KINECTWheels: wheelchair-accessible motion-based game interaction

The increasing popularity of full-body motion-based video games creates new challenges for game accessibility research. Many games strongly focus on able-bodied persons and require players to move around freely. To address this problem, we introduce KINECTWheels, a toolkit that facilitates the integration of wheelchair-based game input. Our library can help game designers to integrate wheelchair input at the development stage, and it can be configured to trigger keystroke events to make off-the-shelf PC games wheelchair-accessible

Recognizing Affiliation: Using Behavioural Traces to Predict the Quality of Social Interactions in Online Games

Online social interactions in multiplayer games can be supportive and positive or toxic and harmful; however, few methods can easily assess interpersonal interaction quality in games. We use behavioural traces to predict affiliation between dyadic strangers, facilitated through their social interactions in an online gaming setting. We collected audio, video, in-game, and self-report data from 23 dyads, extracted 75 features, trained Random Forest and Support Vector Machine models, and evaluated their performance predicting binary (high/low) as well as continuous affiliation toward a partner. The models can predict both binary and continuous affiliation with up to 79.1% accuracy (F1) and 20.1% explained variance (R2) on unseen data, with features based on verbal communication demonstrating the highest potential. Our findings can inform the design of multiplayer games and game communities, and guide the development of systems for matchmaking and mitigating toxic behaviour in online games.Comment: CHI '2

Games as neurofeedback training for children with FASD

Biofeedback games help people maintain specific mental or physical states and are useful to help children with cognitive impairments learn to self-regulate their brain function. However, biofeedback games are expensive and difficult to create and are not sufficiently appealing to hold a child's interest over the long term needed for effective biofeedback training. We present a system that turns off-the-shelf computer games into biofeedback games. Our approach uses texture-based graphical overlays that vary in their obfuscation of underlying screen elements based on the sensed physiological state of the child. The textures can be visually customized so that they appear to be integrated with the underlying game. Through a 12-week deployment, with 16 children with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, we show that our solution can hold a child's interest over a long term, and balances the competing needs of maintaining the fun of playing, while providing effective biofeedback training.Ye

Assessing the impact of visual design on the interpretation of aggregated playtesting data visualization

\u3cp\u3eMaking effective use of data generated from players interacting with games (often via playtesting to improve game quality) is a challenging task since the datasets are often mixed and very large. To address this, various visualization techniques have been introduced to help game developers cope with the data. However, there is a gap in research concerning the impact of different visual designs on the interpretation of gameplay data. In this paper, we propose four alternative visual designs of an aggregated visualization and assess how professional game developers interpret the data differently due to changes in the visual designs. Our results provide an understanding and a supporting argument about the impact of the visual properties transparency and shading (both positive and negative) on the interpretation of the represented data. This is an important contribution to the field of Games User Research given the current move towards data-informed decision making and the popularity of data visualizations.\u3c/p\u3