LudoScience

On May 23rd in Valenciennes, we are organizing a scientific symposium called
“Evaluate and Measure the Impact of Serious Games” during the international

“evirtuoses” event. This meeting aims at asking questions on approaches,
paradigms, experience feedbacks enabling the projection of theoretical
frameworks, methodologies leading to evaluate or measure the impact of Serious
Games, but also to report on collected and analyzed results. Serious Games
generate indeed a strong interest by the perspectives they promise to offer in terms
of prevention, training, education, learning, therapy, communication, coaching, data
collection, etc.… and in areas as varied as education, training, healthcare,
marketing, security, culture… If the question on how to create a Serious Game
remains important, we should ask ourselves how to evaluate and measure the
impact from a scientific point of view. This builds into an essential step in order to
bring guidance to sponsors, users, creators and researchers.

The impact notion is described here as the effect or influence that Serious Games
generate on users but also on an ecosystem. We will explore 3 levels of scale:
micro, meso and macro. We can illustrate those three levels with the study of a
Serious Game user feedback (micro), the interactivity between a user or a group of
users and a Serious Game (meso), and the interaction generated by a Serious
Game in an organized system of any size: institution, enterprise, city, county
(macro). These references are proposed as examples. Depending on the scientific
disciplines, the three levels may command different methods. Let us note finally
that the concept of effectiveness can also be associated with the concept of impact
within the framework of this Symposium.

The objective of this symposium is overall to provide input for a debate based on
sharing paradigms coming from several disciplinary approaches as sciences of
education, information and communication, psychology, sociology, management,
computing, neurosciences, Arts… This comparative approach aims at offering a
large specter to study an object which impact can be divers and relative.
 
In order to summarize the thinking and the works of each participant, we propose at
the end of this symposium to co-write and publish a scientific paper or a special
issue on an on-line scientific review before the beginning of 2013.

Keywords:

Impact, Evaluation, Measure, Serious Game, Organized system, Ecosystem,
Effectiveness

The planning is as follows:

- Text submission (~1500 words) before: April 18th 2012
- Notification to the Reading Committee: April 30th 2012
- Symposium on May 23rd
- Notification of the selection of chosen articles: June 1st 2012
- Final texts submission for publication: October 1st 2012

The speech proposals can include:

- a long presentation (20 minutes and 10 minutes of Q&A)
- a short presentation (10 minutes and 5 minutes of Q&A)
- a poster

Format:

The speech proposal can be submitted in English or French in Word or PDF
format.
Please use the template “Art-modele-Impact SG-2012.doc” you can download at
the following address: http://bit.ly/xjCLye

Scientific Commitee:

Serge Agostinelli (University of Marseillle, France)
Julian Alvarez (Supinfocom groupe Valenciennes/ University of Lille, France)
Raquel Becerril Ortega (University of Lille, France)
Pierre-André Caron (University of Lille, France)
Christophe Chaillou (University of Lille, France)
Yann Coello (University of Lille, France)
Damien Djaouti (University of Toulouse, France)
Pascal Estraillier (University of La Rochelle, France)
Abdelkader Gouaich (University of Montpellier, France)
Patrick Felicia (Waterford Institute of Technology, Irlande)
Maurizio Forte (University of California, USA)

Sara de Freitas (Coventry University, UK)

Pamela Kato (University Medical Center Utrecht, Netherlands)
Christophe Kolski (University of Valenciennes, France)
Isabelle Laffont (University of Montpellier, France)
Sandy Louchart (University of Heriot-Watt, Scotland)
Denis Mottet (University of Montpellier, France)
Louise Sauvé (University of Québec at Montréal, Canada)
Gilson Schwartz (University of São Paulo, Brazil)
Franck Tarpin-Bernard (INSA of Lyon, France)

Partners :

Contact :

Julian Alvarez : j.alvarez@grandhainaut.cci.fr