Ontological Representations of Software Patterns

This paper is based on and advocates the trend in software engineering of extending the use of software patterns as means of structuring solutions to software development problems (be they motivated by best practice or by company interests and policies). The paper argues that, on the one hand, this development requires tools for automatic organisation, retrieval and explanation of software patterns. On the other hand, that the existence of such tools itself will facilitate the further development and employment of patterns in the software development process. The paper analyses existing pattern representations and concludes that they are inadequate for the kind of automation intended here. Adopting a standpoint similar to that taken in the semantic web, the paper proposes that feasible solutions can be built on the basis of ontological representations.Comment: 7 page

Representing Expressed Design Knowledge

The performance gap between expert and novice designers motivates the enhancement of design systems with expressed design knowledge to produce critiquing Intelligent Design Assistants. This paper focuses on the need for generic languages for representing expressed design knowledge for animation and flexible reuse in different design domains and in different design environments

Generating Real-World Impact from Academic Research: Experience Report from a University Impact Hub.

This paper presents an experience report of Digital Creativity Labs (DC Labs), an ‘impact hub’ created at the University of York in the UK. The impact hub is dedicated to fostering impactful collaborations between practitioners and researchers in the world of games, interactive media and the rich space in which these converge. In this paper we describe how the impact hub works and the activities undertaken to build a culture of academic entrepreneurship that allows academic researchers to understand the goals of external partners and align with them. We also present some illustrative case studies before proposing initial lessons learned from experiences of the Lab. Multi-disciplinary academic teams can generate excellent impact, but this doesn’t happen automatically. A culture of entrepreneurship is needed, and opportunities must be created for researchers to tackle problems jointly. Effort must be put into maintaining collaborations with partners

Stepping Through Remixed : Exploring the Limits of Linear Video in a Participatory Mental Health Film

Participatory filmmaking offers opportunities to counterbalance stereotypes about mental health often endorsed by the mainstream media, by involving participants who have a lived experience of mental health problems in production. It is our experience, however, that the linear videos traditionally resulting from such processes can fail to fully accommodate and represent a plurality of participant voices and viewpoints and, as a consequence, may lead to oversimplified accounts of mental health. Interactive film, on the other hand, could open up a space of opportunities for participatory films that allow multiple voices and complex representations to coexist. In this paper, we explore this opportunity by reviewing Stepping Through, a linear film produced by five men with mental health problems in 2016 about isolation and recovery. Through a series of workshops, the film was deconstructed by its creators, who analysed which additional possibilities of both form and content that could be revealed if the Stepping Through was transformed into a non-linear interactive film. Our findings reveal several expressive needs that a non-linear interactive film could more easily accommodate and opportunities for making participatory filmmaking truly dialogic by allowing an active exchange with audiences that preserves, rather than streamlines, the tension between collective views and personal accounts

Narrative Bytes : Data-Driven Content Production in Esports

Esports - video games played competitively that are broadcast to large audiences - are a rapidly growing new form of mainstream entertainment. Esports borrow from traditional TV, but are a qualitatively different genre, due to the high flexibility of content capture and availability of detailed gameplay data. Indeed, in esports, there is access to both real-time and historical data about any action taken in the virtual world. This aspect motivates the research presented here, the question asked being: can the information buried deep in such data, unavailable to the human eye, be unlocked and used to improve the live broadcast compilations of the events? In this paper, we present a large-scale case study of a production tool called Echo, which we developed in close collaboration with leading industry stakeholders. Echo uses live and historic match data to detect extraordinary player performances in the popular esport Dota 2, and dynamically translates interesting data points into audience-facing graphics. Echo was deployed at one of the largest yearly Dota 2 tournaments, which was watched by 25 million people. An analysis of 40 hours of video, over 46,000 live chat messages, and feedback of 98 audience members showed that Echo measurably affected the range and quality of storytelling, increased audience engagement, and invoked rich emotional response among viewers

Designing structural participation in an interactive film on mental health

The practice of interactive documentary can provide participatory opportunities thanks to its capacity for making space for audiences to leave their marks in a film. However, participants’ inclusion has often been limited to an a-posteriori contribution of materials rather than a structural involvement in the film design. What happens when we treat participants as authors and let them imagine and design their own interactive film? This paper explores how design processes from participatory filmmaking can be adapted to achieve this goal by presenting the design process that led to the production of an interactive participatory film on mental health, Stepping Through Interactive. Five participants with lived experience of mental health problems explored, designed, and produced a non-linear film form to effectively represent their personal accounts of mental health. We review the challenges faced and the strategies deployed in the design process in view of supporting similar forms of production in other contexts

Wait, But Why? Assessing Behavior Explanation Strategies for Real-Time Strategy Games

Work in AI-based explanation systems has uncovered an interesting contradiction: people prefer and learn best from 'why' explanations but expert esports commentators primarily answer 'what' questions when explaining complex behavior in real-time strategy games. Three possible explanations for this contradiction are: 1.) broadcast audiences are well-informed and do not need 'why' explanations; 2.) consuming 'why' explanations in real-time is too cognitively demanding for audiences; or 3.) producing live 'why' explanations is too difficult for commentators. We answer this open question by investigating the effects of explanation types and presentation modalities on audience recall and cognitive load in the context of an esports broadcast. We recruit 131 Dota 2 players and split them into three groups: the first group views a Dota 2 broadcast, the second group has the addition of an interactive map that provides 'what' explanations, and the final group receives the interactive map with detailed 'why' explanations. We find that participants who receive short interactive text prompts that provide 'what' explanations outperform the other two groups on a multiple-choice recall task. We also find that participants who receive detailed 'why' explanations submit the highest reports of cognitive load. Our evidence supports the conclusion that informed audiences benefit from explanations but do not have the cognitive resources to process 'why' answers in real-time. It also supports the conclusion that stacked explanation interventions across different modalities, like audio, interactivity, and text, can aid real-time comprehension when attention resources are limited. Together, our results indicate that interactive multimedia interfaces can be leveraged to quickly guide attention and provide low-cost explanations to improve intelligibility when time is too scarce for cognitively demanding 'why' explanations

WARDS : Modelling the Worth of Vision in MOBA’s

Multiplayer strategy games are examples of imperfect information games, where information about the game state can be retrieved through in-game mechanics. One such mechanic is vision. Within esports titles of this genre, such as League of Legends (LoL) and Dota 2, players often gather map information through the use of friendly units called wards. In LoL, one of the most popular esports title worldwide, warding has hitherto been evaluated only using a heuristic called vision score, provided by Riot, the game’s developer. In this paper, we examine the accuracy at LoL’s vision score at predicting the overall game-winner within the context supported by the game. We have ported LoL’s vision score to Dota 2, a similarly popular esports title, and compared its performance against a novel warding model. We have compared both models not only at predicting the overall winner, but also the current state of the game and their ability to predict and reflect short term game advantage and events. We found our model significantly outperformed LoL’s vision score. Additionally, we trained and evaluated a model for predicting the value of wards in real-time through the use of a Neural Network

DAX: Data-Driven Audience Experiences in Esports

Esports(competitivevideogames)havegrownintoaglobalphenomenon with over 450m viewers and a 1.5bn USD market. Esports broadcasts follow a similar structure to traditional sports. However, due to their virtual nature, a large and detailed amount data is available about in-game actions not currently accessible in traditional sport. This provides an opportunity to incorporate novel insights about complex aspects of gameplay into the audience experience – enabling more in-depth coverage for experienced viewers, and increased accessibility for newcomers. Previous research has only explored a limited range of ways data could be incorporated into esports viewing (e.g. data visualizations post-match) and only a few studies have investigated how the presentation of statistics impacts spectators’ experiences and viewing behaviors. We present Weavr, a companion app that allows audiences to consume datadriven insights during and around esports broadcasts. We report on deployments at two major tournaments, that provide ecologically valid findings about how the app’s features were experienced by audiences and their impact on viewing behavior. We discuss implications for the design of second-screen apps for live esports events, and for traditional sports as similar data becomes available for them via improved tracking technologies