Tweeting your Destiny: Profiling Users in the Twitter Landscape around an Online Game

Social media has become a major communication channel for communities centered around video games. Consequently, social media offers a rich data source to study online communities and the discussions evolving around games. Towards this end, we explore a large-scale dataset consisting of over 1 million tweets related to the online multiplayer shooter Destiny and spanning a time period of about 14 months using unsupervised clustering and topic modelling. Furthermore, we correlate Twitter activity of over 3,000 players with their playtime. Our results contribute to the understanding of online player communities by identifying distinct player groups with respect to their Twitter characteristics, describing subgroups within the Destiny community, and uncovering broad topics of community interest.Comment: Accepted at IEEE Conference on Games 201

Students\u27 View on Instant Online Feedback for Presentations

This paper presents an empirical study investigating the use of instant online feedback on face-to-face presentations. This innovative way of using information technology for the specific communication purpose of giving feedback was researched in the context of a university course on “Human-Computer Interaction and Psychology”. A total sum of 80 students majoring in Computer Science participated in the instant online feedback activity and 907 feedbacks were given. 72 students returned the questionnaire for evaluating this educational scenario. Quantitative and qualitative analysis revealed that students seem to prefer giving feedback online in addition to a face-to-face setting for reasons like possible anonymity and more honesty. Study results further demonstrate that instant online feedback may facilitate students\u27 interest in and commitment to their presentations, finally also increasing their contributions\u27 quality

Making A Real Connection:Pro-Social Collaborative Play in Extended Realities – Trends, Challenges and Potentials

Extended reality (XR) has emerged as new cutting-edge technology, encompassing augmented, virtual and mixed reality. Extended reality redefines and elevates the game user experience within immersive and blended environments and opens new horizons, not just for gaming but also for enhancing pro-social connections through collaborative play. This workshop is dedicated to charting the course of trends, identifying and dissecting challenges, and probing the potential inherent in pro-social collaborative play within extended realities. We invite researchers, designers, and practitioners to come together, offering a platform to showcase different approaches. The core objective is to foster the exchange of knowledge and rigorous research findings within this emerging field. By doing so, we aim to build a network and lay a robust foundation for the future implementation of collaborative play in extended reality, paving the way for its seamless integration into the scientific discourse and practice

The role of blockchain technologies in digital assessment

Once information is stored on the Blockchain, it cannot be altered retroactively. This immutability makes Blockchain technology an ideal candidate to secure learning achievements and educational credentials. Keeping data trustworthy, secure and manipulation-proof has become an increasing issue in education due to the rise of digital learning environments, which often combine learning experiences, testing procedures and educational credential management. Currently, most digital learning environments safeguard their data using traditional safety systems (e.g. password protection), which in turn are not Blockchain-based, but controlled by a centralized authority. While these centralized systems provide a certain level of security against unauthorized access from outside the system, manipulation from within the system cannot be excluded. Users with high enough access rights (teachers, administrators, system managers) can still add, change or delete entries. This becomes an even greater problem when learning achievements are to be reflected in fair and transparent credit systems, and especially when these educational credits are to be valid across different institutions or even countries. Due to their ability to store data in a decentralized, transparent and manipulation-proof way, Blockchain-based technologies can provide solutions to this problem. The aim of this paper is to describe the status quo of Blockchain technologies in the educational sector, including the expected merits and drawbacks.peer-reviewe

»Virtual Skills Lab« – Transdisziplinäres Forschen zur Vermittlung sozialer Kompetenzen im digitalen Wandel

Inter- bzw. transdisziplinäre Forschungsarbeit ist im aktuellen Wissenschaftsbereich häufig gängige Praxis, obwohl die Verständnisse über Umfang und Strukturen einer solchen Zusammenarbeit keineswegs einheitlich sind. Die Autor*innen vermitteln anhand eines Virtual-Reality-Trainings für soziale Kompetenzen Einblicke in die Prozesse des gemeinsamen Forschens. In einer Reihe von Gesprächen reflektieren sie über die Ideenfindung zu ihrem Projekt des »Virtual Skills Lab«, die Entwicklung der dazugehörigen Forschungsfrage sowie deren Ausarbeitung in Form der interaktiven Szene. Entlang dieses Beispiels für virtuelles Training werden schließlich praktische Empfehlungen zur Gestaltung der übergreifenden Zusammenarbeit im digitalen Wandel angeboten

Marcus or Mira - Investigating the Perception of Virtual Agent Gender in Virtual Reality Role Play-Training

Immersive virtual training environments are used in various domains. In this work we focus on role-play training in virtual reality. In virtual role-play training conversations and interactions with virtual agents are often fundamental to the training. Therefore, the appearance and behavior of the agents plays an important role when designing role-play training.We focus on the gender appearance of agents, as gender is an important aspect for differentiation between characters. We conducted a study with 40 participants in which we investigated how agents gender appearance influences the perception of the agents´ personality traits and the self-perception of a participants’ assumed role in a training for social skills. This work contributes towards understanding the design-space of virtual agent design, virtual agent gender identity, and the design and development of immersive virtual reality role-play training

Designing for playfulness in human-AI authoring tools

Many human-AI authoring tools are used in a playful way, while being primarily designed for task-achievement—not playfulness. We argue that playfulness is an important yet overlooked factor of user behaviour and experience when interacting with such tools. Motivating and rewarding playfulness as an exploratory, task-agnostic, open, and subversive attitude can support the satisfaction of more diverse user goals, and have a strong, positive effect on the user experience, the emerging human-AI interaction, and the resulting artefact. In this paper, we motivate the importance of playfulness as user experience in human-AI authoring tools, and propose concrete strategies to design for playfulness in the human user through UI design, in the AI through algorithms, or through interventions to their dialog. We conclude with an outlook of the research agenda.peer-reviewe