The Periodic Table of Elements via an XNA-Powered Serious Game -- Digital Storytelling within Virtual Environments: “The Battle of Thermopylae” -- Games on Prescription! Evaluation of the Elinor Console for Home-Based Stroke Rehabilitation -- An Analysis of the Potential to Utilize Virtual Worlds to Enhance Edutainment and Improve the Wellbeing of the Ageing Population -- Course Lectures as Problem-Based Learning Interventions in Virtual Worlds -- Virtual Customers in a Multiagent Training Application -- Game Based Early Programming Education: The More You Play, the More You Learn -- Story Guided Virtual Environments in Educational Applications -- Rendering Technology of 3D Digital Chinese Ink-Wash Landscape Paintings Based on Maya -- Effects of RPG on Middle School Players’ Intrapersonal Intelligence -- Implementation of Lushan Virtual Digital Plant Museum -- Pedestrian Detection Based on Kernel Discriminative Sparse Representation -- The Design and Implementation of Computer-Aided Chinese Medicated Diet System -- Music-Driven Emotion Model Applied in Digitalized Dance Performance of Sacrificial Ceremony for Confucius -- Real-Time Rendering Framework in the Virtual Home Design System -- Multiple-Cue-Based Visual Object Contour Tracking with Incremental Learning -- Building Virtual Entertainment Environment with Tiled Display Wall and Motion Tracking -- A Calibration Method for Removing the Effect of Infrared Camera Self-radiance on the Accuracy of Temperature Measurement -- Enjoying of Traditional Chinese Shadow Play – A Cross-Culture Study -- A Patch-Based Data Reorganization Method for Coupling Large-Scale Simulations and Parallel Visualization -- The Boom and Bust and Boom of Educational Games.

This journal subline serves as a forum for stimulating and disseminating innovative research ideas, theories, emerging technologies, empirical investigations, state-of-the-art methods, and tools in all different genres of edutainment, such as game-based learning and serious games, interactive storytelling, virtual learning environments, VR-based education, and related fields. It covers aspects from educational and game theories, human-computer interaction, computer graphics, artificial intelligence, and systems design. This issue contains a special section on serious games with 8 outstanding contributions from the VS-Games 2011 conference; furthermore, there are 13 regular papers. These contributions clearly demonstrate the use of serious games and virtual worlds for edutainment applications and form a basis for further exploration and new ideas.