Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques

Recent years have seen a rapid proliferation of mass-market consumer software that takes inspiration from video games. Usually summarized as "gamification", this trend connects to a sizeable body of existing concepts and research in human-computer interaction and game studies, such as serious games, pervasive games, alternate reality games, or playful design. However, it is not clear how "gamification" relates to these, whether it denotes a novel phenomenon, and how to define it. Thus, in this paper we investigate "gamification" and the historical origins of the term in relation to precursors and similar concepts. It is suggested that "gamified" applications provide insight into novel, gameful phenomena complementary to playful phenomena. Based on our research, we propose a definition of "gamification" as the use of game design elements in non-game contexts.

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From game design elements to gamefulness: defining "gamification"

From the Publisher: 
A Question of Identity 
Life on the Screen is a fascinating and wide-ranging investigation of the impact of computers and networking on society, peoples' perceptions of themselves, and the individual's relationship to machines. Sherry Turkle, a Professor of the Sociology of Science at MIT and a licensed psychologist, uses Internet MUDs (multi-user domains, or in older gaming parlance multi-user dungeons) as a launching pad for explorations of software design, user interfaces, simulation, artificial intelligence, artificial life, agents, "bots," virtual reality, and "the on-line way of life." 
Turkle's discussion of postmodernism is particularly enlightening. She shows how postmodern concepts in art, architecture, and ethics are related to concrete topics much closer to home, for example AI research (Minsky's "Society of Mind") and even MUDs (exemplified by students with X-window terminals who are doing homework in one window and simultaneously playing out several different roles in the same MUD in other windows). Those of you who have (like me) been turned off by the shallow, pretentious, meaningless paintings and sculptures that litter our museums of modern art may have a different perspective after hearing what Turkle has to say. 
This is a psychoanalytical book, not a technical one. However, software developers and engineers will find it highly accessible because of the depth of the author's technical understanding and credibility. Unlike most other authors in this genre, Turkle does not constantly jar the technically-literate reader with blatant errors or bogus assertions about how things work. Although I personally don't have time or patience for MUDs,view most of AI as snake-oil, and abhor postmodern architecture, I thought the time spent reading this book was an extremely good investment.

스크린 위의 삶 = Life on the screen : identity in the age of the internet

Cooperation is needed for evolution to construct new levels of organization. Genomes, cells, multicellular organisms, social insects, and human society are all based on cooperation. Cooperation means that selfish replicators forgo some of their reproductive potential to help one another. But natural selection implies competition and therefore opposes cooperation unless a specific mechanism is at work. Here I discuss five mechanisms for the evolution of cooperation: kin selection, direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, network reciprocity, and group selection. For each mechanism, a simple rule is derived that specifies whether natural selection can lead to cooperation.

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Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation

In 1974 an article appeared in Science magazine with the dry-sounding title “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” by a pair of psychologists who were not well known outside their discipline of decision theory. In it Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman introduced the world to Prospect Theory, which mapped out how humans actually behave when faced with decisions about gains and losses, in contrast to how economists assumed that people behave. Prospect Theory turned Economics on its head by demonstrating through a series of ingenious experiments that people are much more concerned with losses than they are with gains, and that framing a choice from one perspective or the other will result in decisions that are exactly the opposite of each other, even if the outcomes are monetarily the same. Prospect Theory led cognitive psychology in a new direction that began to uncover other human biases in thinking that are probably not learned but are part of our brain’s wiring.

Thinking fast and slow.

In this paper, we discuss the applicability of using design patterns to enhance the participation of children in the design process. This is illustrated by a study in which gameplay design patterns have been used to evaluate and re-design a collaborative co-located game focused on training collaboration skills in a special education context. The results show that patterns helped as a way of focusing the analysis of observations, as tools for noting suggestions for change, supported the children's involvement in co-design activities, worked as an extendable collection of intermediate-level knowledge elements, and that patterns functioned as a way to introduce a common vocabulary. The contribution of this paper is a number of opportunities and challenges for working with gameplay design patterns with children.

Using Gameplay Design Patterns with Children in the Redesign of a Collaborative Co-located Game

board games for two reasons. First, as noted above, board games are more adaptable to changes in social environments than computer games. Second, the social environment of future pervasive games will have more in common with the environments in which board games are played than those in which computer games are played. 3 TASK ANALYSIS ON BOARD GAMES For the purposes of this study, several board games (Settlers of Catan, El Grande, Citadels, Alhambra, and Ticket to Ride were analyzed using task analysis from the human-computer interaction fi eld (see e.g. [Preece02] for a description of the technique) to identify game actions that can be augmented with electronics. The games were selected because of their relatively complex set of game mechanics. The method was used in a slightly different way than it is usually; instead of having the purpose of understanding how a general activity should be supported, the purpose was to play the game to analyze what the specifi c tasks were and what options were available to players. 3.1 Common tasks Based upon a participatory study of gameplay in these games, as well as studying the printed game rules, tasks were identifi ed that concerned manipulating the game state. This corresponds to identifying task related to operational rules instead of constituative and implicit rules in Salen and Zimmerman's classifi cation of rules [Salen03]. These tasks were then analyzed to see if they could further be reduced into " atomic " tasks until the reduction could not be done further without being based upon measures outside the game state. The time span, the location of the actions, and the granular-ity of sensing are not considered since those parameters to a large extent depend on the characteristics of the game. This method identifi ed a high number of tasks, many of which do not necessarily improve gameplay, e.g. keeping track of players' scores, having too many tokens to sort and note-keeping of the game state. However, it could not be proven that these tasks affected gameplay negatively in all cases or that these tasks were representative of tasks that would be good to automate. Many of the tasks seemed different when viewed fi rst, but were basically the same when abstracting away game specifi c details, e.g. placing a card or a tile is in principle the same task.. To make it possible to relate tasks to technology that support …

Enhancing board games with electronics

This paper introduces Tisch, an application running on the Microsoft Surface that provides computer support for board- and role-playing games. Based on the ideas of tangible and tabletop interfaces, Tisch was developed to explore how technology can support and enhance tabletop gaming activities without becoming a hindrance or removing the players' agency over the rules. Through doing so, Tisch allows players to behave in their accustomed manner, including having unrestricted social interactions and using whatever rules they wish to whatever degree they wish. This is proposed as a solution to harnessing the advantages that computers offer analog games through both offloading unwanted tasks and enhancing immersion.

Tisch digital tools supporting board games

This paper describes a web-browser based on the focus+context technique Flip Zooming. A prototype was developed and evaluated against an ordinary web-browser that used scrollbars on a small screen with a resolution of 160*160 pixels. A preliminary evaluation show that the prototype provides better overview and makes searching for specific items easier compared to the traditional browser. These findings indicate that there are constraints that have to be acknowledged when designing the user interface on small screens.

An alternative to scrollbars on small screens

collections of digital images is a common task. The collections may include photographs, scanned document pages, drawings, renderings, etc., that are located on the user's computer or on the World Wide Web. If the amount of images is large, it is important to maintain a good overview of the material,while still allowing users to examine each image in detail. Visualizations that provide such a view are sometimes called focus+context methods, since they give both an overview (context) and details (focus) at the same time. Many applications provide overviews of image collections by presenting a set of thumbnails (smaller versions of the images) in a display area separate from the main picture. However, this is not always the most natural approach. In real life, we often put all images on the same work space, for instance a desktop. We then optimize the working space by placing the images we are currently interested in close at hand, while maintaining an overview of the whole set. When we bring an image into "focus," it does not stay in the surrounding context, since there is no thumbnail representation that exists separately from the actual image. Furthermore, images often fall naturally into categories and sub-categories (i.e., they have some kind of hierarchical ordering). This can be reflected on the work space by grouping similar images together or placing them in different stacks. We have developed flip zooming, a focus+context approach to presenting image sets that attempts to mimic this way of working with images. 1 The main image and the thumbnails are presented on the same display area rather than in different windows. When an image is selected for viewing, the thumbnails are reduced in size and rearranged to accommodate the main picture, which replaces the thumbnail representation. Our first implementation of the technique was a text-only Web browser, the Zoom Browser. We then generalized the method to allow browsing of any image collection. An evaluation of our first prototype made us aware of some problems with the technique, which have been addressed in the current prototype. In particular, users found it confusing that the place where the main image would appear was not fixed; this was because we wanted to pack as much information as possible on the display. We have now made a trade-off between information density and usability, and the main image is fixed to always appear in the middle of the …

Staffan Björk

Papers

Using Gameplay Design Patterns with Children in the Redesign of a Collaborative Co-located Game

Enhancing board games with electronics

Tisch digital tools supporting board games

An alternative to scrollbars on small screens

A hierarchical focus & context method for image browsing