception during medical procedures by distracting patients, leveraging the dual sensory and emotional nature of pain.
According to the IASP (International Association for the Study of Pain), pain is defined as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in relation to such damage.
While VR shows significant potential, particularly in creating tailored experiences for pain modulation, evidence supporting its effectiveness in surgical procedures under local/regional anesthesia with sedation remains limited.
The VirtuOR (immersive Virtual environments for pain management in Operative Rooms) project aims to address this gap by developing an ontology-based framework, involving patients, clinicians, VR experts, and evidence-based researchers, for the design and setting of VR environments that manage perceived pain thresholds and establish protocols for VR use in operating room procedures. ages later on.
In a world in which a large amount of learning interactive tools deal with the musical abilities, without really supporting a high level of music education, CrazySquare, inspired by the Gordon’s theory, guarantees the acquisition of the learning guitar objectives that students should learn at the end of Italian Middle Schools.
Initially implemented as a paper-and-pencil game, supporting the study of rhythm and its representation, currently, CrazySquare is a game-based mobile application for learning guitar. It is designed according following a multidisciplinary Technology-Enhanced Learning User-Centered Design methodology and leverages the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework to enable the effective integration of technology into traditional teaching practices for Italian school-age pre-adolescents.
F. Caruso, T. Di Mascio, and M. Pennese. “The CrazySquare Project: Gamify the Audiation.” In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2019), 2019, pp. 92–99. doi: 10.5220/0007764900920099.
F. Caruso, S. Peretti, L. Corbacchini, C. Centofanti, and A. D’Errico. “The CrazySquare Project: A Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge Solution.” In: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2020), 2020, pp. 655–662. doi: 10.5220/0009837906550662.
C. Centofanti, A. D’Errico, F. Caruso, and S. Peretti. “The CrazySquare Solution: A Gamified ICT Tool to Support the Musical Learning in Pre-Adolescents.” In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI 2020), 2020. doi: 10.1145/3399715.3399943.
T. Di Mascio, L. Tarantino, and F. Caruso. “Towards a Gamified Musical Skill Learning Model (MuS-LM): Structural Aspects.” In: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Methodologies and Intelligent Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning (MIS4TEL 2020), 2020, pp. 226–238. doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-52538-5_23.
In the landscape of Education 4.0, Serious Games have emerged as a powerful and engaging learning tool, blending entertainment with pedagogy. However, developing serious games presents multidisciplinary challenges, requiring a delicate balance between learning objectives and entertainment.
Existing literature highlights significant gaps in addressing these challenges, as many frameworks adopt narrow perspectives that overlook the holistic nature of serious game development. The SeriousGXcraft project seeks to bridge these gaps by introducing SeriousGXcraft, an innovative, extensible Markup Language (XML)-based framework for the design, implementation, and evaluation of serious games.
Developed through a collaborative effort between technology and psycho-pedagogy experts, this framework aims to address the limitations of existing solutions by leveraging the flexibility of XML to provide a comprehensive and integrated approach. In addition, SeriousGXcraft aims to foster multidisciplinary collaboration and ensures a harmonious balance between the playful and learning aspects of serious games.
By utilizing XML schema, the framework aims to empower development teams to effectively manage, visualize, and support the complex facets of the serious game development process.
F. Caruso, S. Peretti, M. C. Pino, and T. Di Mascio. “SeriousGXcraft: An XML-Based Framework for Developing Serious Games.” In: Proceedings of the 2024 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI ’24). Arenzano, Genoa, Italy: Association for Computing Machinery, 2024. doi: 10.1145/3656650.3656740.
F. Caruso, S. Peretti, M. C. Pino, and T. Di Mascio. “SeriousGXcraft: An Innovative Framework for Multidisciplinary Serious Game Development Powered by XML.” In: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Methodologies and Intelligent Systems for Technology Enhanced Learning (MIS4TEL 2024), 2024.
