Showing papers by "Lennart E. Nacke published in 2012"

Full-body motion-based game interaction for older adults

Abstract: Older adults in nursing homes often lead sedentary lifestyles, which reduces their life expectancy. Full-body motion-control games provide an opportunity for these adults to remain active and engaged; these games are not designed with age-related impairments in mind, which prevents the games from being leveraged to increase the activity levels of older adults. In this paper, we present two studies aimed at developing game design guidelines for full-body motion controls for older adults experiencing age-related changes and impairments. Our studies also demonstrate how full-body motion-control games can accommodate a variety of user abilities, have a positive effect on mood and, by extension, the emotional well-being of older adults. Based on our studies, we present seven guidelines for the design of full-body interaction in games. The guidelines are designed to foster safe physical activity among older adults, thereby increasing their quality of life.

Mixed reality games

Abstract: Collaborative technologies increasingly permeate our everyday lives. Mixed reality games use these technologies to entertain, motivate, educate, and inspire. We understand mixed reality games as goal-directed, structured play experiences that are not fully contained by virtual or physical worlds. They transform existing technologies, relationships, and places into platforms for gameplay. While the design of mixed reality games has received increasing attention across multiple disciplines, a focus on the collaborative potential of mixed reality formats, such as augmented and alternate reality games, has been lacking. We believe the CSCW community can play an essential and unique role in examining and designing the next generation of mixed reality games and technologies that support them. To this end, we seek to bring together researchers, designers, and players to advance an integrated mixed reality games' research canon and outline key opportunities and challenges for future research and development.

"I'm just here to play games": social dynamics and sociality in an online game site

Abstract: There are many web sites that allow people to play board or card games against other human players. These sites offer tools and opportunities for social interaction, but little is known about how people really interact on these sites. To learn more about social dynamics on game sites, we analysed three months of log files from a large site to explore three themes: permanence (whether people formed a long-term association with the site); social interaction (in terms of shared activity and verbal communication); and formation of ties (whether people made contacts with others). Our analyses showed that while the site seems very social when we consider gameplay, the population was highly transient, and people talked very little. To explain these behaviours, we suggest that games and game-based activity should be considered as a legitimate form of human interaction. Our analysis provides new information and new ways of thinking about how game environments can be designed to support many kinds of sociability.

Game user research

Abstract: Game User Research is an emerging field that ties together Human Computer Interaction, Game Development, and Experimental Psychology, specifically investigating the interaction between players and games. The community of Game User Research has been rapidly evolving for the past few years, extending and modifying existing methodologies used by the HCI community to the environment of digital games. In this workshop, we plan to investigate the different methodologies currently in practice within the field as well as their utilities and drawbacks in measuring game design issues or gaining insight about the players' experience. The outcome of the workshop will be a collection of lessons from the trenches and commonly used techniques published in a public online forum. This will extend the discussion of topics beyond the workshop, and serve as a platform for future work. The workshop will be the first of its kind at CHI, tying together HCI research and Game User Research.

Biometric storyboards: visualising game user research data

Abstract: Player experience is difficult to evaluate and report, especially using quantitative methodologies in addition to observations and interviews. One step towards tying quantitative physiological measures of player arousal to player experience reports are Biometric Storyboards (BioSt). They can visualise meaningful relationships between a player's physiological changes and game events. This paper evaluates the usefulness of BioSt to the game industry. We presented the Biometric Storyboards technique to six game developers and interviewed them about the advantages and disadvantages of this technique.

Feedback-based gameplay metrics: measuring player experience via automatic visual analysis

Abstract: Using gameplay metrics to articulate player interaction within game systems has received increased interest in game studies. The value of gameplay metrics comes from a desire to empirically validate over a decade of theorization of player experience and knowledge of games as ludic systems. Taking gameplay metrics beyond formalized user testing (i.e. with the aim of improving a product) allows researchers the freedom of examining any commercially available game without the need to have access to the game's source code. This paper offers a new methodology to obtain data on player behavior, achieved through analyzing video and audio streams. Game interface features are being analyzed automatically, which are indicative of player behavior and gameplay events. This paper outlines the development of this methodology and its application to research that seeks to understand the nature of engagement and player motivations.

Analysing Social Metrics in an Online Game Site

Abstract: Understanding real-time coordination behaviour around multiplayer games is important as it allows designers to make informed decisions about supporting player communities. However, studying existing sites is difficult because of the amounts and range of data involved. In this paper, we argue for using social accounting metrics to investigate large game sites. We demonstrate the use of these metrics to explore the social coordination behaviour of the game site PlayOK, and gain a highlevel view of social activity in the game site. Keywords Games, analysis, social metrics. 1. INTRODUCTION There are many popular online multiplayer game sites ranging from reproductions of board and card games – e.g. PlayOK (www.playok.com) – to rich 3D worlds such as World of Warcraft (WoW). These game sites have large numbers of people interacting and gaming together. They are an ideal setting to study meta-game coordination behaviour. However, it is difficult to understand this real time coordination behaviour in these sites because the sites are very large, often with millions of people and activity throughout the day. The wealth of data that results makes them valuable for study but also makes them difficult to investigate. It is important to understand social coordination activity in these game sites. Deeper understanding enables designers to make informed decisions when supporting game communities. Our goal was to take a broad initial look at how people behave in the game site PlayOK; in particular the real time meta-game coordination to establish and support gameplay. PlayOK is a very large game site that supports 38 different types of multiplayer games and has over 5 million registered users. There are various approaches to understanding the social nature of virtual sites. Some sacrifice breadth of understanding and use methods such as questionnaires (e.g. [1,10]) or observations (e.g. [8]) to get a very deep and rich understanding of certain aspects. Others, such as Social Network Analysis [9], computationally process large amounts of data to produce summaries of community structure. Social accounting metrics, as in [2,5], make use of simple statistical summaries of activity data to gain insight into large-scale behaviour. In this paper, we demonstrate how social accounting techniques can be used to gain a broad understanding of the meta-game activity throughout a game site. We investigate the PlayOK game site using three themes that are frequently considered in work about online communities. These are: permanence, the idea that social groups benefit when people are long-term residents of a place (virtual or real) [1]; social interaction, which has been primarily considered in terms of verbal communication, but which can also include shared activity [3]; and forming ties, in which people meet others, associate, and make lasting connections (strong or weak) [3]. 2. PREVIOUS WORK There are many methods for analysing community and social behaviour in virtual settings, both in games and in other online interactive settings. 2.1 Humanities Inspired Methods Many methods for studying virtual settings are directly inspired by fields such as psychology, sociology and anthropology, which have years of experience in investigating social structures. A notable example is Blanchard’s measure for ‘sense of virtual community’ [1], which derives from the physical world ‘sense of community’ psychological measures. The measure is a questionnaire for members of an online group to test for the presence of a community. Surveys tailored to particular questions are also often used, such as in Yee’s study of player types [10]. Participant-observation techniques have been used in most studies of social interaction in multiplayer role playing games. These include studies of Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) (e.g. [7]) and Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) (e.g. [4,8]). Social interaction insights are based on observations of researchers who play the games. The strength of this broad category of technique is that researchers gain a deep understanding of some aspects of the community. The weakness is that, while the understanding gained is deep, it is not very broad. Typical game site populations are large and so questionnaires and surveys can only be applied to a small proportion of the population. Similarly, an observer can only see a small part of the activity. 2.2 Computational Methods The most prominent method of this category is Social Network Analysis (SNA) (see [9] for a full treatment). In brief, SNA is a collection of algorithms for extracting structural information from social network graphs. Graph nodes are typically people in the social network, and the weighted edges are based on measures of relationships between members, such as number of chat messages exchanged. SNA algorithms can be used to discover features of interest such as communities (groups that interact more frequently with each other), people that are central to communities, people that are connectors between different communities, and many other properties of interest. The strength of SNA is that it provides insight into the large scale structure of the community, especially subgroups. Analysis takes into account data from the whole virtual setting. A weakness is that SNA techniques rely on a well-connected social network. The PlayOK social network was too sparse and disconnected. Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). GRAND 2012, May 2-4, 2012,Montréal, QC, Canada 2.3 Social Accounting Metrics Social accounting metrics use low-level traces of activity – such as logging events – reconstruct community behaviour. This is a very broad category of analysis and there is a lot of research that would qualify. We will use two notable examples to illustrate the qualities of our study. Brush et al [2] used social accounting metrics to study Usenet. The main difference with our investigation is that in Usenet the primary purpose is to communicate directly with text. We are studying a game system where there are multiple means to interact – such as chatting or playing – and the primary purpose is gaming. In addition, the interactions in the game site are real-time, while Usenet is (mostly) asynchronous. The second defining example is Ducheneaut et al’s [5] study of grouping behaviour in World of Warcraft (WoW). While grouping behaviour is of interest to us, we are concerned with how game groups are negotiated and coordinated. WoW is a 3D Massively Multiplayer Online Game, and is a fundamentally different experience than PlayOK. We expect to observe correspondingly different community behaviour. We chose this style of analysis because it allows us to target aspects of interest: specifically real-time communication and coordination around the gameplay. 3. METHODOLOGY Our results are based on analysis of three months of system logs from the online gaming site PlayOK. The logs contained events such as logins, games and chat messages (Table 1). 3.1 The Game Site: PlayOK PlayOK was established in Poland in 2001 and has grown steadily, with 5.2 million unique accounts as of June 2010 (accounts are removed after one year of inactivity). PlayOK is a web-based game site that offers 38 different game types, including board games such as Chess and Backgammon, card games such as Hearts and Canasta, and other games such as Dominoes and Dice. All analysed games are player-vs-player only. Free registration is required to play and the site is ad supported. The games are partitioned by language and region, so not all games are available to every person. Figure 1: A Bridge room: player list at right, table list at left, and room chat at bottom left. After logging in and selecting a game type, the player is presented with a list of rooms. Selecting a room starts a java applet in a new window (Figure 1). In this window are a list of active game tables, a list of other people in the room, and text chat. A game table is a virtual area for a single game, and each room can contain many game tables. Users can enter game tables currently in progress or create new tables. Figure 2: Bridge game table: player information at top right, chat area at bottom right. Entering a game table opens a new window (Figure 2) with a view of the game, a list of people at the table, the names of the players (or empty places if the game is not full), and a chat area. If there is space at the game, and the game has not started, users can ‘sit down’ and become players. 3.2 Log Files The PlayOK administrator made daily log files available to the authors. Our data covers 8 April 2010 to 8 July 2010 (91 days) and consists of ~12GB of compressed text files. Table 1 summarises the structure of the events recorded in the log files. Table 1: Log event types (all include a timestamp) Login User ID, Language, Contacts (list of user IDs), Registration date, #people on the game type Logout User ID, Time logged in, #people in the game type Room Chat Sender ID, Room name Table Chat Sender ID, Room name + Table number Private Chat Sender ID, Receiver ID Join Room User ID, Room Name, #people in the room Leave Room User ID, Room Name, #people in the room Join Table User ID, Room name, Table number, #people at table Leave Table User ID, Room name, Table number, #people at table Invite Inviter ID, Invitee ID, Table number Game Start Room name, Table number, Player IDs (w/ rankings) Game End Room name, Table number 4. PLAYOK SOCIAL DYNAMICS Our analyses looked at three themes frequently used to describe communities and social groups – permanence, social interaction, and formation of ties. Our goal was to take a broad initial look at how people behave in PlayOK. Figure 3: Game types by number of games and chat messages. Size shows population. Selected games are black and labeled. For each theme, we identified specific questions that can be answered through our log-based analyses. In some charts that accompany our analyses, we show a subset of games

Motion-Based Game Design for Older Adults

Abstract: Older adults in nursing homes often lead sedentary lifestyles, which reduces their life expectancy. Full-body motion-control games provide an opportunity for these adults to remain active and engaged; but these games are not designed with age-related impairments in mind, which prevents the games from being leveraged to increase the activity levels of older adults. In this paper, we create a gardening game specifically addressing institutionalized older adults. Additionally, we present an evaluation of the game that demonstrates how full-body motioncontrol games can accommodate a variety of user abilities, have a positive effect on mood and, by extension, the emotional wellbeing of older adults, thereby increasing their quality of life.

CLEVER: A Gameful Enterprise Learning System

Abstract: Employees often lack the motivation to share their implicit knowledge with one another and are reluctant to engage in a collaborative forum for such knowledge exchange. To address this issue, we developed a gameful learning component of an enterprise knowledge management system (KMS) to help foster this process of collaborative and participatory learning. This paper introduces CLEVER, a serious game that combines trivia and strategy elements as game elements to motivate the players into knowledge exchange. Furthermore, we describe how CLEVER uses intrinsic and extrinsic motivational affordances to engage employees into enterprise knowledge learning. Keywords—gamification; gameful design; enterprise learning; knowledge management