Towards Understanding the Importance of Co-Located Gameplay

© Lennart Nacke, 2015. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in CHI PLAY '15 Proceedings of the 2015 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play, https://doi.org/10.1145/2793107.2810312Analyzing the social con¬text present in a gameplay environment and its effect on player experience can provide insights informing the design and social value of games. We investigate the influence of social condition (cooperative or competitive play with a human player versus computer-controlled character) on player experience. The study controlled for co-presence by ensuring that another individual attending to the same stimulus was present in all conditions. Although physiological measures were not significant, subjective measures of arousal and pleasure were significantly different under varying conditions.SIGCHI ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human InteractionPeer-reviewe

Educational Games & Health Sciences

This webinar will begin with an overview of educational games and their benefits. Rina Wehbe, University of Waterloo, will speak about her research and recent game “Above Water” which informs people about strategies for coping with anxiety. Zeb Mathews, University of Tennessee, will speak about his game, “PubWizard” which quizzes graduate level informatics students\u27 knowledge of primary and secondary sources. This will be followed by an interactive exercise of exploring some of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) & National Library of Medicine (NLM) endorsed games. A Q&A session will follow. Are you interested in creating a game? We’ll have an exit survey to discuss hosting a game creation course. The learning objectives currently include the following: - Understand how educational games and gamification are unique - Learn about the possible benefits and advantages of learning with games - Better general understanding of the process of creating an educational game - Become acquainted with 2 educational games that intersect with the health sciences - Understand how basic game design elements are significant in educational games - Become familiar with some NIH & NLM endorsed games Outline:Introduction/Overview: 5-10 min.Rina Wehbe (Above Water): 20 min.Zeb Mathews (PubWizard): 20 min.Game Exercise: 15-20 min.Q&A & Survey: 5–10 min

PENERAPAN MULTIPLAYER PADA APLIKASI PERMAINAN ANDROID (Studi Kasus Aplikasi Permainan ”Bisa Jadi”)

Zaman sekarang pengguna smartphone didukung dengan internet,  jika pada waktu bersamaan smartphone dikombinasi dengan internet maka menciptakan hiburan baru, salah satunya yaitu aplikasi permainan multiplayer. Penerapan multiplayer pada aplikasi permainan android (studi kasus aplikasi permainan “bisa jadi”) merupakan pengembangan dari aplikasi android yang sudah ada sebelumnya. Penulis berharap pengguna lebih tertarik untuk mengajak temannya untuk bermain bersama. Aplikasi permainan “bisa jadi” merupakan aplikasi permainan yang mengadopsi konsep eat bulaga yang acaranya ada disalah satu stasiun televisi sekitar tahun 2010-2014 yang lalu. Pengujiannya dengan cara membandingkan antara aplikasi permainan secara single player dan “secara multiplayer kepada responden dengan cara dimainkan dan dilakukan pengisian kuisioner. Hasil pengujian sekitar 90% mengatakan bahwa permainan “bisa jadi” secara multiplayer layak untuk direkomendasikan ke teman. Kata kunci: aplikasi permainan ”bisa jadi”, Smartphone, Multiplayer, Single Playe

Designing Persuasively using Playful Elements

Alongside productivity and communication, computers are a valuable tool for diversion and amusement. Game Designers leverage the multifaceted world of computing to create applications that can be developed persuasively; designs can be formulated to compel users towards actions and behaviours which range from engaging in the game’s mechanics, micro-transactions, or in more complex manifestations such as encouraging reflection via the evaluation of the moral argument presented in the gameplay narrative. In my dissertation, I explore how to create compelling experiences during playful interactions. Particularly, I explore how design decisions affect users’ behaviours, and evaluations of the gaming experience to learn more about crafting persuasive mechanics in games. First, I present research on calibrating aspects of difficulty and character behaviour in the design of simple games to create more immersive experiences. My work on calibration of game difficulty, and enemy behaviour contribute insight regarding the potential of games to create engaging activities, which inspire prolonged play sessions. Further work in my dissertation explores how players interact with in-game entities they perceive as human and explores the boundaries of acceptable player interaction during co-located gaming situations. My early work gives rise to deeper questions regarding perspectives on co-players during gaming experiences. Specifically, I probe the question of how players perceive human versus computer-controlled teammates during a shared gaming experience. Additionally, I explore how game design factors in the context of a tightly-coupled shared multi-touch large display gaming experience can influence the way that people interact and, in turn, their perspectives on one another to ask: ‘how can games be used persuasively to inspire positive behaviours and social interaction?’. Issues of perspectives are a theme I carry forward in my work by exploring how game dynamics – in particular the use of territoriality – can be used to foster collaborative behaviours. Further, I discuss how my work contributes to the study of persuasive game design, games with purpose, and cement my findings in relation to the games studies and computer science literature. Last, I discuss future work, in which I discuss my ambitions for using persuasive design for social good via Games4Change

Investigating the Effect of Pace Mechanic on Player Motivation and Experience

Games have long been employed to motivate people towards positive behavioral change. Numerous studies, for example, have found people who were previously disinterested in a task can be enticed to spend hours gathering information, developing strategies, and solving complex problems through video games. While the effect of factors such as generational influence or genre appeal have previously been researched extensively in serious games, an aspect in the design of games that remains unexplored through scientific inquiry is the pace mechanic—how time passes in a game. Time could be continuous as in the real world (real-time) or it could be segmented into phases (turn-based). Pace mechanic is fiercely debated by many strategy game fans, where real-time games are widely considered to be more engaging, and the slower pace of turn-based games has been attributed to the development of mastery. In this thesis, I present the results of an exploratory mixed-methods user study to evaluate whether pace mechanic and type of game alter the player experience and are contributing factors to how quickly participants feel competent at a game. 36 participants were invited to play one session of a real-time game and one session of a turn-based game, and asked to provide feedback about their experience. The results of the study highlight some of the differences between these two pace mechanics. Drawing inspiration from previous work in game design, these differences are then used to present implications for the design of games for both play and serious tasks (e.g., educational games)

Design and Evaluation of Intelligent Reward Structures in Human Computation Games

Despite the ubiquity of artificial intelligence, some problems and procedures— such as building commonsense knowledge understanding or generating creative works— have no or few effective algorithmic solutions, yet are considered straightforward for humans to solve. Human computation games (HCGs) are playful, game-based interfaces for tackling these problems through crowdsourcing. HCGs have been used to solve tasks that were and still are considered complex for computational algorithms such as image tagging, protein synthesis, 3D structure reconstruction, and creative artifact generation. However, despite these successes, HCGs have not seen broad adoption compared to other types of serious digital games. Among the many reasons for this lack of adoption is the reality that these games are typically not seen as engaging or compelling to play, as well as the fact that creating HCGs comes at a high development cost to task providers who are typically not game development experts. This thesis is a step towards building and establishing a more formalized design understanding of how to create HCGs that both provide a compelling player experience and complete the underlying task effectively. In this thesis, I explore reward mechanics in HCGs. Reward mechanics are integral to HCGs due their associations with player motivation, compensation, and task validation. I first propose a framework for understanding HCG mechanics and advocate for an experimental methodology evaluating both player experience and task completion metrics to understand variations in HCG mechanics. I then use these tools to frame and design three experiments that explore small-scale variations of reward systems in HCGs: reward functions, reward distribution, and reward personalization. These studies demonstrate that even small variations in rewards (i.e., offering players the ability to choose the type of reward) may have significant positive effects on both player experience and task completion metrics. I also show that some variations (i.e., co-located, competitive reward scoring) may have both positive and negative tradeoffs across these metrics. Moreover, this work observes that existing, anecdotal design wisdom for HCGs may not always hold (i.e., allowing players to verbally collude actually predicts higher task solution accuracy). Altogether, this thesis demonstrates that certain aspects of reward systems in HCGs can be varied to improve the player experience without compromising task completion metrics, and builds more empirically-tested design knowledge for creating more engaging, effective HCGs.Ph.D