PhD Journal Articles

I'm pleased to announce I now have two more papers published on my PhD research. The first article, "Game-Play Breakdowns and Breakthroughs: Exploring the Relationship Between Action, Understanding and Involvement" is in Human Computer Interaction and focuses on the case studies I carried out how they resulted in a theory of the relationship between learning and involvement within the context of games. The theory is represented as a set of 14 claims that relate to: micro and macro involvement; breakdowns and breakthroughs in action, understanding and involvement; progress; and agency, meaning and compelling game-play. In particular, the paper emphasises the ways in which players experience learning via breakthroughs in understanding, where involvement is increased when the player feels responsible for progress. We also argue that supporting the relationship between learning and involvement is vital for ensuring the success of commercial and educational games. (You can also find out a bit more about the methods I used in my 2013 DiGRA journal paper: "Making sense of game-play: How can we examine learning and involvement").

The second article, "The Gaming Involvement and Informal Learning Framework" is in Simulation & Gaming and provides a good overview of the three studies I carried out in and also presents the GIIL framework as the culmination of all my findings. Essentially, the framework is able to account for both how and what people learn from gaming while also highlighting the influence of player identity. Further, the iterative relationship between identity, involvement and learning is emphasised: the more strongly someone identifies themselves as a gamer, the greater their micro and macro-level involvement and the more likely they are to learn from their gaming experiences. This is represented in the figure below (taken from my PhD thesis and also reprinted within the article).

Technically these articles are still in press but both journals have put them up online before print. It's great to have them out there and see all that hard work come together :-)

CHI Play 2014: Toronto

Last month I went to the first CHI Play conference in Toronto - and it was fun :-) The full papers from the conference are openly available for a short time only so make sure to check them out here.

On the Sunday I took part in the somewhat provocatively titled "Participatory Design for Serious Game Design: Truth and Lies" workshop organised by Rilla Khaled, Mina Vasalou, Vero Vanden Abeele, and Maarten Van Mechelen. Participatory design (PD) is something I've recently become more interested in and our submission "Designing Persuasive Games through Competition" was about how PD influenced the organisation of the competition I ran at UCL earlier this year and some of the tensions that arose during the whole process. The workshop was a great experience as I got to meet a load of interesting people and to hear about different types of PD game research. And I learnt that defining PD, while a good learning experience, isn't particularly easy!

On the following day, I presented our paper on Player Strategies: Achieving Breakthroughs and Progressing in Single-player and Cooperative Games (Iacovides, Cox, Avakian & Knoll, 2014 - thanks to Anna Cox for the photo below!). The paper resulted from two UCLIC MSc projects I supervised and the conference also gave me a chance to catch up with Tom Knoll, one of my co-authors who is now at Amberlight. The paper builds upon my PhD work by looking at the types of strategies players use in an attempt to overcome breakdowns and breakthroughs. In single-player games, we found players use trial & error, experiment, stop & think, repetition and take the hint, while in coop games this extended to also include knowledge exchange, guidance and surrendering control/taking over. My favourite design suggestion from this work came from co-author Ara Avakian who suggested incorporating a "Quantum leap mode" in coop games but you'll have to read the paper to find out more about that :-)

In related work, Conor Linehan spoke about "Learning Curves: Analysing Pace and Challenge in Four Successful Puzzle Games", where learning curves refer to the structure and pace at which challenges are introduced to the player. We discussed how there might scope to combine our work as it would interesting to see how these learning curves actually map on to what players actually experience - particular in relation to more and less "successful" types of game. Essentially, it would be worth finding out out whether you see similar patterns of breakdown and breakthrough around the introduction of different mechanics and whether different types of learning curve lead to different types of strategy.

Some of the other highlights of the conference related to considering the design process e.g. Kathrin Gelring and Bob de Schutter presenting a framework for Gerontoludic design; Mina Vasalou reflecting on cultural appropriation when designing a Day of the Dead game for children; and Chad Richards considering the importance of context in developing gamification systems. Other highlights related to understanding game play practices e.g. Nicole Crenshaw highlighting the complexity of naming practices in online games; and Marcus Carter focusing on the use multiple screens to play different games at the same time. Meanwhile Zachary Toupes' categorisations of different cooperative communication mechanics (environment modifying, automated communication, immersive, expressive, emergent and attention focusing) got me thinking about how these forms of communication might relate to different kinds of player strategies.

There were also multiple presentations on games being used for different purposes such Michael Cristel discussing the development of a game for teaching children about the Cognitive Triangle concept of feelings, thoughts, and behaviors and Zachary Fitz-Walter discussing the gamifying university orientation (with mixed results). At a more meta-level, I also enjoyed Marcus' second presentation on paradigms in HCI game research and I'm definitely planning on looking at the paper in more depth. In addition, there was also quite a large industry presence at the conference, where I particularly liked the idea of "guerilla techniques" for user testing mobile games (e.g. at a hot dog stand) by the team from Scopely.

The keynotes were both delivered by people in industry, though I have to admit being a little disappointed by Mike Ambinder from Valve. His talk was titled "Making the best of imperfect data" and though he talked a lot about methodologies (e.g. user testing, data analytics) he mainly seemed to be lamenting the vast amounts of data he has access too and the constraints of not being able to do "proper" research in a commercial environment. Perhaps it's the result of having a background in experimental psychology (which I have too!) but it sounded like what he mainly wanted was the ability to measure everything, tools to automate data analysis and to magically remove all forms of bias. Which is fine, I guess, but I'm not really sure about the specifics of what he was wanted to find out and a lot of "why" questions he did seem to be asking a (e.g. rationales for player choice) really felt more suited to - dare I say it? - qualitative research...

In contrast, Jason VandenBerghe, Creative Director at Ubisoft, did a really good job of showing how he had engaged in research in this area and managed to use it in a positive way. Based on work such as the Big 5 personality traits and Self Determination Theory (SDT - recently applied to video games) he presented the "Engines of Play" - this is basically a tool for considering player motivations over time and for communicating with his team. His talk clearly outlined a problem space, involved some great game examples, suggested areas for further improvement (e.g. what about players drives such as "collecting"?) and managed to be entertaining as well :-)

Oh, and I almost forgot the student game design competition! This was a really quite an impressive showcase - there were games about privacy, sexual health, and even poetry while there were plenty of multiplayer opportunities e.g. a quest game involving IRC chat (and a lot of arguing!). The winner of the competition was a very cool looking game called OHR that took place in a Machinarium inspired world and required the use of physical electronic components. Below is a photo of Anna Cox enjoying a game where you have to shout into a mobile phone mic to avoid on-screen obstacles :-) Also, in the poster session, as part of Citizen Cyberlab, Anna presented some work on RedWire, a re-mixing tool for game design.

All in all, CHI Play was a good experience - and I'm sure I've missed loads out! I'm really looking forward to next year, where it looks like I'm going to be helping organise next year's conference in London :-)

CHI 2013 (Part II) - Citizen Science, biometrics, gamification@work and student games

So on to part two. Apart attending a workshop, I also presented a poster at CHI: Do Games Attract or Sustain Engagement in Citizen Science? A Study of Volunteer Motivations (see below). The poster is based on some work being carried out as part of the Citizen Cyberlab project that Charlene Jennett and Anna Cox are involved with. The paper reports on the findings of a set of pilot interviews that Cassandra Cornish-Trestail carried out with people who play citizen science games - in this case, Foldit and Eyewire. The answer to the question in the title is no, game mechanics didn't seem to attract volunteers but, in addition to tools such as chat facilities and forums, they do help to sustain involvement over time. Essentially, the people who play these games are already interested in science, they aren't gamers. In addition, what game mechanics allow for is greater participation in a range of social interactions while also providing ways in which to recognise volunteer achievements as being meaningful. I really quite enjoyed chatting about the poster and luckily there were quite a few interested people to chat too :-)

I got to meet Elaine Massung a researcher from Bristol who was involved in the Close the Door project - where they were investigating motivations around crowdsourcing to support forms of environmental activism. Interestingly, their work suggests that game mechanics such as points can actually decrease motivation for some people. I also met Anne Bowser, a PhD student from Maryland University who presented the PLACE (Prototyping Location, Activities and Collective Experience - see below) framework for designing location based apps and games earlier on in the conference. I enjoyed hearing about Anne's work with on floracaching (a form of geocaching) and how they developed the Biotracker app - a serious geocaching game for citizen science that encourages players to gather plant phenology data. I'm hoping to be able to use at some point in the UK too!

Anne presented at the session on game design, where I also got to hear about Pejman Mirza-Babaei's work on Biometric storyboards. Unfortunately, Pejman couldn't make the conference but his supervisor Lennart Nacke was there to present the paper. I first became aware of Pejman's work during my PhD and it was really nice to see how far it had come. I'm not a big fan of biometrics, I didn't find the raw data I collected to be useful in relation to identifying game-play breakdowns and breakthroughs within my case studies but the tool that was presented during this talk was pretty cool. It allows for designers to consider the what they want players experience to be (see below) and provides a neat visualisation of the GSR (galvanic skin response) and EMG (electromyography) data that can them be compared with what was intended. The fact the Pejman also compared using this tool with a classic user testing approach (alongwith a control group) was great too and the results indicated that the BioST approach did lead to higher game-play quality. However, I do have some questions about the work carried out, even after reading the paper. The main thing I'm not sure about is whether the BioST approach took more time than the standard gamer user experience approach. This is important, as I know from visiting Playable games, there isn't always a lot of time to get some feedback and provide suggestions to designers. There weren't actually that many differences between the BioST and Classic UT approach, is the former really worth it if it takes a lot longer? I was also unsure about how the tool dealt with artefacts such as movement - does the researcher have to manually clear these up and how long does this take? Finally, I noticed that the BioST tool allowed for player annotations where it looks like players were asked to review a recording of the game-play session and add their comments but I'm pretty sure the classic UT condition didn't also do this... Considering this is what I asked my participants to do and I got a lot of rich data from it, I wondered whether the conditions really were a fair comparison - could the player reviews have been helpful without the biometric data? Nevertheless, I do like that the tool presented does not consider biometric data alone as I think it's important to give player's a voice too. Also, I think the way in which the biometric data was visualised provided designers with a powerful tool for interpreting play experiences so I'd be keen to see more research like this.

Later on I attended the Gamification@Work panel, which has a really interesting mix of people including Sebastien Deterding and a number of people from industry. I particularly liked Sebastien's emphasis on ensuring that autonomy isn't taken away from people when using gameful approaches at work. He also provided us with some quotes from games journalists which clearly indicated how when you have to do something for work, even playing games, the activity can lose it's appeal. I took a lot of notes in this session as it got me thinking about how I would design a game (or gamify a task) but I'm still mulling over these. The people from industry also had some insightful contributions to make but I couldn't help coming away from the session a little concerned about how game mechanics can be used to track performance and manipulate people into behaving in different ways. Why does this make me uncomforatble in relation to work but less so in relation to education or promoting health? Some interesting questions were also raised at the end and while measurements may be important for showing improvement (or lack of it) it's important to remember that not everything can be reduced to metrics.

Other highlights from the latter part of the conference include the student game competition - the quality of games was seriously impressive and I'd really quite like to check out a few of them including Machinneers (a lovely looking puzzle adventure for children stealthily teaches logical thinking, problem solving and procedural literacy), ATUM (an innovative multi-layer point and click game) and Squidge (a really cute game controller that monitors player heart rate - see below); the Women's Representations in Technology panel - again a seriously interesting mix of people and perspectives which got me thinking about feminism and how gender isn't necessarily binary; Razvan Rughinis' paper on badges in education - where he discussed badge architectures and how they can be used to chart learning routes; and finally Bruno Latour's keynote - I have to be honest and say I did not find this the easiest talk to follow but I'm sure it got my brain working! There are definitely other people who have got a better handle on it than I do (e.g. J.Nathan Mathias).

It was a huge conference and in addition to the other talks I haven't mentioend, there are also a few sessions I didn't get to go to so I've also got paper on persuasive games and behaviour change to my reading list. In general though, the conference gave me lots to think about especially in terms of how I want my own research to continue, especially in terms of considering games in relation to my work on CHI+MED, which there may be more to say about later on...

CHI 2013: Paris (Part I) - MOMA, games and learning, game players and the Games SIG

Last week I went to CHI in Paris - it's been a while since I've been to a major academic conference and I seem to have gotten out of the habit of blogging so I thought I would use this as an excuse to get back into it :-) Plus there was a lot of game sessions that have got me thinking.

It all started last Sunday with the MediCHI workshop. This was a good opportunity to talk to about the work I'm doing on CHI+MED, with respect to medical device safety, and to meet others in the field. The main conference started on Monday with a keynote from Paola Antonelli from MOMA. She gave us an overview of lots of intriguing design projects that MOMA has exhibited and while no specific HCI challenges were made explicit during the talk, I was reminded about how technology, including games, can make people think. Particularly interesting examples include PIG 05049 (Christien Meindertsma) and the Menstruation Machine (Hiromi Ozaki/Sputniko!). She also mentioned their recent games collection - extra points for the inclusion of Passage :-)

In terms of the game-related talks, Erik Harpstead discussed an educational game they had developed (a single player physics game called RumbleBlocks - see below) and how they used metrics to assess learning as part of the ENGAGE project. A toolkit was presented for logging game events and that allows for a replay of game-play so player behaviour can be analysed further. This toolkit seems like it could be really useful but my main question was whether collecting this type of logging data can actually account for situations where players progress but without gaining any real understanding of the principles behind what they are doing. This concern was partially addressed during the talk when the replay analysis indicated that the gameplay mechanics actually contravened one of the learning goals (where students were not lowering the centre of their structures, even though they were building one with wider bases and that were more symmetrical). The misalignment between content and gameplay was seen to potentially explain why there was not a difference between pre and post-test regarding centre of mass and also suggested that the game needs to be redesigned to remedy this issue.

Derek Lomas' talk on optimising learning and motivation in educational games through using crowdsourcing techniques also got my attention. What was particularly interesting about this study was the huge amount of data collected (one study has 10,000 participants the other 70,000 - all who played the online math game Battleship Numberline) and the questioning of the inverted-U hypothesis regarding challenge and engagement. Basically, flow theory suggests that if something is too easy, boredom will occur and if it is too hard, you'll get frustration - so a moderate amount of challenge would be the most engaging. However, the findings from Derek's work actually suggest that people find spent the most time playing when the challenge level was lowest thus indicating that  easier challenges are more engaging . Further, the studies indicated there is a trade-off between engagement and learning i.e. you can't have both... I'm going to have to read the paper for more details but there are several points here that I'd like to consider further. First, I'm questioning whether the length of time spent playing is a good measure of engagement (especially when children might be playing these games during school time - who is controlling the length of play if that is the case?). The terms engagement, motivation and enjoyment were all used interchangeably but I'm not sure they can all be reduced to amount of time spent playing. Surely I can enjoy something I play for less time more than something I might play for longer (e.g. if my motivation was to kill time)? Secondly, I want to look at how well integrated the game mechanics of Battleship Numberline are with the learning content - mainly because I don't like the idea that there needs to be a trade-off between engagement and learning! Further, given Jake Habgood's work on the importance of integrating game mechanics, flow and learning content I don't think there has to be. Finally, the authors also suggested that novelty might be more important than challenge in relation to engagement. This was particularly intriguing as I don't think it's something that has been explored in the literature on games and learning and I'm guessing there might be quite a lot to it.

Within the same session, Stephen Foster talked about designing diverse and sustainable educational games that support competition and meta-cognition. Inspired by the way Chess and Starcarft II players relfect and review their game-play, Stephen presented a game called CompetitiveSourcery based on the pre-existing CodeSpells platoform. The game requires players to compete by designing "spells" in java and using them against each other. Three users were observed over two months as they prepared as a team for a tournament - this included playing the game but also discussing strategies, bebugging each other's code and updating a team wiki. In general, this was a good example of tapping into both micro and macro involvement for the purposes of learning but I was surprised not to see any mention of Gee's discussion player affinity groups that exist around games (though Gee is mentioned in the paper). Plus, the idea that teachers should consider meta-level activities isn't entirely new (see Paul Pivec's BECTA report for the importance of the meta-game) while encourgaing discussion through having a tournament has been done before (e.g. research on Racing Academy). Also, while Stephen makes claims about the sustainability of this approach, there is always going to be an issue concerning whether all players will actually engage in the meta-level activities to the same extent. I'm not sure how you address that though...

There were several other game related sessions including Max Birk talking about the relationship between controller type and personality and Jeff Huang talking about patterns of game-play and skill in Halo. For both these talks I wanted a bit more detail on the methods so I'm going to have to add them to the pile of post-CHI papers to follow-up. In relation to the former, I was a little confused about the relationship between my "real" self, my "ideal" self and my "game" self as I'm not sure any of these can be static constructs but there may be some interesting differences to explore here (do standard controllers really make gamers more neurotic?). In relation to the latter, an awful lot of logging data was collected but I was a little disappointed that "patterns of gameplay" was more about how long people play for and how often than it was about gameplay strategies (but that's only because I'm more interested in player strategies!). Other highlights included Nicholas Graham discussing a tabletop game where one person plays the game and the other orchestrates the experience in real time i.e. builds levels and obstacles. This reminded me a little of Sleep is Death but Tabula Rasa seemed a bit more light-hearted in it's approach to foster open-ended creativity. Tamara Peyton (see below) then spoke about the alternate reality game I Love Bees and showed how leadership emerged from team-play. Interestingly, the players spontaneously used military terms and take on different roles within the team which she classified as General, Lieutenant and Private. I particularly liked that she emphasised that disjuncture can be as important as flow - essentially we should also be thinking about what it means to fail and how failing isn't necessarily a negative experience.

I also attended the SIG on Games and Entertainment and was pleased to see that there really is quite an active games community at CHI. Katherine Isbister and Regina Bernhaupt led the session but handed over the reigns of the SIG to Magy Seif-El-Nasr and Heather Desurvive. The topics that came up ranged from needing to foster links between industry and academia, introducing further games courses at next year's conference, and discussing other venues for games research. It was clear that while some people were interested in the user experience side and methods for assessing game-play others where interested in using games as research tools e.g. for the purposes of collecting data. Regarding the latter, there was a suggestion that there might be a workshop or course next year with a focus on how you might evaluate this kind of large-scale data but I think that will depend on whether someone volunteers to run it! I enjoyed the session overall and found a good way to see the range of game-related interests across the CHI community.

Ok, I think that's enough for today. There is still plenty more to write but I'm going to have to leave it for another post! For now I'm going to leave you with a pic of Charlene Jennett hugging a bear to make one jump on screen :-)

Interactive punching bag

Ok, so this isn't directly game related but it could be, depending on what you use the device for. This summer, six 18/19-year-olds built an interactive punching bag as a summer project at the Open University. Think of it as a game interface, with lights, sounds and sensors. If you like it, please feel free to do so on youtube and to share the video as it would be great to give their work some exposure.