Online Playtesting With Crowdsourcing: Advantages and Challenges

Answering important design questions and delivering actionable insights within a couple of days is invaluable. Traditional playtests are often time consuming, expensive and deliver insights based on only a small sample of participants. Crowdsourced playtests may deliver comparable quality of feedback with less resources. However, several aspects have to be considered in order to receive meaningful and actionable results. Based on our experience, we provide five recommendations to ensure data quality and prevent fraud. Taken together, this suggests that crowd-sourced playtesting is a promising alternative for indie, non-profit and academic Games User Research

The role of gaming during difficult life experiences

HCI has become increasingly interested in the use of technology during difficult life experiences. Yet despite considerable popularity, little is known about how and why people engage with games in times of personal difficulty. Based on a qualitative analysis of an online survey (N=95), our findings indicate that games offered players much needed respite from stress, supported them in dealing with their feelings, facilitated social connections, stimulated personal change and growth, and provided a lifeline in times of existential doubt. However, despite an emphasis on gaming as being able to support coping in ways other activities did not, participants also referred to games as unproductive and as an obstacle to living well. We discuss these findings in relation to both coping process and outcome, while considering tensions around the potential benefits and perceived value of gaming

How does HCI Understand Human Autonomy and Agency?

Funding Information: Funded by the European Union (ERC, THEORYCRAFT, 101043198). Publisher Copyright: © 2023 Owner/Author.Human agency and autonomy have always been fundamental concepts in HCI. New developments, including ubiquitous AI and the growing integration of technologies into our lives, make these issues ever pressing, as technologies increase their ability to influence our behaviours and values. However, in HCI understandings of autonomy and agency remain ambiguous. Both concepts are used to describe a wide range of phenomena pertaining to sense-of-control, material independence, and identity. It is unclear to what degree these understandings are compatible, and how they support the development of research programs and practical interventions. We address this by reviewing 30 years of HCI research on autonomy and agency to identify current understandings, open issues, and future directions. From this analysis, we identify ethical issues, and outline key themes to guide future work. We also articulate avenues for advancing clarity and specificity around these concepts, and for coordinating integrative work across different HCI communities.Peer reviewe

Towards Democratisation of Games User Research:Exploring Playtesting Challenges of Indie Video Game Developers

Playtesting is a games user research (GUR) method used to evaluate design decisions based on feedback gathered from players with the goal to improve player experiences (PX). HCI games research has been actively working on and promoting best practices in GUR. However, these practices often require resources, knowledge and expertise, which are not readily available for indie video games developers. Thus, to better understand how GUR can support these developers, we conducted an interview study with 13 indie games professionals to learn about their practices and the challenges they face when doing playtesting. We report on the key findings from this study, including challenges with finding appropriate participants and handling the data from playtests. We provide a discussion of how existing GUR practices can be adapted and what HCI games research can do to help mitigate these challenges to make playtesting more accessible and impactful to indie video games developers

Self-Determination Theory in HCI : Shaping a Research Agenda

Self-determination theory (SDT) has become one of the most frequently used and well-validated theories used in HCI research, modelling the relation of basic psychological needs, intrinsic motivation, positive experience and wellbeing. This makes it a prime candidate for a ‘motor theme’ driving more integrated, systematic, theory-guided research. However, its use in HCI has remained superficial and disjointed across various application domains like games, health and wellbeing, or learning. This workshop therefore convenes researchers across HCI to co-create a research agenda on how SDT-informed HCI research can maximise its progress in the coming years

Disassembling gamification: the effects of points and meaning on user motivation and performance

Interest in gamification is growing steadily. But as the underlying mechanisms of gamification are not well understood yet, a closer examination of a gamified activity’s meaning and individual game design elements may provide more insights. We examine the effects of points – a basic element of gamification, – and meaningful framing – acknowledging participants’ contribution to a scientific cause, – on intrinsic motivation and performance in an online image annotation task. Based on these findings, we discuss implications and opportunities for future research on gamification

Surveys in Games User Research

Surveys are an essential method of data collection that can deliver generalizable and actionable insights about the player’s experience. In this chapter, we present practice- oriented guidance about when the method is appropriate, what constitutes a good questionnaire, and how to alleviate possible biases and issues with data quality

Vibing Together: Dance Experiences in Social Virtual Reality

Supplementary materials for publication: Roosa Piitulainen, Perttu Hämäläinen, and Elisa D. Mekler. 2022. Vibing Together: Dance Experiences in Social Virtual Reality. In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’22), April 29-May 5, 2022, New Orleans, LA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 18 pages. https://doi.org/10. 1145/3491102.350182