Serious Games for Dynamic Content and Advanced Entertainment Services

Mª Amparo Navarro-Salvador1, Ana Belén Sánchez-Calzón 2,

Carlos Fernández-Llatas3 and Teresa Meneu4 ITACA - Health and Wellbeing Technologies, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain

1manasal@itaca.upv.es 2absanch@itaca.upv.es 3cfllatas@itaca.upv.es 4tmeneu@itaca.upv.es

Abstract— Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) has been keeping a constant evolution for the last years. For children today ICT are not a strange element, but are part of their daily lives and they easily use them. For this reason, it is interesting to research how ICT can be used to teach and entertain children. In this scenario, Project Enjoy.IT! aims to design, develop an validate an entertainment platform with advanced contents, which will set up a practical realization of the new products and services from the Future Internet. The project is integrating the physical world as an extension of the virtual world and vice versa, creating an Ambient Intelligence (AmI) system which will be able to act depending on the needs and knowledge of children. The platform is based on Services Choreography and games are interconnected using a Social Network. A games pilot has been developed, and tested by children of Polytechnic University of Valencia Summer School. From the results of this preliminary study, the rest of the games will be developed for the final platform.

I. INTRODUCTION Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) has

been keeping a constant evolution for the last years. ICT are increasing their presence in all human activities both in the working life and in the private life. They offer a new innovator space in different fields such as industry, services, health, commerce, education, etc.

Nowadays, the Internet is a part of many people in many places of the world. Its evolution has been spectacular in the last 15 years. Despite that, the Internet is still in its adolescence: less than one third of the world population has at least once surfed the Internet [1]. On the other hand, the Internet now is anywhere and at any time. People not only are able to access to it using a computer but also using a mobile, a smartphone, a tablet PC, a games console or even a TV set. Moreover, one of the most important parts of the Internet is driven by Social Networks. Users are the creators of the Internet content. Despite this, the Internet world is still a linear scenario focused on showing contents and dissociated from physical world.

Focusing on children, who are the target of this Project, it is worth to highlight several aspects. For children today ICT are not a strange element but are part of their daily lives. This is

the starting point: the habitual use of ICT by children place ICT as a privileged way to transmit certain messages to them. ICT can be used to teach and entertain at the same time. In this field, videogames can play a positive and important role if they are used properly. Interconnection of games can improve social contact and the participation in common activities. In this sense, it is another way to maintain or promote contact among friends as well as other hobbies (sports, reading...). Games are also beneficial when promoting eye-hand coordination and the acquisition of manual skills. They also stimulate memory and the ability to retain concepts.

Finally, it is worth noting the current status of socio-cultural field to children. In this area the objective is to educate children while they play. But the use of ICT is very poorly integrated in sociocultural animation. It is necessary a qualitative transformation to get the full integration of ICT into the environment of the children. Different technologies and devices can be connected to create a new space of entertainment where technology is the engine of the games without the children becoming aware of it.

In this context Project Enjoy.IT! [2] is born, whose main objective is to design, develop and validate an entertainment platform with advanced contents which will set a practical realization of the new products and services of the Future Internet. This platform is being implemented in the campus of the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV), during the Summer School [3]. This school takes place in July at the University campus and is destined to children from 3-17 years old who perform a set of cultural and sport activities directed by leisure professionals.

The following paper explains, in first instance, the objectives that the Project aims to obtain with their execution. In the second instance, the materials and methods which will be employed to the Project development are explained. In this section, a state of the art of actual videogames and entertainment is described. In the third instance, we present the Project Enjoy.IT! results and which technology is being used. Finally, how the developed games affect to children is explained.

II. OBJECTIVES The first objective of Project Enjoy.IT! is to design,

develop and validate an entertainment platform and advanced contents which is going to be a practical realization of new products and services of the Future Internet. Project Enjoy.IT! is a pre-industrial prototype which will set up a technological platform of personalized, ubiquitous and collaborative services.

In addition, the implementation of this project aims to promote the use of ICT by children who are not enough familiarized users with this kind of technologies.

Moreover, the project expects to develop innovative research lines. A good example is the integration of the user in the chain of provision of services. The receiver of this project is the Summer School which is applying this platform to its children. The Summer School is the potential beneficiary of the results and is also participating in the project conception and design stages from the first moment.

This project also aspires to contribute to the researching and development of innovative technology in three of the five pillars of the Future Internet. The first one is the Internet of Things [4]. Project Enjoy.IT! wants to integrate the physical world as an extension of the virtual world and vice versa. For this reason, an Ambient Intelligence (AmI) [5] system is being created which will be able to act depending on the children’s necessities. But this AmI network will not only be able to realize received requests but also be aware of the children’s identity and his context. Another pillar is the Internet of Knowledge and Contents. In this research line, there is a Social Network that links all the games and its components. So, the games and its sensors are one of the generators of the content. At the same time, children and monitors also contribute to the content network. In this manner, Project Enjoy.IT! will create and automatically associate content and knowledge elements linked to the Internet of Things which will be instantly extended to the Internet of People and will also create tools for generating and using content in an easy and powerful fashion. Finally, the third pillar of the Future Internet to be developed is the Internet of People. Each player will have a specific role which will complete the group abilities. So every child is important and needed, thus promoting the integration of all children in the use and enjoyment of applications, including those with special needs or disabled ones. Of course, there is a special attention to ensure that these new capabilities don’t jeopardize the privacy of users and securing inherent knowledge generated in the process and communications security [6].

III. MATERIALS AND METHODS For the implementation of this project various knowledge

are needed in order to unite different disciplines that, all together, make up the games platform of Project Enjoy.IT!.

In the first place, there are current videogames. Performing a global vision of the video games existing nowadays, it is worth noting two types of video games for Project Enjoy.IT!. On the one hand there are online videogames. Online

videogames are those played via the Internet regardless of the platform. They can either be multiplayer games played with other people, or single player. Because one of the objectives of the project is to get more than twenty children playing together at the same time, it is worth focusing on multiplayer games. These are games which include a mode for various players. They are often played via the Internet or other network with other people connected to it. Furthermore, there is the theme of these videogames. They can be collaborative or competitive games. The first group of them, the collaborative ones, are interesting videogames for Enjoy.IT!. A cooperative game is a game in which two or more players do not compete, but rather strive to achieve the same objective and therefore earn or lose as a group. Role-playing games are the most common form of a cooperative game, in spite of not being always like that. In such games, players (acting as characters) are generally seeking similar objectives.

Additionally, there are serious games. A serious game is a game designed for a different purpose other than pure entertainment. Serious games are learning tools which have pedagogical and educational objectives that enable players to obtain a set of predominantly practical knowledge and skills. The game by itself is a motivating factor for students, it becomes a meaningful and leisure learning, it promotes teamwork and it has great flexibility in its use. For this reason, what we aim to achieve with Project Enjoy.IT! video gaming platform is that children learn while they are playing. At the same time, they will be developing in both the psychomotor activity and the psychosocial levels [7].

The interaction form of these games will be different from the usual: we want children to perform a series of activities linked by a common story. In this story they will have to move and interact with the environment, either through sensors responding to his actions, or using the new available game controllers that make users stand up from the chair and use their body to move the remote control and the character at the same time, such as Wiimote or PlayStation Move. Even using Microsoft Kinect, where gestures and spoken commands are used to control the game. Moreover, in order to create a transparent environment, sensors and remote controllers used will be hidden and, as far as possible, they will be wireless.

Otherwise, we aim to integrate all this technologies into the world of the socio-cultural animation, which focuses on the development of recreational activities for children of all ages. This animation currently does not include ICT for the realization of the games and there is where Project Enjoy.IT! is going to give a change with this type of combined experience. Thus, the Project desires to go beyond what exists today in the world of video games: it wants to enhance the interactive possibilities not just with the remote control but also with the environment, within a broad space where entertainment activities can be executed in a way that include both video games and physical activity, without the user being aware of the technology that is behind all the environment.

In order to create this platform, an architecture based on Services Choreography [8] is going to be used. This fact will facilitate the installation and fault tolerance in the

environment, which will be surrounded by sensors. The sensors will collect the data independently from the central system.

For the games programming stage it is necessary to highlight the following used elements. It has been used the Unified Modelling Language (UML) [9] for the designing of the games. UML is a graphical language to view, specify and document each of the parts comprising the development of software. UML provides a way of modelling conceptual things such as business processes and system functions, as well as concrete things such as writing classes in a specific language, database schemas, and reusable software components.

XNA Framework 4 has been used for the games programming. XNA [10] is a set of tools with a managed execution environment provided by Microsoft that facilitates the development of computer and management games. Version 4 has been chosen because it better fits the specifications of the platform games, due to their improvements in the crossover development of applications among platforms, simplicity and power of filters in addition to its improvements in the audio system and the support for touch screens.

IV. RESULTS Project Enjoy.IT! is creating a digital and interactive

entertainment platform for children. A complete role-playing adventure of interconnected games is being built. Two hundred and fifty children approx., divided into groups of twenty-five children (9-10 years old) from the Polytechnic University of Valencia’s Summer School are participating on it. The plot introduces an adventure in a fantasy world where each group of children plays as a village from a region and has to solve the same problem: Natural resources are near extinction and children have to begin a journey around an imaginary world in order to find several pieces from a magical object which will solve the problem. Using the recovered pieces the magical object will be assembled, always bearing in mind the collaborative spirit to promote positive values among children. The adventure will be composed by around ten different games. A different technology is used in each game. Games are multiplayer, collaborative (among children in a group and among different groups) and interconnected to the whole adventure, using a Social Network. All the advances of each group will be able to be consulted by every player and by children’s parents [11].

To contain this adventure a modular and scalable platform is being created based on Services Choreography Architecture (See figure 1).

Services Choreography [12] specification is targeted for composing interoperable, peer-to-peer collaborations among any type of participant regardless of the supporting platform or programming model used by the implementation of the hosting environment. Choreography has no centralised control, which is instead shared among domains, where each one is able to carry out its own activities according to its role in a peer-to-peer model, applying a global behavioural contract.

Using the choreographer, services and devices are able to exchange information in a distributed way because choreographed processes are independent and can communicate with each other to define its workflow execution. This model makes easy to turn the connection and disconnection of services dynamically and is capable of using different types of sensors and configurations.

Fig. 1 Enjoy.IT! platform architecture

Use of choreography for interconnecting services requires

the use of a common exchange language that allows services to be understood. For this reason an architecture that includes a semantic layer in the choreographer to improve communication among sensors, actuators, and services in the system is needed. The use of Ontology Services and Machine Reasoning for the description of data from sensors allows making a more accurate interpretation of information obtained from them, and allows the system to automatically detect sensors and services available in each moment.

Service choreography involves the Orchestration [12] of both manual and automated processes. There is a centralised control mechanism which directs activities, each of which is an interaction among services. So an Orchestrator is also included in the architecture of Services connected to the choreographer who supports the use of workflows to describe processes graphically. Workflows are a formal specification of the implementation of processes that can be dynamically executed by a computer-based system. Using these tools a non-expert can create complex processes, enabling them to be managed automatically by a system, without the need of writing any line of source code.

In this architecture there are other necessary components. There is a control centre where the summer school monitors will control next year several aspects of the adventure such as the evolution of each group, how many groups are playing at the same time, where are they playing, which children are playing, etc.

There is also a repository where all data items are stored in the system.

Using a private Social Network the games are being interconnected to the whole adventure. All the advances of

each group in the adventure will be able to be consulted by every player, monitors and even the parents of the children. Players will be able to consult the milestones achieved by any group, contribute to various forums related to the places they visit, see the groups’ positions on the map as well as upload and view photos, etc. So contents are generated by the users and by the system, from the information captured by the sensors and the intelligence of the platform [11].

Focusing on games features, the first premise is that

selected games for the platform must be reusable. It is feasible to use them for different years by modifying the environment, the content of the activities, the questions, etc. The idea is that any changes can be made by the monitors themselves using a configuration tool.

Four games have been developed and tested by UPV Summer School children. Next there is a summary of these games features.

A. Finding the golden idol In this game the children must find the Golden Idol. So the

children are divided into teams of 4-5 players. Moving around a projected board they answer the proposed questions and bring together the five needed stones to open the chest of the idol. The Board is virtual and is projected on a big screen. Through an overhead camera, the image of the children is projected on the board, and children become the counters of the game. For each throw children use a giant dice, inside of which there is a Wiimote which captures the position of the dice. The questions belong to the following subjects: art, sport, science, technology and health and welfare.

Fig. 2 “Finding the golden idol”

In this game children are fully integrated in the technology,

focusing on the development of the game, without realizing that it is virtual. This game stimulates the cognition through the challenge of answering the questions. It also encourages both memory and attention. But, in addition, moving in a virtual board promotes motor and eye-hand-foot coordination, as well as the laterality and spatial knowledge. It is interactive and motivating to children. By team working there is collaboration among members and a desire for improvement.

B. The crazy boat race Children have to navigate a river in a rowboat. Its objective

is to reach the goal in the shortest possible time, collecting as many coins as they can along the way. On their journey, they meet with a series of obstacles which they have to avoid working as a team. The game makes a tour within an imaginary rowboat driven by 6 paddles. The children are sitting on 6 rows of 3 chairs, like if they were in a rowboat. In front of them there is a projected screen where players can see the route they must follow. The paddles used have a Wiimote inside to capture their movement. The joint movement of the two sides makes the boat move in a straight line. But if only one side is rowing, the boat moves diagonally in the corresponding direction. A total of 19 children can play out, 18 play as a rowers (3 children by paddle) and a helmsman, leading their colleagues.

Fig. 3 “The crazy boat race”

This game develops concepts of collaboration through a rowing experience that involves coordination and balance. The game strengthens the laterality, confidence and balance. It also promotes cooperation among the team members. For their proper development it is essential that children are guided either by another child or a monitor. If another child guides them, it is difficult for children of this age (9-10 years old): the child who runs is back to the screen and has to have a great coordination and orientation in space to make it properly. This game also involves physical activity because the act of rowing implies wide circular movements with both arms. When children play, they are immersed on the game.

C. The endless forest The game objective is to successfully solve in the shortest

possible time seven labyrinths presented to children in a touch screen. The children have to scroll through the forest labyrinth by pressing the avatar with their finger and moving it around the screen. They have to be careful because, if they leave the marked route and collide against a wall, they have to start again. Arriving at the end of the labyrinth, they begin the next stage. Children individually perform the maze by turns. If one child leaves the path, the avatar is immediately returned to the starting point, and the child must give way to another teammate, waiting for the turn to be able to continue.

Fig. 4 “The endless forest” This game shows an interaction and coordination of mutual

interests among children, so that, there is cooperation among them. When a child is performing the labyrinth the others are spontaneously guiding them. Moreover, it has been noted a respect for rules and every child awaits his or her turn. Further, this game helps the attention process, eye-hand coordination and the capacity for concentration and manipulation, developing at the same time the fine motor skills.

D. Paint and colour Children have a whiteboard where, through infrared pencils,

they can select a range of colours and draw, either in a spontaneous way or guided by monitors, who ask them to draw individual objects. Two children can now draw up at the same time. This year there was a canvas of reduced dimensions (1.5 m x 1.25 m). Following the success of the proof of concept, its size is increasing in order to have a large screen where up to five children could draw at the same time.

Fig. 5 “Paint and colour” This game promotes creativity and encourages the

development of the imagination. However, at this age an incentive must be proposed, as a sort of competition among the players, for they to avoid getting bored soon.

V. CONCLUSIONS At the present time, the use of ICT in the teaching of

children is essential because ICT are part of the daily lives of children. This is why Project Enjoy.IT! aims to promote the

use of ICT and make new technology accessible to children. It has been observed that ICT cause the collaboration among the children, help them to focus on learning, improve motivation and interest, favour the spirit of search, promote integration and also stimulate the development of certain intellectual skills, such as reasoning, problem solving, creativity and the ability of learning to learn. And ICT also contribute to the development of physical and cognitive skills.

Project Enjoy.IT! also aims to integrate ICT in the individual’s environment and immerse the users in a world that will interact with them in a natural way.

It is also true that, when children are initiated into the world of ICT, they need adults to help them meet the mechanism, to explain the operation and to modify ICT to their levels, to adapt ICT. So children may have increased autonomy in their use. And this is being achieved by Project Enjoy.IT!. The game development using ICT in the UPV Summer School has enabled, in addition to entertain children, the development of a range of abilities and skills and a cross-cutting education that the child acquires in a playful way.

As a whole, the developed games are very well accepted by children, who immediately learn their handling and understand their purposes. The games help to enhance a number of features of psychomotor development such as the motor functions, coordination, laterality and temporal-spatial orientation. They also stimulate the processes of memory and problem solving, as well as visual perception. Finally, it is worth to highlight that games favour interpersonal relationships with peers, encouraging collaboration and respect for the established rules.

As the results of the pilot study in July prove, the developed games are complete games, which entertain children much, and that make them "learn without realizing it," as well as promote other capabilities in a transversal way.

A follow-up is needed to identify, within them, which games are better accepted to promote them, as well as to modify those aspects that can make children get bored of the game, either for their difficulty or for the not adaptation to the psychological level of its age.

REFERENCES [1] CISCO and GBN Global Business Network, “La evolución de

Internet”, Fundación Telefónica Tech. Rep., Dec. 2010. [2] (2011) Project Enjoy.IT! website. [Online]. Available:

http://www.proyectoenjoyit.es/ [3] (2011) Escola d’Estiu website. [Online]. Available:

http://www.escoladestiu.upv.es/ [4] H. Sundmaeker, P. Guillemin, P. Friess, S. Woelfflé. Vision and

challenges for realising the Internet of Things. Cluster of European Research Projects on the Internet of Things, 2010.

[5] G. Riva, F. Vatalaro, F. Davide, M. Alcañiz. Ambient Intelligence. IOS Press, 2005

[6] M.A. Navarro-Salvador, A.B. Sánchez-Calzón, C. Fernández-Llatas, T. Meneu. “Ambient Intelligence Based Architecture for Immersive Social Entertainment”, in 2nd International Symposium on Ambient Intelligence (ISAmI 2011), paper, p. 227.

[7] M. Sánchez. Buenas Prácticas en la Creación de Serious Games (Objetos de Aprendizaje Reutilizables). Post-Proceedings del IV Simposio Pluridisciplinar sobre Diseño, Evaluación y Desarrollo de Contenidos Educativos Reutilizables, SPDECE 2007, Bilbao, Spain, September 19-21, 2007 2008

[8] C. Fernández-Llatas, J.B. Mocholí, A. Moyano, T.Meneu. “Semantic Process Choreography for Distributed Sensor Management” in International Workshop on Semantic Sensor Web - SSW 2010, paper.

[9] (2011) Unified Modeling Languaje website. [Online]. Available: http://www.uml.org/

[10] (2011) XNA Tutorial website. [Online]. Available: http://www.xna-tutorial.com/

[11] M.A. Navarro-Salvador, A.B. Sánchez-Calzón, C. Fernández-Llatas, T. Meneu. “Enjoy.IT!: A Platform to Integrate Entertainment Services”, IJACI vol. 4, No 1, 2011, pp. 1-8

[12] C.Fernández-Llatas, J. P. Lázaro and J. M. Benedí. Workflow Mining Application to Ambient Intelligence Behavior Modeling. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009. Volume 5615/2009, 160-167