Game development for experience through staying there

We describe two approaches to aid in game design, evaluation and development for user-players staying there, continuing to engage in game activities. The first is the hierarchical activity-based scenario (HABS) approach providing a theoretical framework to support the design of game narrative and scenario, model and reason about user-players' behavior and experience from acting in the scenario, and help identify problematic aspects of game design. The second is a continuous and unobtrusive approach that supports evaluation. Central to our approach is a tool called ISIS (Immersidata analySIS) to query and identify data of interest and to index events within virtual or video recordings, or graphical visualizations of game sessions. Used in conjunction with HABS, analysis of the associated data and indexed events helps us to understand user-players' behaviour and experience and aids in the detection of design problems to inform game development. To demonstrate our approaches we describe how they have been utilized in the development of an educational serious game.

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