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This Special Issue of ToDiGRA comprises works that werepresented at the workshop “Teaching Games: PedagogicalApproaches”, which took place at DiGRA 2019 in Tokyo. Thepapers presented were elaborated into articles for this issue. Theblind peer reviews, along with the revisions of the articles, tookplace during the 2020 pandemic lockdown. The workshoporganizing committee, along with the editor of this volume, wouldlike to express their thanks and appreciation to all the authors andreviewers for their work and effort during these troublesome times.This volume is dedicated to Jeff Watson, who passed away beforewe could release it.

The history of European videogames has so far been overshadowed by the global impact of the Japanese and North American industries. However, European game development studios have played a major role in videogame history, and many prominent videogames in popular culture, such as Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider, Alone in the Dark, and The Witcher, were made in Europe. This book proposes an inquiry into European videogames, including both analyses of transnational aspects of European production and close readings of national specificities. It offers a kaleidoscope of European videogame culture, focusing on the analysis of European works and creators but also addressing contextual aspects and placing videogames within a wider sociocultural and philosophical ground. The aim of this collective work is to contribute to the creation of a, until now, almost non-existent yet necessary academic endeavour: a story and critical exploration of the works, authors, styles, and cultures of the European videogame.

Holojam in Wonderland is a prototype of a new type of performance activity, “Immersive Mixed Reality Theater” (IMRT). With unique and novel properties possessed by neither cinema nor traditional theater, IMRT promises exciting new expressive possibilities for multi-user, participatory, immersive digital narratives. The authors describe the piece, the technology used to create it and some of the key aesthetic choices and takeaways.

This study examines the influence of players’ age, gender and gaming preferences and habits (from now on, “gaming preferences”) on the effectiveness of a specific videogame that has been designed to increase the interest towards classical theater among teenagers. Using a validated instrument, participants were divided into four groups based on their gaming preferences: (1) Well-rounded gamers, who play all types of games often; (2) Hardcore players, who frequently tend to play first-person shooter (FPS) and sports games; (3) Casual players, who play moderately and tend to play music, social, and puzzle games; and (4) Non-gamers, who barely play videogames at all. Among all of the participants’ personal factors (age, gender and type of player) that were measured, only gaming preferences seemed to have a significant (p

In Spain, young people are losing their interest in classical drama. We believe that educational games are an excellent medium for addressing this issue. This article describes the design and implementation of a videogame based on La Dama Boba, Lope de Vega's stage play. The aim of the videogame is to motivate young people to go to classical theater plays and to familiarize students with the plot and the characters before they go to the theater. This goal is achieved by making avatars interesting to players, by incorporating different theater techniques to generate characters' personalities and by including the elements that can be used as audiovisual content such as music, scenery, and costume design. In this paper, we also present the results of an initial evaluation of the game with master's students from the E-learning group. In order to improve the game, we have studied its effects in terms of improvement of knowledge, learning outcomes, and student motivation.

The video game adaptation of Blade Runner (1997) exemplifies the challenges of adapting narrative from traditional media into digital games. The key to the process of adaptation is the fictional world, which it borrows both from Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and Ridley Scott's film Blade Runner (1982). Each of these works provides different access points to the world, creating an intertextual relationship that can be qualified as transmedia storytelling, as defined by Jenkins (2006). The game utilizes the properties of digital environments (Murray, 2001) in order to create a world that the player can explore and participate in; for this world to have the sort of complexity and richness that gives way to engaging interactions, the game resorts to the film to create a visual representation, and to the themes of the novel. Thus the game is inescapably intertextual, since it needs of both source materials in order to make the best of the medium of the video game.

This article explores the early evolution of the structure and management of gameplay in videogames. The authors introduce the notion of gameplay segmentation to capture the role that design elements such as level, boss, and wave play in videogames and identify three modes of segmentation. Temporal segmentation limits, synchronizes, and/or coordinates player activity over time. Spatial segmentation breaks the game's virtual space into sublocations. Challenge segmentation presents the player with a sequence of self-contained challenges. The authors describe each mode, and additional submodes, by analyzing vintage arcade games. The analyses illustrate how these games represent a “primordial soup” in which many current game design conventions were first explored. Their simplicity provides the authors with access to the original “building blocks” of videogames, thus allowing them to develop a rich vocabulary for the discussion.

La narratologia tradicional se centra a descriure estructures basades en models linguistics que compliquen entendre la narrativa en mitjans interactius. No obstant aixo, basant-nos en teories mes recents, com les proposades per Herman a Story Logic (2002), el qual es refereix als storyworlds (mons-historia) com l'element central de les narratives, podem ver com els mons de ficcio ens serveix tant per entendre les narratives en mitjans interactius com en el proces de translacio entre ells. Per aixo, farem servir com a exemple el videojoc Blade Runner (1997) i la seva relacio amb els textos en els quals esta basat, la novel·la Blade Runner. Els andoides somnien xais electrics? de Philip K. Dick i la pel·licula Blade Runner de Ridley Scott. Per mitja d'una analisi comparativa de textos, podem apreciar com el joc fa servir els textos originals per recrear el seu mon de ficcio, fent servir els pilars que segons Herman defineixen el mon-historia, que son els estats, esdeveniments i accions que el caracteritzen. Aquests pilars es veuen reflectits en l'attrezzo, que serveix per donar peu a les accions del jugador, aixi com les micronarratives que invoquen esdeveniments que es narren en els textos en els quals s'inspira el joc. El joc tambe reprodueix la ambiguitat ontologica caracteristica dels mons de Philip K. Dick per mitja del seu disseny, tot recreant un dels estats dominants del mon de ficcio.

This project tackles procedural generation of narrative puzzles found in adventure games. The challenge is not only generating the puzzles in games which traditionally only have one walkthrough, but also making the development process accessible to designers. Given that the goal is to make these games playable and easy to develop, the focus of this project is facilitating the immediate development of these games. This paper describes the system of procedural generation of one game, Symon, which was the reference and inspiration for a standalone toolset, the Puzzle Dice System to create other adventure games with procedurally generated puzzles. The toolset has been put to the test with another game, Stranded in Singapore, and it is still being expanded and improved on at the moment of writing.

ing the fictional world to essential components is one of the first steps to design the system of a game. The amount of detail with which the fictional world is implemented as the system determines the level of abstraction of the simulation of the game [9]. This paper is a historical analysis of the design of a specific genre, adventure games, and how the levels of abstraction have shifted through time. Early adventure games, such as Zork or The Lurking Horror, had a wide range of possible actions and had more detailed simulations of the game world. Through the more than thirty years of history of adventure games, such as Space Quest, Myst, Indigo Prophecy or the recent Machinarium, the nuance of the simulation has diminished, as well as the variety of possible actions. There are two basic reasons for this simplification: first, to make the interface easier to use, and second, in order to facilitate players finding and identifying the elements of the puzzles and advance the story. This historical exploration of adventure games design provides insight on the trade-offs of choosing different levels of abstraction in the design, which may be extensible to other videogame genres.

The inclusion of a practicum is one of the main challenges in the game studies curriculum, especially when it comes to teaching professional practices to students. This paper presents how professional management methodologies (Scrum, in this case) can be related to models of Situated Learning, as we demonstrate through our case study, the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab. Being aware of the connections and the pedagogical potential of professional practices can improve both how we teach and how our students learn how game development works. In our case study we also propose ways in which the practicum can be related to research in videogames.