Player involvement in the process of game development has become a de-facto standard in both industry and academia. Participation is intended to empower players, while helping designers create better games. However, participation also introduces uncertainty regarding players’ and designers’ relative roles, and creates new concerns over the exploitation of players, marginalization of designers, and the quality of game design outcomes. In this workshop, we invite the games research community to critically reflect on methods used to facilitate player participation, with the goal of establishing dialogue around meaningful and constructive player involvement

Gerling, Kathrin

Hicks, Kieran

Linehan, Conor

Mirza-Babaei, Pejman

Shearer, John

Wallner, Guenter

University of Lincoln Institutional Repository

 Exploiting Players? Critical Reflections on Participation in Game Development  Abstract Player involvement in the process of game development has become a de-facto standard in both industry and academia. Participation is intended to empower players, while helping designers create better games. However, participation also introduces uncertainty regarding players’ and designers’ relative roles, and creates new concerns over the exploitation of players, marginalization of designers, and the quality of game design outcomes. In this workshop, we invite the games research community to critically reflect on methods used to facilitate player participation, with the goal of establishing dialogue around meaningful and constructive player involvement. Author Keywords Participatory Design; Games User Research; Game Analytics; Methodology; Game Design. ACM Classification Keywords D.2.10 [Software Engineering]: Design - Methodologies Introduction and Background Player involvement in game development has become a de-facto standard in industry and academia. Methods range from participatory design (PD), which directly involves a small number players in ideation and development [5], to post-hoc evaluations in the context Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.   CHI PLAY'17 Extended Abstracts, October 15–18, 2017, Amsterdam, Netherlands © 2017 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5111-9/17/10. https://doi.org/10.1145/3130859.3131441.  Kathrin Gerling University of Lincoln Lincoln, UK kgerling@lincoln.ac.uk  Guenter Wallner University of Applied Arts Vienna Vienna, Austria guenter.wallner@uni-ak.ac.at  Pejman Mirza-Babaei UOIT  Oshawa, ON, Canada pejman@uoit.ca  John Shearer University of Lincoln Lincoln, UK jshearer@lincoln.ac.uk  Conor Linehan University College Cork Cork, Ireland conor.linehan@ucc.ie  Kieran Hicks Hitpoint Games Ltd. Lincoln, UK khicks@hitpointgames.com    of games user research (GUR) [6] and large-scale analysis of player behavior and implications for design from the perspective of game analytics (GA) [4]. While these approaches differ in underlying philosophy and scope, all subscribe to the ideology that player involvement leads to better games. Proponents from academia and industry alike often highlight the empowering nature of giving players a voice throughout the development process and the advantages that tailoring games to players’ needs has for player experience. However, there is little reflection on negative implications that PD, GUR, and GA may have in the wider context of game development. For example, PD is often carried out in collaboration with participants who do not have any experience in designing high quality, well-balanced, interesting games. This configuration often leads to games that are essentially designed by the experts, with simply the narrative or artwork guided by the non-experts. In other words, expertise becomes a source of unchallenged power that marginalizes player perspectives. In contrast, GA directly feeds player behavior into the design process. However, the sheer quantity of metrics available through GA bears the risk that individual creativity is replaced by a ‘design by numbers’ [1,3], trying to engage everyone but ending up pleasing nobody. In terms of power relationships, GA places bigger emphasis on data in turn, requiring experience to infer the right insights [2] and bearing the risk of marginalizing the role of the designer.  In this workshop, we aim to foster critical reflection on user involvement in game development, starting conversation around limitations and risk associated with current trends, raising questions regarding perspectives on players and designers they suggest. We want to hear from PD, GUR and GA communities and share instances in which chosen approaches led to conflict, negatively impacted outcomes for one or more groups of stakeholders, or simply resulted in less than enjoyable player experiences. Through reflection on instances of failure, and by bringing together different perspectives on player involvement in game development that spans industry and academia, we want to identify main challenges and develop new views on methods of involvement, refine our views on the role of players throughout development and beyond, and encourage player involvement that is appropriate, respects all stakeholders, and does in fact lead to creative and more engaging games. Objectives and Outcomes The objective of the workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners who work with end-users in various capacities to critically reflect on and refine research approaches PD UCD, GUR, and GA. The main outcome of this workshop will be a white paper authored together with all workshop participants that outlines a roadmap for methods of user involvement in game development. The paper will further our understanding of ideologies and values behind player involvement, and identify instances of challenge in PD, GUR and GA that arise from the practical involvement of players. To this end, it will provide a structured, systematic analysis of case studies to outline where current approaches are prone to failure.  Workshop Activities We will use Slack (http://www.slack.com) to facilitate communication among workshop participants at all stages. Generally, we aim to involve all authors and not just workshop attendees throughout our workshop, and Organizing Team  Kathrin Gerling is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln with experience in PD and GUR focused on players with special needs. http://staff.lincoln.ac.uk/kgerling Kieran Hicks is a PhD student at the University of Lincoln and creative director of Hitpoint Games. http://www.hitpointgames.com/ Conor Linehan is a Lecturer at University College Cork, focusing on the design and evaluation of games for education and wellbeing. http://research.ucc.ie/profiles/A011/conorlinehan Pejman Mirza-Babaei is an Assistant Professor at UOIT and User Research Director at Execution Labs, with extensive experience in academic and industry GUR. http:/www.pejman.ca John Shearer is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln; his research walks between Computer Science and the Arts. http://staff.lincoln.ac.uk/jshearer Guenter Wallner is senior scientist at the University of Applied Arts Vienna looking at telemetry data to derive actionable insights for game design. http://autoteles.org/  it is planned to use the tool to disseminate front-loaded activities, share thoughts on the day, and track outcomes to make results accessible and engage all authors in the development of the white paper. Before the workshop. The proposed workshop includes a number of front-loaded activities, a mini-symposium and hands-on activities on the day of the workshop, and tangible strategies for encouraging collaboration beyond CHI PLAY 2017.Front-loaded activities include short questionnaires that we will send out to participants in the weeks leading up to CHI PLAY to gain insights into their perspectives on user participation and key challenges they encountered, feeding into activity (2) and the resulting white paper. During the workshop. On the day of the workshop, a mix of presentations, group work, and role-play will contribute to a closer examination of player participation in games research (see side bar for detailed schedule). Case studies to support activities (3) and (4) will focus on instances of problematic player involvement in game development (e.g., a participatory design project in which stakeholders made conflicting suggestions that were impossible for designers to reconcile) that lend themselves to further discussion with regards to methodological implications and ethical challenges. In the wrap-up session of the workshop, we will solicit participant collaboration beyond the event and develop a joint schedule to contribute to the joint white paper. Beyond the workshop. We will continue to use Slack to develop the previously described white paper. This step will draw from some of the front-loaded activities along with tangible outcomes of workshop activities (2), (3) and (4). To ensure accessibility of outcomes for the entire CHI PLAY community, it is planned to submit the white paper to a related journal venue, for example, the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (IJHCS). Participation This workshop aims to engage between 10 and 15 participants from academia and industry; the submission process is designed to facilitate this broad scope: Papers solicited from participants will focus on their personal, practical experience with game development and research methodologies that involve end-users, discussing instances where player involvement led to discouraging results.  References 1. Jennifer Whitson. Game Design by Numbers: Instrumental Play and the Quantitative Shift in the Digital Game Industry. Diss. Carleton University, Ottawa, 2012. 2. Robin Powell. Positive and Negative effects of Game Analytics in the Game Design process: A Grounded Theory Study. Master thesis Uppsala University, 2016. 3. Patricia Hernandez. Big Brother is watching: how developers use game analytics. Available online: http://bit.ly/2lyYKUV, last access 23/02/17. 4. Seif El-Nasr, Magy, Drachen, Anders  and Canossa , Alessandro. Game analytics - Maximizing the Value of Player Data. New York, Springer, 2013. 5. Jonathan Waddington, Conor Linehan, Kieran Hicks, Kathrin Gerling, and Timothy Hodgson. 2015. Participatory design of therapeutic video games for young people with neurological vision impairment. In Proceedings of CHI 2015, ACM (2015), 3533-3542. 6. Gareth R. White, Joonhwan Lee, Daniel Johnson, Peta Wyeth, and Pejman Mirza-Babaei. Crossing Domains: Diverse Perspectives on Players. In CHI EA '15. ACM (2015), 2349-2352. Detailed Schedule  Morning session. (1) Mini-symposium to introduce participants and give an opportunity to share individual perspectives on user participation. Five minute presentations using a maximum of two slides, to be submitted prior to the event. (2) Group work by research approach, reflect on goals and challenges based on previously solicited materials. Produce poster with entire group that summarises challenges, summary of results to be uploaded to shared document on the day. Afternoon session. Mixed groups of participants will be invited to (3) work on case studies we will derive from their workshop submissions to encourage reflection on previously identified challenges and develop potential solutions. We will encourage (4) role-play to experience the views of players and designers. Produce poster that refines core challenges based on individual case studies, and points toward mitigation strategies. Summary of results to be uploaded to shared document on the day.  

Exploiting players? critical reflections on participation in game development

Player involvement in the process of game development has become a de-facto standard in both industry and academia. Participation is intended to empower players, while helping designers create better games. However, participation also introduces uncertainty regarding players\u27 and designers\u27 relative roles, and creates new concerns over the exploitation of players, marginalization of designers, and the quality of game design outcomes. In this workshop, we invite the games research community to critically reflect on methods used to facilitate player participation, with the goal of establishing dialogue around meaningful and constructive player involvement

Irish Universities

Exploiting players? Critical reflections on participation in game development

\u3cp\u3ePlayer involvement in the process of game development has become a de-facto standard in both industry and academia. Participation is intended to empower players, while helping designers create better games. However, participation also introduces uncertainty regarding players' and designers' relative roles, and creates new concerns over the exploitation of players, marginalization of designers, and the quality of game design outcomes. In this workshop, we invite the games research community to critically reflect on methods used to facilitate player participation, with the goal of establishing dialogue around meaningful and constructive player involvement.\u3c/p\u3

Gerling, Kathrin Maria

Wallner, G

Repository TU/e

Exploiting players?:critical reflections on participation in game development

Player involvement in the process of game development has become a de-facto standard in both industry and academia. Participation is intended to empower players, while helping designers create better games. However, participation also introduces uncertainty regarding players' and designers' relative roles, and creates new concerns over the exploitation of players, marginalization of designers, and the quality of game design outcomes. In this workshop, we invite the games research community to critically reflect on methods used to facilitate player participation, with the goal of establishing dialogue around meaningful and constructive player involvement

Cork Open Research Archive

Title Exploiting players? Critical reflections on participation in gamedevelopmentAuthor(s) Gerling, Kathrin; Wallner, Guenter; Mirza-Babaei, Pejman; Shearer,John; Linehan, Conor; Hicks, KieranPublication date 2017Original citation Gerling, K., Wallner, G., Mirza-Babaei, P., Shearer, J., Linehan, C. andHicks, K. (2017) ‘Exploiting players? Critical reflections onparticipation in game development’, Extended Abstracts Publication ofthe Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHIPLAY '17). Amsterdam, the Netherlands, 15–18  October. doi:10.1145/3130859.3131441Type of publication Conference itemLink to publisher'sversionhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3130859.3131441Access to the full text of the published version may require asubscription.Rights © 2017, the Authors. Published by ACM. This is the author'sversion of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not forredistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published inExtended Abstracts Publication of the Annual Symposium onComputer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY '17)http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3130859.3131441Item downloadedfromhttp://hdl.handle.net/10468/5170Downloaded on 2018-08-23T20:26:59Z Exploiting Players? Critical Reflections on Participation in Game Development  Abstract Player involvement in the process of game development has become a de-facto standard in both industry and academia. Participation is intended to empower players, while helping designers create better games. However, participation also introduces uncertainty regarding players’ and designers’ relative roles, and creates new concerns over the exploitation of players, marginalization of designers, and the quality of game design outcomes. In this workshop, we invite the games research community to critically reflect on methods used to facilitate player participation, with the goal of establishing dialogue around meaningful and constructive player involvement. Author Keywords Participatory Design; Games User Research; Game Analytics; Methodology; Game Design. ACM Classification Keywords D.2.10 [Software Engineering]: Design - Methodologies Introduction and Background Player involvement in game development has become a de-facto standard in industry and academia. Methods range from participatory design (PD), which directly involves a small number players in ideation and development [5], to post-hoc evaluations in the context Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.   CHI PLAY'17 Extended Abstracts, October 15–18, 2017, Amsterdam, Netherlands © 2017 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5111-9/17/10. https://doi.org/10.1145/3130859.3131441.  Kathrin Gerling University of Lincoln Lincoln, UK kgerling@lincoln.ac.uk  Guenter Wallner University of Applied Arts Vienna Vienna, Austria guenter.wallner@uni-ak.ac.at  Pejman Mirza-Babaei UOIT  Oshawa, ON, Canada pejman@uoit.ca  John Shearer University of Lincoln Lincoln, UK jshearer@lincoln.ac.uk  Conor Linehan University College Cork Cork, Ireland conor.linehan@ucc.ie  Kieran Hicks Hitpoint Games Ltd. Lincoln, UK khicks@hitpointgames.com    of games user research (GUR) [6] and large-scale analysis of player behavior and implications for design from the perspective of game analytics (GA) [4]. While these approaches differ in underlying philosophy and scope, all subscribe to the ideology that player involvement leads to better games. Proponents from academia and industry alike often highlight the empowering nature of giving players a voice throughout the development process and the advantages that tailoring games to players’ needs has for player experience. However, there is little reflection on negative implications that PD, GUR, and GA may have in the wider context of game development. For example, PD is often carried out in collaboration with participants who do not have any experience in designing high quality, well-balanced, interesting games. This configuration often leads to games that are essentially designed by the experts, with simply the narrative or artwork guided by the non-experts. In other words, expertise becomes a source of unchallenged power that marginalizes player perspectives. In contrast, GA directly feeds player behavior into the design process. However, the sheer quantity of metrics available through GA bears the risk that individual creativity is replaced by a ‘design by numbers’ [1,3], trying to engage everyone but ending up pleasing nobody. In terms of power relationships, GA places bigger emphasis on data in turn, requiring experience to infer the right insights [2] and bearing the risk of marginalizing the role of the designer.  In this workshop, we aim to foster critical reflection on user involvement in game development, starting conversation around limitations and risk associated with current trends, raising questions regarding perspectives on players and designers they suggest. We want to hear from PD, GUR and GA communities and share instances in which chosen approaches led to conflict, negatively impacted outcomes for one or more groups of stakeholders, or simply resulted in less than enjoyable player experiences. Through reflection on instances of failure, and by bringing together different perspectives on player involvement in game development that spans industry and academia, we want to identify main challenges and develop new views on methods of involvement, refine our views on the role of players throughout development and beyond, and encourage player involvement that is appropriate, respects all stakeholders, and does in fact lead to creative and more engaging games. Objectives and Outcomes The objective of the workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners who work with end-users in various capacities to critically reflect on and refine research approaches PD UCD, GUR, and GA. The main outcome of this workshop will be a white paper authored together with all workshop participants that outlines a roadmap for methods of user involvement in game development. The paper will further our understanding of ideologies and values behind player involvement, and identify instances of challenge in PD, GUR and GA that arise from the practical involvement of players. To this end, it will provide a structured, systematic analysis of case studies to outline where current approaches are prone to failure.  Workshop Activities We will use Slack (http://www.slack.com) to facilitate communication among workshop participants at all stages. Generally, we aim to involve all authors and not just workshop attendees throughout our workshop, and Organizing Team  Kathrin Gerling is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln with experience in PD and GUR focused on players with special needs. http://staff.lincoln.ac.uk/kgerling Kieran Hicks is a PhD student at the University of Lincoln and creative director of Hitpoint Games. http://www.hitpointgames.com/ Conor Linehan is a Lecturer at University College Cork, focusing on the design and evaluation of games for education and wellbeing. http://research.ucc.ie/profiles/A011/conorlinehan Pejman Mirza-Babaei is an Assistant Professor at UOIT and User Research Director at Execution Labs, with extensive experience in academic and industry GUR. http:/www.pejman.ca John Shearer is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln; his research walks between Computer Science and the Arts. http://staff.lincoln.ac.uk/jshearer Guenter Wallner is senior scientist at the University of Applied Arts Vienna looking at telemetry data to derive actionable insights for game design. http://autoteles.org/  it is planned to use the tool to disseminate front-loaded activities, share thoughts on the day, and track outcomes to make results accessible and engage all authors in the development of the white paper. Before the workshop. The proposed workshop includes a number of front-loaded activities, a mini-symposium and hands-on activities on the day of the workshop, and tangible strategies for encouraging collaboration beyond CHI PLAY 2017.Front-loaded activities include short questionnaires that we will send out to participants in the weeks leading up to CHI PLAY to gain insights into their perspectives on user participation and key challenges they encountered, feeding into activity (2) and the resulting white paper. During the workshop. On the day of the workshop, a mix of presentations, group work, and role-play will contribute to a closer examination of player participation in games research (see side bar for detailed schedule). Case studies to support activities (3) and (4) will focus on instances of problematic player involvement in game development (e.g., a participatory design project in which stakeholders made conflicting suggestions that were impossible for designers to reconcile) that lend themselves to further discussion with regards to methodological implications and ethical challenges. In the wrap-up session of the workshop, we will solicit participant collaboration beyond the event and develop a joint schedule to contribute to the joint white paper. Beyond the workshop. We will continue to use Slack to develop the previously described white paper. This step will draw from some of the front-loaded activities along with tangible outcomes of workshop activities (2), (3) and (4). To ensure accessibility of outcomes for the entire CHI PLAY community, it is planned to submit the white paper to a related journal venue, for example, the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (IJHCS). Participation This workshop aims to engage between 10 and 15 participants from academia and industry; the submission process is designed to facilitate this broad scope: Papers solicited from participants will focus on their personal, practical experience with game development and research methodologies that involve end-users, discussing instances where player involvement led to discouraging results.  References 1. Jennifer Whitson. Game Design by Numbers: Instrumental Play and the Quantitative Shift in the Digital Game Industry. Diss. Carleton University, Ottawa, 2012. 2. Robin Powell. Positive and Negative effects of Game Analytics in the Game Design process: A Grounded Theory Study. Master thesis Uppsala University, 2016. 3. Patricia Hernandez. Big Brother is watching: how developers use game analytics. Available online: http://bit.ly/2lyYKUV, last access 23/02/17. 4. Seif El-Nasr, Magy, Drachen, Anders  and Canossa , Alessandro. Game analytics - Maximizing the Value of Player Data. New York, Springer, 2013. 5. Jonathan Waddington, Conor Linehan, Kieran Hicks, Kathrin Gerling, and Timothy Hodgson. 2015. Participatory design of therapeutic video games for young people with neurological vision impairment. In Proceedings of CHI 2015, ACM (2015), 3533-3542. 6. Gareth R. White, Joonhwan Lee, Daniel Johnson, Peta Wyeth, and Pejman Mirza-Babaei. Crossing Domains: Diverse Perspectives on Players. In CHI EA '15. ACM (2015), 2349-2352. Detailed Schedule  Morning session. (1) Mini-symposium to introduce participants and give an opportunity to share individual perspectives on user participation. Five minute presentations using a maximum of two slides, to be submitted prior to the event. (2) Group work by research approach, reflect on goals and challenges based on previously solicited materials. Produce poster with entire group that summarises challenges, summary of results to be uploaded to shared document on the day. Afternoon session. Mixed groups of participants will be invited to (3) work on case studies we will derive from their workshop submissions to encourage reflection on previously identified challenges and develop potential solutions. We will encourage (4) role-play to experience the views of players and designers. Produce poster that refines core challenges based on individual case studies, and points toward mitigation strategies. Summary of results to be uploaded to shared document on the day.  

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Exploiting players? critical reflections on participation in game development

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