Cologne. From 7th-8th November 2008
the finals of the World Cyber Games 2008
and the 3rd Youth Forum North Rhine-Westphalia took
place in Cologne.
The topic of the Youth
forum was „Playful learning in Virtual Worlds“
and takomat together with the University of Graz presented
the 80days project with a booth at the forum and participated
in a panel discussion about „Learning in Virtual
Worlds“.
At the 80days booth,
takomat conducted a survey with our intended target
group (pupils around 12-14 years) in order to validate
the game design of the 80days game. The questionnaire
was designed by the University of Leicester which
is responsible for scientific evaluation and validation
of the game.
139 pupils (78 girls
and 61 boys) were involved in the survey. They were
asked to complete a questionnaire to express their
opinions on different aspects of the game design and
to provide some improvement suggestions based on their
own ideas. Furthermore, some general questions about
their computer game play habit (i.e. frequency, gametype)
were included in the questionnaire.
Results of the survey
suggest that the 80Days game design concept was generally
well received by the respondents. The fact that almost
60% of the children intend to play the game (‘Probably
Yes’ and ‘Surely Yes’) in the future
is encouraging. Responses to the specific questions
on the game design showed some interesting results
how the pupils perceive the story and the characters
of the game.
Story
While the respondents
found stories about aliens in general moderately interesting
(2.7 out of five), the particular 80Days-story showed
much more positive responses (3.4 out of the five).
Additionally, there were significant gender differences
in the perception of alien stories in general, in
which the boys showed a stronger interest than the
girls, In contrast, the 80Days story was equally well
perceived by these boys and girls. It seems that the
80Days story improves the generic extraterrestrial
story type as well as the gender specific acceptance
of such stories.
Game Characters
56% of the pupils would
„like to fly with this Alien Scout in the UFO“,
20% of the respondents didn’t like that idea.
Feon’s character design – the Alien Scout
– was perceived positive; the first five most
frequent adjectives the youths used to describe him
were „friendly“ (35), „funny“
(30), „clever“ (29), „small“
(29), „cute“ (28).
