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Serious Games and Edutainment Applications pp 85–106Cite as

A Formalism to Define, Assess and Evaluate Player Behaviour in Mobile Device Based Serious Games

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Abstract

The chapter provides introductory background information on all relevant fields (Games-based learning, Mobile devices, Mobile entertainment, Mobile education, Behavioural psychology) and showcases a small number of mobile devices based serious games and applications to support the claim that such games can be implemented for this device type. It then introduces formal propositional logic and suggests the use of a formal language to express statements about games and events in games. The next section is referencing to established guidelines from the field of behavioural psychology and provides an formalism (based on the content of the previous section) that allows the unambiguous definition and evaluation of behaviour in the context of a game. The chapter is targeting the large stretch of vagueness (definition of the behaviour under investigation, design of a game to evaluate such behaviour, collection of data/profiling and finally the interpretation of this data) that is found in almost all existing work concerned with human game playing behaviour. The contribution of the chapter is the introduction of a formalism which removes the vagueness and ambiguity from parts of this stretch. Ideally the only subjective part of the evaluation of human game playing behaviour is to be found in the final interpretation of the data, and the formalism allows for this reduction of vagueness (given that it is well constructed and tailored to the investigation at hand).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Etisalat BT Innocation Centre (EBTIC), Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

    Hanno Hildmann

  2. University of the West of Scotland (UWS), Scotland, UK

    Hanno Hildmann

  3. Centrum für Erlebnispädagogik Volkersberg, Volkersberg, Germany

    Jule Hildmann

Authors
  1. Hanno Hildmann
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  2. Jule Hildmann
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Correspondence to Hanno Hildmann .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Digital Design Studio, The Glasgow School of Art, The Hub, Glasgow, G51 1EA, United Kingdom

    Minhua Ma

  2. E514, School of Computing and Mathematics, University of Derby, Kedleston Road, Derby, DE22 1GB, United Kingdom

    Andreas Oikonomou

  3. , School of Electrical and Information, University of South Australia, Adelaide, SA 5095, South Australia, Australia

    Lakhmi C. Jain

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Hildmann, H., Hildmann, J. (2011). A Formalism to Define, Assess and Evaluate Player Behaviour in Mobile Device Based Serious Games. In: Ma, M., Oikonomou, A., Jain, L. (eds) Serious Games and Edutainment Applications. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2161-9_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2161-9_6

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  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4471-2160-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4471-2161-9

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