Bringing Game Achievements and Community Achievements Together
Key: KGS13-3
Author: Johannes Konert, Nico Gerwien, Stefan Göbel, Ralf Steinmetz
Date: September 2013
Kind: In proceedings
Publisher: Academic Bookshop
Book title: Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Games Based Learning (ECGBL)
Keywords: Peer Learning, Achievement System, Community Achievements, Serious Games Technology, Social Serious Games
Abstract: When Social Media is used for game-based learning one major issue it the rewarding of players for their efforts to provide user-generated content to others (Peer Tutoring). This can be done by rewards and achievements gathered within the game or when content is created within a game-related community platform. For Serious Games that foster the knowledge exchange among peer learners (players) the rewarding and tracking of both – in-game and in-community assistance and help among learners – is desired. Thus we propose an architecture and solution for an integrated achievements-system which allows the combination and rewarding of player activities in games and related communities at the same time. The Achieve2Conquer platform provides game developers with a middleware architecture where achievements are created, visualized to users within a web-frontend and updated by progress information from game instances and community platforms simultaneously. The architectural model of Achieve2Conquer allows a weight balancing of achievements from game and community, to prevent an overrating of one of them. In unbalanced achievement systems this may otherwise lead to an extensive use of community-based achievements by eager players due to the fact that these achievements are usually available unlimited (e.g. like achievements for being the first person commenting a new post). Additionally we propose new achievements types for hybrid achievements and user-generated achievements to combine existing reward models of both worlds (games and social media applications). These allow the guidance of players, e.g. by first requesting achievements parts to be achieved within the game environment, then by conducting actions in the community and finally requesting a collaborative aspect. A prototypical implementation will be presented to show the benefits of the system.
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