The term gamification is a wide concept and has multiple meanings in different contexts of traditional gaming, education, social influencers, business marketing, retail, health and well being and more. (Hawari et al., 2020)
Within gamification, the natural tendencies for collaboration, reward and achievement are incentivised through level of engagement, influence, brand loyalty, etc.
There are many ways to invoke an emotional response from end-users as a direct result of a computational model or behavioural pattern within a focused environment. When looking at a group of individuals within the broader term of the word user group; there are 2 specific groups:
- A user group that creates the experience, gameplay artists and developers.
- A user group that is the end consumer of the overall product.
In relation to User Group A, the following definition relates well from (Bostrom et al., 1990). “The importance of effective training in ensuring the success of end-user computing (EUC) has been emphasized by several researchers in information systems. A vast amount of evidence from research in related areas such as educational psychology suggests that individual differences, such as learning style, may affect users learning about a new EUC software package.”
We have seen the effects of the above definition as a direct practice throughout the internship programs run by Graphic Monk for this in-house project.
These new toolsets and workflows have created a new world of opportunities for creatives to design, build and deploy digital humans in a new light within, film, television, games, AI interactive projects and more.
Visual effects have added magic to bring the virtual world into the realm of believable realities. As suggested in the Unreal Virtual Production Field guide (Virtual Production Hub – Unreal Engine, n.d.), Virtual Production encompasses a widespread of CG (computer graphics) visualisations and productions. These are not new technologies, but moreover, techniques used by storytellers in the field of animation, game design, film making to bring together all aspects of characters and environments within the realm of believable reality.
Virtual environments offer the unique opportunity of virtually scouting real-life locations that are hard to access for any reason and use in a proposed project for the basis of storytelling and rich visual experiences.
(Bennett & Carter, 2014), the author, Joel Bennett argues (Adopting Virtual Production For Animated Filmaking) and presents a compelling case for virtual production and the role it plays in assisting directors and storytellers be more connected with the creative process starting from ideation to previsualization (previs) to production to post-production.
This new toolset affords new abilities, whereby virtual environments and visual effects created by computer-generated design processes are now available for an interactive experience.
Using virtual cameras, performance capture of an actor placed within the virtual production environment using a variety of real-time motion capture methods and systems helps in enhancing the connectedness of each aspect of the production pipeline. (Zhu & Li, 2016)
Using this emerging technology pipelines, and through our research we have been able to answer some crucial questions and understand the importance of virtual production, virtual environments, virtual cameras and virtual – digital humans as well as the integral roles they all play in the next generation story telling and gamification engagement.