Teses

Earthquakes are known as one of the most dangerous natural hazards due to their unpredictability, and because it is not possible to know when a major seismic activity will occur, it is highly recommended to be prepared. Due to the growing interest in Serious games unique characteristics to teach and train individuals, there was an opportunity of using Serious games to better prepare and inform people about earthquakes. This work describes a Serious game that was developed to teach elementary school children about common practices and procedures to take before, during and after an earthquake as well as warn them about the risks and promote discussion among the students and diffuse this knowledge to their families. To achieve this, we investigated the characteristics of Serious Games and studied games with similar purposes in order to create a game able to entertain while teaching pedagogical content. Through the results obtained from the tests conducted we can conclude that our game was able to successfully achieve it’s purpose, being able to rise awareness about earthquake preparedness in schools.

Lighting has much more importance than simply establishing visibility. In cinematography, theatre and videogames, good lighting is expected to create images with emotional content, set atmosphere and mood, direct attention and provide depth to a two-dimensional image. Lighting design is the process of finding light parameters: positions, directions, colours, and intensities to achieve the visual properties wanted for a specific scene. The traditional method of lighting design for a scene is iterative, requiring trial and error until the desired goal is reached. This is a repetitive and tedious work, which requires technical and artistic expertise in the field. Inverse lighting design aims to provide designers with semi-automated approaches and easy to use tools, to configure lighting for scenes, minimizing the time and expertise needed. This work will explore lighting by example. More specifically, the possibility of using videos and images as examples for lighting 3D scenes. The major goal of the proposed system is to emulate in the virtual scenes the same mood present on the short videos or images used as input. Tests were conducted with users, rating the mood of images used as input of the system and the resulting automatically illuminated 3D scenes. The obtained results were satisfactory, presenting some similar ratings.

There has been a growing interest in Serious Games, more specifically on how they blend seriousness with entertainment and an interest on how certain video games use persuasion techniques to change players’ awareness or to promote discussion on some serious issues. The objective of this dissertation is to develop a video game with the purpose of raising players’ awareness for the conciliation of agriculture with biodiversity in the region of Castro Verde and motivate the players to know more about the business and economics of agriculture. To achieve this, we investigated the characteristics and design strategies of Serious Games and we investigated how techniques and strategies of persuasion can be implemented in video games in order to create entertaining persuasive gameplay. Further, we investigated some video games that implemented such techniques and analysed how they were achieved. We came up with an approach on how to translate real-world context into persuasive gameplay elements so players were drawn to the agricultural and environmental issues of Castro Verde. We conducted tests to assess the effectiveness of the persuasive gameplay. The final evaluation results were consistent with our objective, which states that implementing persuasion techniques and strategies in our game persuades players to be aware of the issues of Castro Verde.

This project documents the development of a framework for the creation of Social Network Games. As a proof of concept, a functional Social Network Game prototype based on an existing two player game concept was created. In a first stage, existing games, industry articles and market studies were researched for the purpose of profiling the average player, identifying commonly used mechanics and finding success metrics. Subsequently, a conceptual framework integrating the aforementioned mechanics and concepts in the existing game was carefully detailed. Finally, a fully functional prototype for the new game was implemented in a real Social Networking context and made available for testing to a group of diverse players. Results obtained from direct and indirect user feedback were analyzed and the conclusion reached that the adaptation of the two player game into a Social Network Game using the framework was successful, and the framework proved adequate for the creation of a popular and potentially profitable Social Network Game. The main problems in our implementation were also identified and solutions suggested as future work.