Design + Games

Preview of Friday's Activities

Event of the Day

Gameful Design with StudyCrafter

In this panel talk, we present StudyCrafter, a free engine to empower users to create, play, share, and analyze gamified projects. We showcase how this platform has been used to speculate about post-covid world impressions, study supply chain decisions, develop innovative therapeutic solutions, make engaging surveys and experiments, and create impactful games. We also demonstrate how this platform empowers others to design, in particular users who may not know how to program or make games. We discuss the opportunities and limitations of StudyCrafter and how it and related authoring tools can help us achieve a more gameful world.

Casper Harteveld
Assosciate Professor

Giovanni Troiano
Visiting Assistant Professor

Students and Postdocs:

Nithesh Javvaji, PhD student: Gamified Experiments with StudyCrafter
Mehmet Kosa, Postdoc: Gamified surveys with StudyCrafter
Omid Mohaddesi, PhD student: Supply Chain Design with StudyCrafter
Uttkarsh Narayan, PhD student: Gamified therapy with StudyCrafter
Mahsa Nasri, PhD student: Serious Games with StudyCrafter

Presentation Recording:

Presentation Slides:

StudyCrafter slidedeck.pptx.pdf

Key Takeaways

GhostLabs’ StudyCrafter is not only a design product itself—developed through, by, and for design research—but also it is an online platform that allows others to design games and gamified experiences.
StudyCrafter is designed to explore ourselves/behaviors and to empower others
Explore ourselves
- playing to learn through gamified experiences
  - Serious games: games for non-entertainment purposes such as education, public efficacy, training, health, etc.
  - Gamified experiments: rich experiential experiments that allow for the study of human behavioural responses.
  - Gamified surveys: surveys that aren’t so boring. Can eliminate potential bias of survey response based on participants’ awareness that they are engaging in a survey task.
  - Speculative design: allows for qualitative data collection and analysis through methods such as the story completion method.
Empower others
- non-designers designing their own games that can have a positive impact.
  - Gamified Onboarding: paying attention to and remembering information that is otherwise not-so-exciting.
  - Gamified Therapy: psychotherapists making therapy more accessible for both therapists and patients.
  - Gamified Education: learning through gameplay.
As part of an NSF grant, awarded this year StudyCrafter will be used in classrooms at 10+ universities across the US.