Games have been part of human–computer interaction (HCI) research since the first CHI conference in 1982. At that gathering, Tom Malone, then at Xerox PARC, presented insights from the study of computer games to motivate a set of design principles for “enjoyable” user interfaces (Malone, 1982). Over the ensuing years, games-related HCI research has steadily grown as a subarea of CHI (e.g. Keeker, Pagulayan, Sykes, & Lazzaro, 2004; Pausch, Gold, Skelly, & Thiel, 1994), with more rapid acceleration in the last 10 years. A recent metareview (Carter, Downs, Nansen, Harrop, & Gibbs, 2014) analyzed game- and play-related content at CHI between 2003 and 2013, finding that the overall percentage of the CHI proceedings related to play and games rose from 2.5% to a peak of 9.5% in 2012. In the last few years, venues for game-related HCI work have expanded as well. From 2011 to 2013, two of this special issue’s editors (Bernhaupt & Isbister, 2013) formed a Games and Entertainment Special Community devoted to game-related HCI research at CHI, leading to the permanent addition to CHI venues of a Student Game Design Competition. And in 2014, a new ACM-sponsored conference was created as a specialized peer-reviewed venue for the intersection of HCI and Games—CHI-Play. Game-related research is clearly a valued, integral, and growing segment of HCI research

Bernhaupt, R.

de Freitas, S.

Isbister, K.

English

Bernhaupt, Regina

Isbister, Katherine

De Freitas, Sara

Open Archive Toulouse Archive Ouverte

   Open Archive TOULOUSE Archive Ouverte (OATAO)  OATAO is an open access repository that collects the work of Toulouse researchers and makes it freely available over the web where possible.  This is an author-deposited version published in : http://oatao.univ-toulouse.fr/ Eprints ID : 14968 To link to this article : DOI:10.1080/07370024.2015.1016573 URL : http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2015.1016573 To cite this version :  Bernhaupt, Regina and Isbister, Katherine and De Freitas, Sara Introduction to this Special Issue on HCI and Games. (2015) Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 30 (n° 3-4). pp. 195-201. ISSN 0737-0024 Any correspondence concerning this service should be sent to the repository administrator: staff-oatao@listes-diff.inp-toulouse.fr Introduction to this Special Issue on HCIand GamesRegina Bernhaupt,1 Katherine Isbister,2 and Sara de Freitas31Ruwido Inc, Austria2New York University3Murdoch University, AustraliaFRAMING GAMES ANDHUMAN–COMPUTERINTERACTION RESEARCHGames have been part of human–computer interaction (HCI) research sincethe first CHI conference in 1982. At that gathering, Tom Malone, then at XeroxPARC, presented insights from the study of computer games to motivate a set ofdesign principles for “enjoyable” user interfaces (Malone, 1982). Over the ensuingyears, games-related HCI research has steadily grown as a subarea of CHI (e.g. Keeker,Pagulayan, Sykes, & Lazzaro, 2004; Pausch, Gold, Skelly, & Thiel, 1994), with morerapid acceleration in the last 10 years. A recent metareview (Carter, Downs, Nansen,Harrop, & Gibbs, 2014) analyzed game- and play-related content at CHI between2003 and 2013, finding that the overall percentage of the CHI proceedings related toplay and games rose from 2.5% to a peak of 9.5% in 2012. In the last few years, venuesfor game-related HCI work have expanded as well. From 2011 to 2013, two of this spe-cial issue’s editors (Bernhaupt & Isbister, 2013) formed a Games and EntertainmentSpecial Community devoted to game-related HCI research at CHI, leading to the per-manent addition to CHI venues of a Student Game Design Competition. And in 2014,a new ACM-sponsored conference was created as a specialized peer-reviewed venueRegina Bernhaupt (Regina.Bernhaupt@irit.fr, http://www.irit.fr/recherches/ICS/people/bernhaupt/) is a researcher in human–computer interaction with an interest in user experience especiallywhen related to entertainment applications; she is Director of User Experience research at ruwidoInc, Austria, and Visiting Professor at Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse. KatherineIsbister (katherine.isbister@nyu.edu, katherineinterface.com) is a human–computer interactionresearcher with an interest in games and social and emotional affordances; she is Research Directorof the Game Innovation Lab in the School of Engineering at New York University. Sara de Freitas(s.defreitas@murdoch.edu.au, http://saradefreitas.wordpress.com/) has a background in technology-enhanced learning and information sciences; she founded and ran the Serious Games Institute inthe United Kingdom for 6 years and is Pro Vice Chancellor for Learning and Teaching at MurdochUniversity in Western Australia.for the intersection of HCI and Games—CHI-Play. Game-related research is clearly avalued, integral, and growing segment of HCI research.Despite this trajectory, there has been sporadic discussion about what role gamesresearch can and should play in shaping the larger field of HCI (Zaphiris and Ang,2007). Here we outline some of the benefits that Games and HCI research brings toour field as a whole.Understanding Interactive Experience and MotivationFirst, there is the great and enduring appeal that games offer in providing com-pelling interactive experiences. Well-crafted games motivate players to persist forhours, to learn very difficult tasks with pleasure, and to form powerful communitiesof practice, gladly devoting a great deal of time, money, and attention. Tom Malone’s(1982) CHI paper points to this aspect of studying games—asking what games canteach us about designing interactive experiences more broadly. What causes people topersist in and enjoy gameplay? Are there processes of design and evaluation that can betransferred to other software contexts? These questions turn out to be quite challeng-ing to answer, pushing the limits of our capacity to measure interactive experience andthrowing into question how we go about designing and developing truly compellinginteractive experiences.Motivating Behavior ChangeGames and gamelike qualities can also solve practical problems and increasesocial good. This is a strong argument to take games research seriously for those whoare not so engaged by entertainment applications. Not only are there challenges tocreating such “serious games,” but also there are many outstanding research questionsarising from this approach (Marczewski, 2014). When is it a good idea to create a gameto inspire behavior change? What sorts of gamelike elements will motivate a desiredbehavior, and why?Exploration of New Interactive Methods and TechniquesAnother clear value of games concerns how the “magic circle” of play offersa testbed for exploring new interaction techniques and experiences, enabling morerapid adoption of novel input techniques. The Kinect device and the Oculus Rift areexamples—both were first deployed commercially with games as the primary use case.The widespread availability of these devices has enabled others working in HCI toexpand the possibility space of interaction, for example, recent work examining theuse of the Kinect in surgical applications (O’Hara et al., 2014).Taken together, the articles in this special issue reinforce and elaborate howgames-related HCI research contributes to the broader field of HCI. Game researchersstudy novel interaction technologies, tackle thorny design problems, and examine userpopulations in ways that have applicability to other subdomains of HCI, as we hopethe articles in this special issue will show.Finally, however, we also firmly believe that not all game-related HCI researchneeds to prove obvious value outside the domain of games. Games are a growingcategory of interactive system with a huge end user population. They therefore meritstudy in their own right, and we also need to better understand the value and impact ofgames on the everyday lives of their users. How do games shape our daily experienceand our long-term well-being? How do people play out their humanness in gamingsituations? What are best practices in game design and evaluation, and why? A growingbody of game research examines these concerns. We did not solicit this type of paperfor the special issue, but we encourage the reader to seek out such papers at CHI-Play,as well as at CHI and in other general HCI venues.ARTICLES IN THIS SPECIAL ISSUEIn our call for papers, we put forth several subthemes we were seeing in currentGames and HCI research:1. Design and evaluation of “serious” games and the relationship of these practices tobest practices in HCI.2. Novel interaction paradigms and modes of interaction arising from games (suchas physical interfaces, natural user interfaces, crowd modeling of characters, aug-mented reality).3. Innovation of methodologies and techniques for conducting game-related HCIresearch.4. Studies of design and development practices and values from the game develop-ment community.The final set of articles in this special issue cover these themes.Iacovides, Cox, McAndrew, Aczel, and Scanlon take a close look at the con-nection between player involvement and learning. They use interviews, gameplayobservations, and player diaries to develop a rich picture of how the process of learningand mastering a game modulates player involvement, generating a set of 14 theoreticalclaims concerning micro- and macroinvolvement; breakdowns in action, understand-ing, and involvement; progress; and agency, meaning, and compelling gameplay.Although they focus on entertainment contexts, the authors argue how their findingsalso apply to educational games. One could argue too that their theory has relevancefor understanding the mastery of other complex interactive systems.Alankus and Kelleher created a motion-based game to improve stroke survivors’rehabilitation when this is unsupervised by a clinician. In particular, their focus ison reducing the compensatory motions (improper movements that impede the fullrehabilitation process) that patients tend to make when doing unsupervised exercises.The researchers introduced a technique to measure these movements and designeda game that uses these measurements, along with appropriate incentives and disin-centives, to reduce these kinds of movements. Along with promising new results,this work demonstrates the challenges in creating games for impact—the game itselfmust be compelling and engaging, and must address the impact goal in ways that aremeasurable and, ideally, broadly applicable.Sim, Read, Gregory and Xu explore whether children can be guided througha participatory design process in designing serious games for children in other cul-tural contexts. The authors engaged 50 children in a UK primary school in designingmobile-based games to teach proper hand-washing technique to Ugandan children.The UK children used drawings to communicate their ideas, which were distilled intoa single game by the authors and developed and taken to Uganda. They comparedthis game to Angry Birds, a popular mobile game, using simple survey-style evalua-tion tools aimed at children. Twenty-five children at a Uganda school took part in theevaluation. The authors found that both games were considered fun by the Ugandanchildren, with somemixed results from their survey instruments regarding which gamewas preferred overall. The authors conclude that participatory design can be effectivelyused to allow children to design serious game concepts that are implementable and thatare enjoyable for children in another cultural group.Deterding presents his “lens of intrinsic skill atoms”—a framework for under-standing and engaging in what he terms “gameful design,” more broadly known asgamification. Deterding reviews extant knowledge from research and industry con-texts about this type of design as well as methods for achieving and evaluating results,identifying flaws that his framework addresses. He outlines a gameful design method-ology that combines intrinsic skill atoms with Schell’s concept of design lenses (Schell,2008). As Deterding puts it,In pursuing her needs, a user’s activity entails certain inherent, skill-based chal-lenges. A gameful system supports the user’s needs by both (a) directly facilitatingtheir attainment, removing all extraneous challenges, and (b) restructuring remain-ing inherent challenges into nested, interlinked feedback loops of goals, actions,objects, rules, and feedback that afford motivating experiences.Deterding argues for the benefits of his method in increasing rigor, effectiveness, andthe capacity for evaluation of gameful designs. He has used this method in 19 designprojects and training workshops with more than 300 participants to date.Wadley, Carter, and Gibbs take a close look at the influence of voice on play-ers’ experience of online gaming environments with the aim of understanding bestpractices for incorporating voice into design of these “virtual worlds.” This articlesummarizes over a decade of research presenting a comprehensive picture of theimpact of voice across a range of game genres. To properly grasp the impact ofvoice on gameplay, the researchers focused on gathering data from players in their“real-world” locations, engaging players in diary keeping and interviews to get a long-term sense of how voice input affected their play. The authors also examined shifts inthe use of voice in games from a radio metaphor (as if speaking to team members on aradio) to a proximity-based metaphor (hearing only those nearby). Their findings rangefrom the benefits of voice for coordination of teams to a sense of awkwardness abouthow voice reveals a player’s social identity, diminishing the ability to role-play. Overall,their research paints a nuanced picture adding complexity to the naïve assumptionthat voice will be more fluid and effective for players, instead presenting the trade-offsinvolved in evoking voice as a modality.Isbister and Mueller’s work targets games that use movement sensing as input—something that all major gaming consoles now offer in addition to buttons andjoysticks, and that is incorporated into many modern mobile and tablet platforms.They present 11 guidelines for designing movement-based games, distilled from theirown research and design practice and validated through interviews with movement-based game design and evaluation experts. The authors extend the application of theirguidelines into the broader HCI field by providing conceptual links and referencesaccompanying each guideline. For example, one guideline is “celebrating movementarticulation”—designing a game’s movements and reward structures to encourageplayers to pay attention to the manner in which they execute a particular gesture ormotion. The authors point out that this guideline has relevance to home-based ges-tural systems, which could attend to and adapt to the style in which movements andgestures are performed—for example, raising the volume of music higher if a gestureis performed in a more rapid and intense manner. The authors note that professionalgame designers rarely record this kind of practitioner knowledge, instead transmittingit orally to others on their development teams, and occasionally giving presentations atconferences. Thus this article also has value as a snapshot of expert practice in handlingmovement-based interaction in games, which can be applied to other movement-basedcontexts in HCI.LOOKING AHEADAn Emerging Research AgendaThere are many open issues and challenges remaining in Games and HCIresearch, some of which we touched on earlier. There are basic questions about thenature of games and play and the application of games and game-like qualities, as wellas the impact and experience of games in everyday life. As new input, display, sensing,and networking technologies emerge, the possibility space of games and play expands,generating further research, and exciting new applications.Linking Between Games Research, HCI, and Application DomainsThere are logistical challenges as well. The breadth of work at present, andthe proliferation of presentation and publication venues, can make it difficult forresearchers working in the games area to keep up with one another’s work. We believeit would be helpful to create an up-to-date taxonomy of game research subareas, withlinkages back to related fields helping all to draw upon extant literature. For example,game researchers aiming to measure enjoyment or flow should refer back to work inthe larger field of HCI operationalizing and measuring these constructs. And SeriousGames researchers might look to capitalize on HCI research methodology as well asthe methods of the target domain (e.g., health, education, conservation) (Games forChange, 2014).Synergy Between Researchers and PractitionersThere is also room for increased integration of practitioner and researcher knowl-edge and efforts (as is true for HCI in general). A good model for this is the yearlyGame User Research workshop at CHI, which attracts a good mix of industry- andresearch-based attendees. At present, there are still very few active game designers anddevelopers who attend CHI and other HCI conference venues—their presence wouldhelp to enrich and validate research approaches to games.Although there is much work yet to do, it is clear that Game and HCI researchis a vibrant area, and an enduring and valuable part of the HCI landscape. We lookforward to the continued evolution of this exciting subfield.NOTESAcknowledgments. We thank Steve Whittaker for his tireless support and patience inputting together this special issue, through illnesses and job changes and other challenges thatslowed the process.REFERENCESBernhaupt, R., & Isbister, K. (2013). A new perspective for the games and entertainment com-munity. Proceedings of the CHI 2013 Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems. NewYork, NY: ACM.Bluestein, A. (2014, November). Video games for grown-ups. Fast Company. Retrieved fromhttp://www.fastcompany.com/3038466/video-games-for-grown-upsCarter, M., Downs, J., Nansen, B., Harrop, M., & Gibbs, M. (2014). Paradigms of gamesresearch in HCI: A review of 10 years of research at CHI. Proceedings of the First ACMSIGCHI Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play. New York, NY: ACM.Games for Change. (2014).Games for Change. Retrieved from http://www.gamesforchange.org/Keeker, K., Pagulayan, R., Sykes, J., & Lazzaro, N. (2004). The untapped world of video games.In CHI ’04 extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1610–1611). New York,NY: ACM.Malone, T. W. (1982). Heuristics for designing enjoyable user interfaces: Lessons from com-puter games. Proceedings of the CHI 1982 Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems.New York, NY: ACM.Marczewski, A. (2002). Gamification: A simple introduction. Amazon Digital Services.O’Hara, K., Gonzalez, G., Penney, G., Sellen, A., Corish, R., Mentis, H., . . . Carrell,T. (2014). Interactional order and constructed ways of seeing with touchless imag-ing systems in surgery. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 23, 299–337.doi:10.1007/s10606-014-9203-4Pausch, R., Gold, R., Skelly, T., & Thiel, D. (1994). What HCI designers can learn from videogame designers. InConference Companion onHuman Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 177–178).New York, NY: ACM. doi:10.1145/259963.260220Schell, J. (2008). The art of game design: A book of lenses. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: CRC Press.Zaphiris, P., & Ang, C. S. (2007). HCI issues in computer games. Interacting with Computers, 19,135–139. doi:10.1016/j.intcom.2006.08.007ARTICLES IN THIS SPECIAL ISSUEAlankus, G., & Kelleher, C. (2015). Reducing compensatory motions in motion-based videogames for stroke rehabilitation.Human-Computer Interaction, 30, 232–262.Deterding, S. (2015). The lens of intrinsic skill atoms: A method for gameful design. Human-Computer Interaction, 30, 294–335.Iacovides, I., Cox, A., McAndrew, P., Aczel, J., & Scanlon, E. (2015). Game-play break-downs and breakthroughs: Exploring the relationship between action, understanding andinvolvement.Human-Computer Interaction, 30, 202–231.Isbister, K., & Mueller, F. (2015). Guidelines for the design of movement-based games andtheir relevance to HCI.Human-Computer Interaction, 30, 366–399.Sim, G., Read, J., & Gregory, P. (2015). From England to Uganda: Children designing andevaluating serious games.Human-Computer Interaction, 30, 263–293.Wadley, G., Carter, M., & Gibbs, M. (2015). Voice in virtual worlds: The design, use andinfluence of voice chat in online play.Human-Computer Interaction, 30, 336–365.

Introduction to this Special Issue on HCI and Games

Research Repository

  MURDOCH RESEARCH REPOSITORY    This is the author’s final version of the work, as accepted for publication  following peer review but without the publisher’s layout or pagination.    http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2015.1016573       Bernhaupt, R., Isbister, K. and de Freitas, S. (2015) Introduction to this special issue on HCI and games. Human–Computer Interaction, 30 (3-4). pp. 195-201.     http://researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/26946/       Copyright © 2015 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.  It is posted here for your personal use. No further distribution is permitted.   Introduction to this Special Issue on HCIand GamesRegina Bernhaupt,1 Katherine Isbister,2 and Sara de Freitas31Ruwido Inc, Austria2New York University3Murdoch University, AustraliaFRAMING GAMES AND HUMAN–COMPUTERINTERACTION RESEARCHGames have been part of human–computer interaction (HCI) research sincethe first CHI conference in 1982. At that gathering, Tom Malone, then at XeroxPARC, presented insights from the study of computer games to motivate a set ofdesign principles for “enjoyable” user interfaces (Malone, 1982). Over the ensuingyears, games-related HCI research has steadily grown as a subarea of CHI (e.g. Keeker,Pagulayan, Sykes, & Lazzaro, 2004; Pausch, Gold, Skelly, & Thiel, 1994), with morerapid acceleration in the last 10 years. A recent metareview (Carter, Downs, Nansen,Harrop, & Gibbs, 2014) analyzed game- and play-related content at CHI between2003 and 2013, finding that the overall percentage of the CHI proceedings related toplay and games rose from 2.5% to a peak of 9.5% in 2012. In the last few years, venuesfor game-related HCI work have expanded as well. From 2011 to 2013, two of this spe-cial issue’s editors (Bernhaupt & Isbister, 2013) formed a Games and EntertainmentSpecial Community devoted to game-related HCI research at CHI, leading to the per-manent addition to CHI venues of a Student Game Design Competition. And in 2014,a new ACM-sponsored conference was created as a specialized peer-reviewed venueRegina Bernhaupt (Regina.Bernhaupt@irit.fr, http://www.irit.fr/recherches/ICS/people/bernhaupt/) is a researcher in human–computer interaction with an interest in user experience especiallywhen related to entertainment applications; she is Director of User Experience research at ruwidoInc, Austria, and Visiting Professor at Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse. KatherineIsbister (katherine.isbister@nyu.edu, katherineinterface.com) is a human–computer interactionresearcher with an interest in games and social and emotional affordances; she is Research Directorof the Game Innovation Lab in the School of Engineering at New York University. Sara de Freitas(s.defreitas@murdoch.edu.au, http://saradefreitas.wordpress.com/) has a background in technology-enhanced learning and information sciences; she founded and ran the Serious Games Institute inthe United Kingdom for 6 years and is Pro Vice Chancellor for Learning and Teaching at MurdochUniversity in Western Australia.for the intersection of HCI and Games—CHI-Play. Game-related research is clearly avalued, integral, and growing segment of HCI research.Despite this trajectory, there has been sporadic discussion about what role gamesresearch can and should play in shaping the larger field of HCI (Zaphiris and Ang,2007). Here we outline some of the benefits that Games and HCI research brings toour field as a whole.Understanding Interactive Experience and MotivationFirst, there is the great and enduring appeal that games offer in providing com-pelling interactive experiences. Well-crafted games motivate players to persist forhours, to learn very difficult tasks with pleasure, and to form powerful communitiesof practice, gladly devoting a great deal of time, money, and attention. Tom Malone’s(1982) CHI paper points to this aspect of studying games—asking what games canteach us about designing interactive experiences more broadly. What causes people topersist in and enjoy gameplay? Are there processes of design and evaluation that can betransferred to other software contexts? These questions turn out to be quite challeng-ing to answer, pushing the limits of our capacity to measure interactive experience andthrowing into question how we go about designing and developing truly compellinginteractive experiences.Motivating Behavior ChangeGames and gamelike qualities can also solve practical problems and increasesocial good. This is a strong argument to take games research seriously for those whoare not so engaged by entertainment applications. Not only are there challenges tocreating such “serious games,” but also there are many outstanding research questionsarising from this approach (Marczewski, 2014). When is it a good idea to create a gameto inspire behavior change? What sorts of gamelike elements will motivate a desiredbehavior, and why?Exploration of New Interactive Methods and TechniquesAnother clear value of games concerns how the “magic circle” of play offersa testbed for exploring new interaction techniques and experiences, enabling morerapid adoption of novel input techniques. The Kinect device and the Oculus Rift areexamples—both were first deployed commercially with games as the primary use case.The widespread availability of these devices has enabled others working in HCI toexpand the possibility space of interaction, for example, recent work examining theuse of the Kinect in surgical applications (O’Hara et al., 2014).Taken together, the articles in this special issue reinforce and elaborate howgames-related HCI research contributes to the broader field of HCI. Game researchersstudy novel interaction technologies, tackle thorny design problems, and examine userpopulations in ways that have applicability to other subdomains of HCI, as we hopethe articles in this special issue will show.Finally, however, we also firmly believe that not all game-related HCI researchneeds to prove obvious value outside the domain of games. Games are a growingcategory of interactive system with a huge end user population. They therefore meritstudy in their own right, and we also need to better understand the value and impact ofgames on the everyday lives of their users. How do games shape our daily experienceand our long-term well-being? How do people play out their humanness in gamingsituations? What are best practices in game design and evaluation, and why? A growingbody of game research examines these concerns. We did not solicit this type of paperfor the special issue, but we encourage the reader to seek out such papers at CHI-Play,as well as at CHI and in other general HCI venues.ARTICLES IN THIS SPECIAL ISSUEIn our call for papers, we put forth several subthemes we were seeing in currentGames and HCI research:1. Design and evaluation of “serious” games and the relationship of these practices tobest practices in HCI.2. Novel interaction paradigms and modes of interaction arising from games (suchas physical interfaces, natural user interfaces, crowd modeling of characters, aug-mented reality).3. Innovation of methodologies and techniques for conducting game-related HCIresearch.4. Studies of design and development practices and values from the game develop-ment community.The final set of articles in this special issue cover these themes.Iacovides, Cox, McAndrew, Aczel, and Scanlon take a close look at the con-nection between player involvement and learning. They use interviews, gameplayobservations, and player diaries to develop a rich picture of how the process of learningand mastering a game modulates player involvement, generating a set of 14 theoreticalclaims concerning micro- and macroinvolvement; breakdowns in action, understand-ing, and involvement; progress; and agency, meaning, and compelling gameplay.Although they focus on entertainment contexts, the authors argue how their findingsalso apply to educational games. One could argue too that their theory has relevancefor understanding the mastery of other complex interactive systems.Alankus and Kelleher created a motion-based game to improve stroke survivors’rehabilitation when this is unsupervised by a clinician. In particular, their focus ison reducing the compensatory motions (improper movements that impede the fullrehabilitation process) that patients tend to make when doing unsupervised exercises.The researchers introduced a technique to measure these movements and designeda game that uses these measurements, along with appropriate incentives and disin-centives, to reduce these kinds of movements. Along with promising new results,this work demonstrates the challenges in creating games for impact—the game itselfmust be compelling and engaging, and must address the impact goal in ways that aremeasurable and, ideally, broadly applicable.Sim, Read, Gregory and Xu explore whether children can be guided througha participatory design process in designing serious games for children in other cul-tural contexts. The authors engaged 50 children in a UK primary school in designingmobile-based games to teach proper hand-washing technique to Ugandan children.The UK children used drawings to communicate their ideas, which were distilled intoa single game by the authors and developed and taken to Uganda. They comparedthis game to Angry Birds, a popular mobile game, using simple survey-style evalua-tion tools aimed at children. Twenty-five children at a Uganda school took part in theevaluation. The authors found that both games were considered fun by the Ugandanchildren, with some mixed results from their survey instruments regarding which gamewas preferred overall. The authors conclude that participatory design can be effectivelyused to allow children to design serious game concepts that are implementable and thatare enjoyable for children in another cultural group.Deterding presents his “lens of intrinsic skill atoms”—a framework for under-standing and engaging in what he terms “gameful design,” more broadly known asgamification. Deterding reviews extant knowledge from research and industry con-texts about this type of design as well as methods for achieving and evaluating results,identifying flaws that his framework addresses. He outlines a gameful design method-ology that combines intrinsic skill atoms with Schell’s concept of design lenses (Schell,2008). As Deterding puts it,In pursuing her needs, a user’s activity entails certain inherent, skill-based chal-lenges. A gameful system supports the user’s needs by both (a) directly facilitatingtheir attainment, removing all extraneous challenges, and (b) restructuring remain-ing inherent challenges into nested, interlinked feedback loops of goals, actions,objects, rules, and feedback that afford motivating experiences.Deterding argues for the benefits of his method in increasing rigor, effectiveness, andthe capacity for evaluation of gameful designs. He has used this method in 19 designprojects and training workshops with more than 300 participants to date.Wadley, Carter, and Gibbs take a close look at the influence of voice on play-ers’ experience of online gaming environments with the aim of understanding bestpractices for incorporating voice into design of these “virtual worlds.” This articlesummarizes over a decade of research presenting a comprehensive picture of theimpact of voice across a range of game genres. To properly grasp the impact ofvoice on gameplay, the researchers focused on gathering data from players in their“real-world” locations, engaging players in diary keeping and interviews to get a long-term sense of how voice input affected their play. The authors also examined shifts inthe use of voice in games from a radio metaphor (as if speaking to team members on aradio) to a proximity-based metaphor (hearing only those nearby). Their findings rangefrom the benefits of voice for coordination of teams to a sense of awkwardness abouthow voice reveals a player’s social identity, diminishing the ability to role-play. Overall,their research paints a nuanced picture adding complexity to the naïve assumptionthat voice will be more fluid and effective for players, instead presenting the trade-offsinvolved in evoking voice as a modality.Isbister and Mueller’s work targets games that use movement sensing as input—something that all major gaming consoles now offer in addition to buttons andjoysticks, and that is incorporated into many modern mobile and tablet platforms.They present 11 guidelines for designing movement-based games, distilled from theirown research and design practice and validated through interviews with movement-based game design and evaluation experts. The authors extend the application of theirguidelines into the broader HCI field by providing conceptual links and referencesaccompanying each guideline. For example, one guideline is “celebrating movementarticulation”—designing a game’s movements and reward structures to encourageplayers to pay attention to the manner in which they execute a particular gesture ormotion. The authors point out that this guideline has relevance to home-based ges-tural systems, which could attend to and adapt to the style in which movements andgestures are performed—for example, raising the volume of music higher if a gestureis performed in a more rapid and intense manner. The authors note that professionalgame designers rarely record this kind of practitioner knowledge, instead transmittingit orally to others on their development teams, and occasionally giving presentations atconferences. Thus this article also has value as a snapshot of expert practice in handlingmovement-based interaction in games, which can be applied to other movement-basedcontexts in HCI.LOOKING AHEADAn Emerging Research AgendaThere are many open issues and challenges remaining in Games and HCIresearch, some of which we touched on earlier. There are basic questions about thenature of games and play and the application of games and game-like qualities, as wellas the impact and experience of games in everyday life. As new input, display, sensing,and networking technologies emerge, the possibility space of games and play expands,generating further research, and exciting new applications.Linking Between Games Research, HCI, and Application DomainsThere are logistical challenges as well. The breadth of work at present, andthe proliferation of presentation and publication venues, can make it difficult forresearchers working in the games area to keep up with one another’s work. We believeit would be helpful to create an up-to-date taxonomy of game research subareas, withlinkages back to related fields helping all to draw upon extant literature. For example,game researchers aiming to measure enjoyment or flow should refer back to work inthe larger field of HCI operationalizing and measuring these constructs. And SeriousGames researchers might look to capitalize on HCI research methodology as well asthe methods of the target domain (e.g., health, education, conservation) (Games forChange, 2014).Synergy Between Researchers and PractitionersThere is also room for increased integration of practitioner and researcher knowl-edge and efforts (as is true for HCI in general). A good model for this is the yearlyGame User Research workshop at CHI, which attracts a good mix of industry- andresearch-based attendees. At present, there are still very few active game designers anddevelopers who attend CHI and other HCI conference venues—their presence wouldhelp to enrich and validate research approaches to games.Although there is much work yet to do, it is clear that Game and HCI researchis a vibrant area, and an enduring and valuable part of the HCI landscape. We lookforward to the continued evolution of this exciting subfield.NOTESAcknowledgments. We thank Steve Whittaker for his tireless support and patience inputting together this special issue, through illnesses and job changes and other challenges thatslowed the process.REFERENCESBernhaupt, R., & Isbister, K. (2013). A new perspective for the games and entertainment com-munity. Proceedings of the CHI 2013 Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems. NewYork, NY: ACM.Bluestein, A. (2014, November). Video games for grown-ups. Fast Company. Retrieved fromhttp://www.fastcompany.com/3038466/video-games-for-grown-upsCarter, M., Downs, J., Nansen, B., Harrop, M., & Gibbs, M. (2014). Paradigms of gamesresearch in HCI: A review of 10 years of research at CHI. Proceedings of the First ACMSIGCHI Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play. New York, NY: ACM.Games for Change. (2014). Games for Change. Retrieved from http://www.gamesforchange.org/Keeker, K., Pagulayan, R., Sykes, J., & Lazzaro, N. (2004). The untapped world of video games.In CHI ’04 extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1610–1611). New York,NY: ACM.Malone, T. W. (1982). Heuristics for designing enjoyable user interfaces: Lessons from com-puter games. Proceedings of the CHI 1982 Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems.New York, NY: ACM.Marczewski, A. (2002). Gamification: A simple introduction. Amazon Digital Services.O’Hara, K., Gonzalez, G., Penney, G., Sellen, A., Corish, R., Mentis, H., . . . Carrell,T. (2014). Interactional order and constructed ways of seeing with touchless imag-ing systems in surgery. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 23, 299–337.doi:10.1007/s10606-014-9203-4Pausch, R., Gold, R., Skelly, T., & Thiel, D. (1994). What HCI designers can learn from videogame designers. In Conference Companion on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 177–178).New York, NY: ACM. doi:10.1145/259963.260220Schell, J. (2008). The art of game design: A book of lenses. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: CRC Press.Zaphiris, P., & Ang, C. S. (2007). HCI issues in computer games. Interacting with Computers, 19,135–139. doi:10.1016/j.intcom.2006.08.007ARTICLES IN THIS SPECIAL ISSUEAlankus, G., & Kelleher, C. (2015). Reducing compensatory motions in motion-based videogames for stroke rehabilitation. Human-Computer Interaction, 30, 232–262.Deterding, S. (2015). The lens of intrinsic skill atoms: A method for gameful design. Human-Computer Interaction, 30, 294–335.Iacovides, I., Cox, A., McAndrew, P., Aczel, J., & Scanlon, E. (2015). Game-play break-downs and breakthroughs: Exploring the relationship between action, understanding andinvolvement. Human-Computer Interaction, 30, 202–231.Isbister, K., & Mueller, F. (2015). Guidelines for the design of movement-based games andtheir relevance to HCI. Human-Computer Interaction, 30, 366–399.Sim, G., Read, J., & Gregory, P. (2015). From England to Uganda: Children designing andevaluating serious games. Human-Computer Interaction, 30, 263–293.Wadley, G., Carter, M., & Gibbs, M. (2015). Voice in virtual worlds: The design, use andinfluence of voice chat in online play. Human-Computer Interaction, 30, 336–365.

Introduction to this special issue on HCI and games

\u3cp\u3eThe Special Issue of Human-Computer Interaction, 2015 is o devoted to papers on game-related HCI research at CHI. Iacovides, Cox, McAndrew, Aczel, and Scanlon take a close look at the connection between player involvement and learning. Alankus and Kelleher created a motion-based game to improve stroke survivors' rehabilitation when this is unsupervised by a clinician. In particular, their focus is on reducing the compensatory motions that patients tend to make when doing unsupervised exercises. Sim, Read, Gregory and Xu  explore whether children can be guided through a participatory design process in designing serious games for children in other cultural contexts. Deterding presents his 'lens of intrinsic skill atoms', a framework for understanding and engaging in what he terms gameful design, more broadly known as gamification. Isbister and Mueller's work targets games that use movement sensing as input, something that all major gaming consoles now offer in addition to buttons and joysticks, and that is incorporated into many modern mobile and tablet platforms.\u3c/p\u3

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