Games and Gamification

Research Areas

Games and Gamification

Games and Gamification

Usually, we play to have fun. A good game creates user engagement in the game tasks, involving high levels of motivation that promote concentration and performance.

Within this research area, we study the game mechanisms that give enough challenge to user skills and recognized renewals that absorb the user in the game activities reaching a subjective experience of total involvement with the game.

In non-ludic contexts, particularly in work, training, and teaching situations, we study the best ways to use game mechanics to motivate workers and/or students to become engaged with the organization and consequently improve their happiness and performance.

Some developed projects

ERGOSHOW

Ergoshow 1 and 2 are a pedagogical game for young people, developed in a User Centred Design perspective. The main objective of those games was to engage the students in the areas of safety and health, so that in the future they are more responsible adults.

Bone, is a sympathetic character from Ergoshow 1, used to communicate to the youngers, knowledge about manipulation of loads and sitting work and their relationship to the occurrence of musculoskeletal problems.

he characters in Ergoshow 2, that corresponds to Personas in the worker population.These characters will experience various adventures in a virtual factory, to solve the problems of safety and health at work, becoming at the end of the game successful entrepreneurs.

Rebelo, F., & Filgueiras, E.V. (2012). Ergoshow: A user-centred design game to make children aware of ergonomics and occupational safety and health. Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 13, 4-17. doi: 10.1080/1463922X.2010.525761

SmartCity Sense

The Smart City Sense project proposes an approach to the theme of smart cities that places citizens at the heart of the information-gathering and sharing process. The Citizen becomes a significant element of the process of collecting/ making available information about the state of the city. The citizen ceases to be a mere consumer of information about the city and becomes one of the active contributors.
The project proposes the conceptualization, design, and implementation of a computer platform in which the wealth of data collected by citizens (volume, variety, and detail) is aggregated with data collected by a multiplicity of other sensors in the city, giving, in real-time, a clearer and more vivid view of the city's "Pulse". This platform will provide an environment (physical and virtual) suitable for cooperation between Citizens and Authorities, enabling the information entered by one of the parties to be available for consultation by all other interested parties.

 

Rebelo F., Noriega P., Oliveira T., Santos D., Oliveira S. (2018) Expected User Acceptance of an Augmented Reality Service for a Smart City. In: Marcus A., Wang W. (eds) Design, User Experience, and Usability: Users, Contexts and Case Studies. DUXU 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 10920, 703-714. Springer, Cham -https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91806-8_55

Rebelo F., Noriega P., Oliveira T., Santos D., Carvalhais J., Cotrim T. (2018) Applications and Interface Requirements to Engage the Citizens to Share Information in a Smart City Project. In: Rebelo F., Soares M. (eds) Advances in Ergonomics in Design. AHFE 2017. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 588, 712-721. Springer, Cham -https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60582-1_71
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