The authors examine technology-driven games--especially active gaming--as an evolving form of children's play. They offer an overview of play and its developmental benefits, describe the literature on the emergence of technology-driven play, and reflect on the diminishment of physical play in contemporary culture. They suggest that active gaming,…

Digital games have matured substantially as a narrative medium in the last decade. However, there is still much work to be done to more fully understand the poetics of story-based-games. Game narrative remains an important issue with significant cultural, economic and scholarly implications. In this article, we undertake a critical analysis of the…

The 2008 commercial video game "Spore" allowed more than a million players to design their own life forms. Starting from single-celled organisms players played through a caricature of natural history. Press coverage of the game's release offer two frames for thinking about the implications of the game. Some scientists and educators saw the game as…

This preliminary study examined the characteristics and risk factors of problem gambling among Chinese American adolescents. A total of 192 Chinese American students (aged 13-19) from 9th to 12th grades were recruited from three high schools in San Francisco, California. Students were administered the South Oaks Gambling Screen Revised for…

Suppose we had a brand new world to study--a world that possibly works with a different set of principles, a non-Newtonian world. Maybe this world is Newtonian, maybe it isn't. This world exists in video games, and it is open for exploration. Most video games try to incorporate realistic physics, but sometimes this does not happen. The obvious…

This study validated a video game paradigm to explore attention to prosodic and linguistic components of spoken sentences in nine moderate-to-low functioning children with autism and impaired verbal skills. Nine typically developing children were also included. The children listened to pre-recorded sentences varying with respect to content (e.g.,…

Although digital technologies have become commonplace among people who grew up around them, little is known about the effect that such technology will have on learners or its impact on traditional methods of educational delivery. This dissertation examines how certain technologies affect digital natives and seeks to understand specific…

If one wants to learn about the role that games play in education, then the University of Wisconsin at Madison is the place to go. It's home to the Games, Learning, and Society Initiative and its current director Dr. Kurt Squire. In this interview, Squire talks about his research and how libraries can embrace gaming as a tool for learning.

This article introduces a recently developed haptic glove system and describes how the participants used a video game that was purposely designed to train them in skills that are needed for the efficient use of the haptic glove. Assessed skills included speed, efficiency, embodied skill, and engagement. The findings and implications for future…

Today's youth are situated in a complex information ecology that includes video games and print texts. At the basic level, video game play itself is a form of digital literacy practice. If we widen our focus from the "individual player + technology" to the online communities that play them, we find that video games also lie at the nexus of a…

Experimental research in business and economics has exploded in recent years in both laboratory and field settings. The generality of findings from field experiments is limited by the specificity of the experimental environment. Laboratory studies, on the other hand, are criticized for being devoid of the contextual cues that may indicate to…

To get a better understanding of how networked technologies are impacting teachers and their teaching practices, in 2015 MediaSmarts partnered with the Canadian Teachers' Federation to survey 4,043 K-12 teachers and school administrators who were teaching in classroom settings across the country. The survey explored the extent to which networked…

For a child to learn through Problem-Solving in Serious games, the game scaffolding mechanism has to be effective. Scaffolding is based on the Vygotzkian Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) concept which refers to the distance between the actual development level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as…

This paper presents the results of an ongoing study which has been carried out with a group of German Foreign Language students at the University of Cadiz since 2012. The purpose of the study was to analyze the impact of videogame-like applications on foreign language learning and their motivational potential to increase learning beyond the…

The aim of this research was to examine the impact of using traditional games with the purpose of decreasing violent behavior among pupils in elementary schools as well as improving their mutual relationships. The research was conducted among second-, third- and fourth-graders in elementary schools in Karlovac (a total of 232 pupils). In order to…