Participatory Design

RESEARCH PAPER 1:

RELEVANCE OF VIDEOGAMES IN THE LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT OF YOUNG CHILDREN

INTRODUCTION

In today’s world, videogames has gained a tremendous growth in all major aspects, thereby, making its study an essential factor. Violence in the games is the major concern. It is generally a known fact that the players of videogames (namely children or adults), tend to incorporate the same playing style into their real world. This paper highlights the adaptation play in a child’s growth as per the theories proposed by Freud, Piaget and Vygotsky (Bruner, 1972A).

Following is the statement put forth by Ian Bogost in his book “Persuasive Games”

Playing a role in a videogame does not automatically imply validation for the behavior the game models, As I have argued, videogames can also give players the opportunity to empathize with people and situations they might not ordinarily encounter. Videogames teach abstract principles that service general problem-solving skills and learning values. It encourages the learner to experiment within knowledge domains freely without fear of incompetence due to incomplete mastery. (p. 230-231)

Few other statements put forth by other researchers include:

“the game teaches players how to convert skills into strategies, and to turn failure into success” (James Paul Gee, “Demonstrating the important Learning Found in COTS Games”, 2004) Taking a step back from the immediate situation, analyzing the choices and the odds, and finding the right strategy. (Beck & Wade, Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press, 2004)

Videogames giving its capacity of communicating and submerging individuals into an imaginary world can be used for creating a way of playing for educative entertainment, in this way it can prevent the ambient risks that young people of 14 to 25 years old in Colombia suffer and make their life better. (Guerrero, 2014)

PARTICIPANTS CHOSEN

For this current research, 50 boys were chosen. On the other hand, girls of Elementary schools belonging to 2^nd, 4^th and 6^th classes corresponding to 7-8, 9-10 and 12-13 age limits were also picked up. Participants were distributed into groups of 16 ( 8 boys and 8 girls under 2nd grade), 16 ( 8 boys and 8 girls under 4th grade ) and 18 ( 9 boys and 9 girls under 6th grade ) respectively. Apart from participants functioning as players and controllers, few extra players were always kept as handy.

INSTRUMENTS CHOSEN

Xbox360, a console for playing games was chosen. Two numbers of TV’s in the form of flat screen and controllers to act as joypad was present. Additionally, a video camera was also fitted in order to record the activities and observations when children played. Few accessories namely action figures and portal to introduce them were also kept.

REASONS FOR CHOOSING THE DESIRED PARTICIPANTS

Children of the desired age limits belonging to respective grades and schools were particularly chosen to carry out this study in order to analyse and provide solutions for the following criteria

1. Learning behaviour of the desired age group children.

2. Both genders were chosen to investigate whether boys or girls were more attracted to videogames.

3. Observation of the children’s cooperation skills by allowing them to play in pairs.

4. Observations to know whether these children organised themselves when doing such activities.

5. To determine how far children can learn by themselves without adult’s intervention.

6. How far children can solve problems themselves without asking for any kind of help.

7. Lastly, it is to find how much a child can inter relate the play by understanding its real meaning and apply to his/her learning capabilities to achieve and sustain their growth.

INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT THE RESEARCH

1. Children started playing the Skylanders game by themselves without any kind of external help by simply using the sample tutorial present for playing the game.

2. The game was completely new to these children. Even in such situation, they started showing interest spontaneously so as to participate in the game immediately and explore it.

3. The participation rate for the game kept increasing tremendously as day and time progressed thereby leading to formation of second group of children playing another game under adult’s and staff’s guidance.

4. Communication established between groups on its own without any external force.

5. Children themselves started forming teams without any proper definition which led to formation of meaning for the game that they played by means of collaborative thinking.

6. Children started sharing their experiences regarding what they discovered (positives and negatives) during the time of play and even provided tips to their fellow mates in making progress towards the game.

7. Skills and knowledge were shared among the rest of the children as when any kind of progress or mastery of the game was achieved.

8. Bruner (1984) discovered a method named Scaffolding which is very much related to the method proposed by Vygotsky (1979). It is defined as the Zone of Proximal Development: the distance between what one can do alone and what one can do with the help of someone with better skills. The child, who knows the most or understands the game at a faster rate, will offer that knowledge to those who are slow learners. The speed at which children started learning gradually increased because of increase in the mutual learning system that these children followed.

9. Some forms of leadership roles were also exhibited by some players.

One of the best example to depict this scenario was the presence of a 7 year old girl, who was playing during the first few minutes of the game opted to act as a mentor and a tutor for other children giving them her own chance to play. She even started giving some information which was very much useful for the other children younger in age than her to progress through the game. The most interesting fact was that whenever she felt like playing, the younger generation were happier to give her a chance which she would again give up after few minutes of play. This happened throughout the research season.

10. The fact to be noted was that no big conflicts happened during the entire play. Even during the time when minor conflicts happened, no forms of interruption happened making the game to be stopped completely.

11. The game was a big success which was expressed by means of greetings from children towards the people who conducted this research. It was also noted that children of all the age groups who were considered for this research completely enjoyed the whole performance.

12. A very ingrained belief in adults, parents or teachers, is that only boys are interested in videogames and nor girls, and that, if they are interested, the girls are slower at learning than the boys. Various studies have shown that both gender do play video games, although they have different preferences in the type of videogames as shown by Greenberg et al (2010) among others. It was noted during this study that this belief was completely false as girls played equally fast to that of the boys.

13. Lacasa et al (2009) describes that this capacity of self-regulation among children of primary education. This effect got proved when children started maintaining their own time limits and made turns among them automatically.

14. Back and Wade (2004) have demonstrated the collaboration between group of players and the acquisition of social skills while playing videogames. This theory also got proved in this research as children started taking up different roles within the group among themselves.

15. A ludic environment established throughout the study which was very much essential to make this research a success.

16. Children got so much immersed within the play that they started interacting with the figures which was within the game considering it to be a real human.

CONCLUSION

To conclude, it is to be clearly identified, accepted and noted that this learning process followed by the children through the means of playing games show casted their caring, control and leadership qualities.

RESEARCH PAPER 2:

CLASSIFYING MOVIES BASED ON AUDIENCE PERCEPTIONS: MTI FRAMEWORK AND BOX OFFICE PERFORMANCE

INTRODUCTION

Today’s fast moving society, people are highly accelerated by systemized work which leads to hyper anxiety tend to affects their social value and their cultural heritages. In this situation, movies play a vital role to relaxing themselves and ignite them to forecast their social responsibilities. Movies are cultural artifacts which reflect the societal ethical of the country.   

A  Movie is a progression of pictorial representation, when exposed on a screen, which constructs the illusion of moving images due to the phi phenomenon. This optical illusion causes the audience to perceive continuous motion between separate objects viewed rapidly in succession.

This research based on korean which observes the current status of the movie genre usage in movie research and film industry and introduced a new method to classify movies by large-scale audience survey by measure the factors to set the Movie type indicator (MTI) . It shows the comparison between the movies types and genres with respect to box-office revenue. Versatile box-office revenues (opening week revenue, total revenue, and revenue-per screen) differed significantly across movie types, whereas only the opening week revenue showed a significant difference across movie genres, suggesting that movie types may be a better predictor of a movie’s box-office performance than movie genres that have been frequently used in prior research on box-office performance prediction.

“John Miller, managing director of J.P. Morgan Securities’ entertainment group which owns 80% of the Hollywood’s film production loans market, doesn’t read scripts, doesn’t care about plots, and doesn’t worry about which stars have signed on. But, Miller does focus on what really counts in a movie’s success: its business plan, especially its budget, release date, genre, and distribution schedule.” (Businessweek, February 24, 2005)

PARTICIPANTS CHOSEN

In this research, they have selected 377 movies (both foreign and Korean) to create the movie lists forth audience survey. These movies are from the Top 100 film lists of the Korean Box-office from 2001 to 2004, plus movies that garnered more than 100,000 admissions from 2005 to 2007 in Korea. Of the 377 movies, 230 titles (132 Korean, 98 foreign) were used.

Totally 125 students are participants who are all categorized with respect to their degrees sort of undergraduate, graduate, and MBA of different age groups and also participants are chosen based on their frequently movie going behavior.

INSTRUMENTS CHOSEN

In this research, they used paper based survey as an instrument in which participants are motivated to complete the open ended survey after watching their respective movies which are pre assigned to them.

REASONS FOR CHOSING THE DESIRED PARTICIPANTS

Perceptive of the people may vary on different sort of age groups. In this film industry, movies are common factor to all the age group people, so researcher chosen the participants at different age group to set the movie type indicator.

By considered the above mentioned factors, researchers chosen the respondents were 52% male and, in terms of age group, about 71% were in their twenties, and 28% were in their thirties.

Somehow, movies lovers are aware of key success criteria of the movie.In terms of frequency of cinema-going behavior, 29% were watching movies at the theater 12 or more times a year, 31% were watching six to 11 times a year, 23% were four or five times a year, and 17% belonged to the one to three times per year group.

INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT THE RESEARCH

1. One of the main interesting facts in this paper, in which researcher narrow down the key categorization on nine series of clusters further extends to various genres with MTI scores for each.

2. Using a large-scale audience survey data, the authors clustered movies into 9 distinct types based on 8 audience-perceived movie characteristics such as fun, eye-catching, discomfort, and feel-good.

3. By this, researcher validated their method by comparing movie types vs. movie genres in terms of their box-office revenue explanatory power.

It drives movie production to build a people likable movie, results to block-busters revenue, and also helps to increase the social standards.

CONCLUSION

As we gone through the research paper, we have concluded that introducing MTI score to the movies reflects the perspective of versatile people on different genres of movies which motivate the movie directors to produce blockbuster films.   

REFERENCES

1. Beck, J. Wade, M. (2004) Got Game: how the gamer generation is reshaping business for ever. Harvard Business School Press, Cambridge, MA

2. Bogost. (2010) Persuasive Games: the expressive power of videogames. The MIT Press.

3. Bruner, J. S. (1972b). Immaturity: its nature and uses. American Psychologist 27, 687-708.

4. Bruner, J.S. (2012). What Psychology Should Study. International Journal of Educational Psychology, 1(1), 5-13.

5. Ferguson, C. J. (2010) Blazing angels or resident evil? Can violent video games be a force for good? Review of General Psychology, 14(2), pp. 68-81.

6. Gee, J.P. (2005) “Demonstrating the important Learning Found in COTS Games”, Paper presented at The Serious Game Summit. San Francisco, California.

7. Ferguson, C. y Rueda, S. (2010). The Hitman, Violent Video Game Exposure Effects on Aggressive Behavior, Hostile Feelings, and Depression Study. European

Psychologiste, 15, 99‐108.

8. Lacasa, P., Méndez, L., & Martinez, R. (2009). Using videogames as educational tools: Building bridges between commercial and serious games. In Marja Kankaanrata & Pekka Neittaanmäki (eds.). Parte II Learning (69-82). Milton Keynes, UK: Springer Verlag

9. Lacasa, P., Méndez, L., & Martinez, R. (2008). Bringing commercial games into the classroom. Computers and Composition, 25, 341–358.

10. Vygotsky, L. S. (1979). Consciousness as a problem in the psychology of behavior. Soviet psychology, 17(4), 3-35.

11. Bruner, J. S. (1972a). Concepciones de la infancia: Freud, Piaget y Vygotsky. En J. Linaza (comp.) Acción, pensamiento y lenguaje: Escritos de J. S. Bruner, (p. 31-44). Madrid: Alianza (1984).

12. Guerrero, J. (2014). Herramientas lúdicas, pedagógicas y metodológicas a través de los videojuegos. Bogotá. Revista e-ikon