Percorrer por autor "Sousa, Micael"

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    Games! What are they good for? : the struggle of serious game adoption for rehabilitation
    (2025-01-12) Fonseca, Maria Micaela; Fachada, Nuno; Sousa, Micael; Oliveira, Jorge; Rodrigues, Pedro; Sousa, Sara; Quaresma, Claudia; Lopes, Phil; HEI-LAB - Human Environment Interaction Lab; ECATI - School of Communication, Architecture, Arts and Information Technologies; COPELABS - Cognitive and People-centric Computing
    The field of serious games for health has grown significantly, demonstrating effectiveness in various clinical contexts such as stroke, spinal cord injury, and degenerative neurological diseases. Despite their potential benefits, therapists face barriers to adopting serious games in rehabilitation, including limited training and game literacy, concerns about cost and equipment availability, and a lack of evidence-based research on game effectiveness. Serious games for rehabilitation often involve repetitive exercises, which can be tedious and reduce motivation for continued rehabilitation, treating clients as passive recipients of clinical outcomes rather than players. This study identifies gaps and provides essential insights for advancing serious games in rehabilitation, aiming to enhance their engagement for clients and effectiveness as a therapeutic tool. Addressing these challenges requires a paradigm shift towards developing and co-creating serious games for rehabilitation with therapists, researchers, and stakeholders. Furthermore, future research is crucial to advance the development of serious games, ensuring they adhere to evidence-based principles and engage both clients and therapists. This endeavor will identify gaps in the field, inspire new directions, and support the creation of practical guidelines for serious games research.
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    Mastering modern board game design to build new learning experiences : the MBGTOTEACH framework
    (Lusofona University, 2023-01-01) Sousa, Micael; HEI-LAB - Human Environment Interaction Lab
    Games have proven to be engaging tools for learning. Digital games dominate, but analog games are not obsolete. Modern board games provide new opportunities for teachers. This paper proposes the MBGTOTEACH framework as an introduction and on going process for teachers to use, adapt, and develop modern board games for learning purposes. This framework aims to help teachers profit from these games to build their game-based approaches. The MBGTOTEACH framework was tested during two sessions with teachers and education researchers. It increased the awareness of the potential of game-based learning and the design characteristics of modern board games. Sessions results show that participants might need a more solid game culture and experiences to recognize how to explore games’ potential. Modifying and developing new learning games based on modern board games is not achieved rapidly, although recognizing the games’ potential in introducing sessions is achievable.
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    Modeling urban spaces with cubes : building analogue serious games for collaborative planning
    (Lusofona University, 2023) Sousa, Micael; CICANT - Centre for Research in Applied Communication, Culture, and New Technologies
    Games are popular as ever. Professionals from every field are trying to build their serious games, combining engaging playability with simulation and learning outcomes. Urban planning is no exception. However, materializing these games is no easy task. We propose a serious game development process to combine modern board game mechanisms with realistic urban maps, profiting from the simplicity, flexibility, and collaboration dynamics analogue games provide. For this, we tested two collaborative games with architecture students. Although different, the games have similar core mechanical and economic systems, modelling urban zones with hexagons and squares. The experience revealed some pitfalls to avoid in game-based planning practice and helped to define a development process for serious games for urban planning.
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    Roundtable, analogue co-design : opportunities, challenges and other nuances
    (Lusofona University, 2023) Brand, Inka; C., Isra; Brand, Markus; S., Shei; Sousa, Micael; Sousa, Carla; Casimiro, Cátia; CICANT - Centre for Research in Applied Communication, Culture, and New Technologies; HEI-LAB - Human Environment Interaction Lab
    Co-design is linked to a range of advantages, encompassing enhancements in idea generation, service or product development processes, decision-making, cooperation, creativity, as well as long-term satisfaction and loyalty among clients and users (Steen, 2013; Steen et al., 2011). Despite its widespread use as a strategic approach, co-design has received less scholarly attention, and critical discussions regarding its underlying concepts are infrequent. The occurrence of this particular circumstance can perhaps be attributed to the widespread practice of categorizing projects as co-design, which may lead to a dilution or confusion of conceptual understanding (Steen, 2013). In the field of games, especially at an academic level, the idea of co-design has been used mainly to describe processes of horizontalizing research design, aligned with participatory paradigms (Brown, 2022; Hall, 1975). Specifically, where the player no longer plays a completely passive role, but co-creates the gaming world together with the designers (De Jans et al., 2017; Loos et al., 2019; Pedersen & Buur, 2000). Or when the games (applied as a serious game) deliver a tool for ideation and the co-creation of projects and solutions to a specific problem (Sousa, 2021). Here, we have invited two of the most prominent duos of contemporary analog game designers – Isra/Shei and Inka Brand/Markus Brand – to reflect on how they complement and oppose each other in this process. Relational and gender characteristics, how they impact the creative process, and the players’ vision of the games created, among many other issues, will be reflected here.