CHI 2015: Seoul, South Korea

Last week I was in Seoul for CHI 2015, where overall UCLIC had a really good year and some great talks. With respect to my own work, I presented my paper with Anna Cox on "Moving Beyond Fun: Evaluating Serious Experience in Digital Games" on how we evaluated the games that were entered into our persuasive game design competition for students. Not much work has been done around this sort of thing, so we developed a method that involved expert judging, play-testing with interviews and post-play emails to establish which of the entries was most likely to lead to reflection on human error and blame culture within the context of healthcare. In the paper we argue that our methods allowed for a consideration of domain relevance and potential to lead to reflection (expert judging), gameplay experience and engagement with competition themes (play-testing and interviews) and longer term resonance (follow-up emails). While you can find the games entered into the competition here, the winner, Nurse's Dilemma serves as a great example of how a one-off uncomfortable gaming experience can lead to reflection on previously taken for granted assumptions about responsibility and blame within healthcare. 

I also went to the workshop on diverse perspectives on players which was a great opportunity to talk about player research, methods in the area (including case studies), and challenges the area is facing, such as ecological validity, conceptions of gameplay, plus the need to operationalise key terms and to agree on definitions! We ended up drawing a road map of our discussions - see pic below, where we really did end up with karaoke :-)

There were quite a few games sessions at CHI, though I was a little annoyed that one of them clashed with the session I was in, plus I missed the alt.chi talk on Games Against Health but I guess that just means there is more to add to my reading list! I'm also going to have to add the work-in-progress paper It Was Sad But Still Good: Gratifications of Emotionally Moving Game Experiences by Julia Ayumi Bopp and colleagues as it sounds intriguing. Of the talks I did go to, there was a lot of interesting work presented including Alena Denisova on 1st vs. 3rd person perspectives and immersion, Rodrigo Vicencio-Moreira on techniques for player balancing in FPS games, Daniel Johnson and Lennart Nacke on characteristics of MOBA gameplay, Peta Wyeth on differences between playing cooperative games with avatars (people) and agents (AI characters) and Sauvik Das on comparing linear and open world game structures.

I particularly enjoyed Melodie Vidal's talk about The Royal Corgi, a game that uses eye tracking as a mechanic (see video below). Basically, you play a character in medieval England who wants to gain favour in the royal court by becoming a trainer to the King's corgi and you have to convince other characters in the game that you are worthy of the job - and where you look will matter as some want you to look them in the eye (but not at their wife) and others expect deference and a lowered gaze... The idea seemed quite novel, where eye tracking was able offer an additional channel of communication and I was particularly interested in some of the strong reactions the game provoked.

Chris Preist also gave a really good talk on using gameplay as an extrinsic motivator for learning, in this case as a way to encourage teenagers to revise for their Mathematics GCSE exams. They adopted an approach based on free-to-play games in a game that was like Clash of Clans where instead of having to make micro-payments to get resources and speed up the game, the students had to take a revision test. The students were allowed to play the game when they liked over three weeks and the findings indicated that those in the game condition improved significantly more those in the quiz only and control conditions - plus, the game condition students spent more time on the revision quiz than the quiz only group. Further, the qualitative data suggested it was at the expense of their normal gaming time. While there are some potential issues to consider - it could be argued that revision is not the same as having to learn new content, and it's not clear whether an intrinsic game could lead to larger learning gains or whether this approach would sustain revision over longer periods of time (see below) - but all in all it came across as a relatively simple way to get students to do more revision, which, in the authors words, is already "associated with the extrinsic motivation of passing an exam"!

With respect to the rest of the conference, the game competition has got me thinking a lot more about reflection so I made sure to go along to other talks that I thought might be relevant. Some of the highlights include Geraldine Fitzpatrick considering reflection in relation to food waste and highlighting the emotional dimension of the process (something which I'm not sure if always discussed), Eric Baumer introducing conceptual dimension of reflective informatics (relating to breakdown, inquiry, and transformation), and Jeffrey Bardzell highlighting how research through design can contribute to knowledge (through invoking experiences rather than representing reality). I'm getting quite intrigued by critical design but I do feel like I haven't quite got my head around it yet, so while I missed the talk, so I've put Pierce et al's paper on Expanding and Refining Design and Criticality in HCI on my reading list as well. 

I also enjoyed Ben Kirman and Shaun Lawson's talk that presented the quantification of pets as a case study that, through speculative design fiction, was essentially a critique of the quantified tracking movement. Besides getting a man in a dog suit to walk on stage, they presented a number of speculative design fictions, such as a dog collar that can tell you whether your dog is happy or sad and a way to track cat movements in gardens through their microchips (see quantifiedpet.com for more details!), which they presented to focus groups consisting of pet owners an animal behaviour experts. While the owners mostly really liked the ideas behind the designs as they wanted to understand their pets more, the experts raised important concerns about the scientific basis of these technologies and how they might actually undermine the bond between animals and humans - particularly since that bond at least partially relies on human beings being able to interpret complex animal behaviour. So there was lots of food for thought here in relation to both trying to quantify pretty much everything but also in terms of using design fictions within research. 


To close the conference we had Psy as the final keynote speaker but while he gave a rather humble, honest and engaging talk about the explosion of Gangnam Style, and the conference centre was in the Gangnam district, I'm not entirely sure it had much to do with HCI... In general though CHI gave me lots to think about (and to read up on!) and Seoul was a great city to visit - I'm glad I made sure I had a little extra time to explore :-)

 View from the National Museum of Korea

UCL Student Game Design Competition

Calling all student game designers!!! Do you believe that games can be more than just a bit of fun? Is designing games your thing? Do you think games can contribute to the understanding of science? If this sounds like you, we’d love to see you at the Persuasive Games Competition! 

The CHI+MED project (which involves researchers from Queen Mary University, City University, Swansea University and UCL) is inviting teams of students to design a game that will be made freely available on errordiary.org. Prizes will be awarded at the final showcase, including £1000 for first place, £500 for runner up and £500 for the people’s choice. Get started by registering here for our kick-off event, which will be taking place at UCL on Feb 1st 2014. The event is only open to students (at any level of higher education, from any institution, and in any area) so student ID will be required. At least one member of each team must have attended the kick-off to take part in the competition. Please check out the details on the website (including the sources of inspiration) and make sure to share the link with others.  

Social gaming

I had a couple of friends come round last weekend so we could have a go on a some games I'd been wanting to try out. The first one was World of Goo, which I already knew I was going to love as I'd already played the PC demo. At first we were looking for some sort of multi-player mode, but then realised that all you had to do was point another wiimote at the screen to join in the puzzle solving. World of Goo is seriously easy to pick up, and we enjoyed it pretty much from the start. It follows the usual approach of starting you off with relatively easy tasks which get grow more and more difficult the further you progress - achieving a nice balance between your developing skills and the challenges you have to face. I also really like how you gradually start to become more and more curious about the goo and what exactly is going on in the game world. Who is the mysterious Sign Painter who leaves cryptic clues around the place? What are goo balls used for? What's with the random giant frogs? And so on. While I quite like this sort of randomness, one of my friends did point out the self-referential humour employed by the game might get annoying after a while. It was quite interesting to try and solve each puzzle with someone else though, especially since the experience seemed to have much to do with who you are playing with! While it made sense to cooperate and establish some sort of strategy together i.e. "you do the bridge and I'll do the balloons" (see image below), there was also the occasional competitive moment of "stop stealing my goo balls!". We didn't try it with three wiimotes but I have a suspicion it would have been quite hard to break down the puzzles into different tasks and it would have just turned into who can solve the puzzle fastest!

In contrast, de Blob supports multi-player play with a party gaming mode. The game is essentially a single-player adventure where you have to bring colour back to Chroma City by acquiring paint and bumping into things. It's amusing enough but not very engaging in the long term to be honest - I think I'm more intrigued by World of Goo's Sign Painter than the de Blob story. I had hoped the party mode would be a bit more interesting, but it essentially consists of three mini-games (which you have to unlock by playing the story mode) where you can compete against another player (actually up to 4, but while I do have 4 wiimotes, I've only got two nunchucks). The image below shows the split screen for two-player mode. We played it for a bit and it was entertaining but to be honest there wasn't much there to keep us going for long. The party mode just ended up feeling like a bit of a simplistic add on thrown in to try and tap into the Wii's success as a party console. Which is fine, if you don't want to invest much effort into it, or if you're playing with people who don't have much gaming experience.

If you want something a bit meatier though, there is Little Big Planet on the PS3, which I would seriously encourage anyone to have a go on. I'm going to ignore the user-generated content side of things for the moment as I think I want to do a separate post on this later on, and focus on the going through the levels, which you have to do anyway to unlock materials to design your own levels. I have played it on my own, and while it's incredibly cute and you could spend ages customising your little sack person, I found it a lot more fun to play it with someone. I first tried it back home at Christmas with my sister, and it brought back memories of how it used to feel playing together on my Mega-drive as kids - a sort of nostalgic bonding experience! The game encourages you to play with someone else by providing challenges you can only solve with the help of another player. I didn't realise until I was helping out at the Digilab stall in the Learn About Fair on campus a couple of weeks ago that you can play with up to four players. This was quite cool in terms of getting as many people to try it as possible but did get a little complicated trying to keep multiple sack boys and girls on screen at once (if your character disappears off to one side for too long you end up losing a life).


So, I think two-player mode works best, but while the game starts out easy enough some of the later levels can be quite difficult! Or at least they require a level of coordination and timing from both players that isn't always easy to achieve. The fact that there are frequent save points throughout each level means reduces the consequences of falling off a cliff or into crocodile jaws, being burnt to death etc but you essentially get four chances at making it to the next checkpoint, and that's between the number of people playing. So if there are two of you, and one of you has died twice, and the other once, the pressure is on for the second player to make it to the next check point in one piece, otherwise you have to go back to the start of the level It's an interesting mechanic, but it can get a little frustrating when things don't go very well. Plus, I tend to want to rush into everything when presented with a new level (I'm going to blame this on growing up playing Sonic...) when perhaps a bit of patience would work better. I also think that while de Blob and possibly World of Goo could quickly be picked up by any player, and played quite happily by a single player, Little Big Planet requires a bit more investment from two people to really reach it's potential as an engaging platformer. At the end of the day, I guess what you choose what you want to play based on the energy you want to put in and the experience you want to have.

Co-located play (or Playing games in the same room with friends)

I've been thinking a bit lately by how social games have become. I mean, they've always had a social side, but they've become a lot more socially 'acceptable' over the last few years. And I don't just mean the rise of the MMORPG, like World of Warcraft, but the more traditional inviting people round to play. I know with respect to the Wii, the novelty factor is responsible in part for this curiosity, but can it last? Can the Wii introduce people to gaming and keep them interested?

I was playing a couple of games at my sister Katerina's over the weekend. She's never been seriously into games but enjoys playing them with people. One of the games we looked at was Super Mario Galaxy. I wanted to try out the co-star mode where you have one player playing Mario, and the other acting as some sort of helper, and we took turns in different roles. The second player uses the Wiimote to do things like collect and shoot star bits, freeze enemies, make Mario jump higher etc but you don't actually play a second character (like in Sonic 3 on the Mega Drive for instance, where you can play Tails ). I didn't mind being the 'co-star' as it was pretty interesting trying to anticipate what player 1 was going to do next and figuring out how you could help out. Plus, I'm sure there were a couple of points where my actions e.g. freezing an enemy mushroom, dictated what player 1 actually did do next. In contrast, my sister got a little bored after a while. We only played the first couple of levels, so it's possible it would have got more interesting as the levels got more complex. Meanwhile the endless storyboarding at the start of the game (which you unfortunately can't skip) probably didn't help either. Nevertheless, I can see how you could get bored just pointing the Wii remote at the screen for hours, while someone else actually gets to play the game.

We also played EA Playground, a game that revolves around a number of different playground games e.g. dodge ball, track car racing, tether ball etc. There were three of us playing but we only had two Wii remotes, so we ended up taking turns. It would have been interesting to see how the games would have dealt with more than two players, as I'm not sure they all could. There was a bit of a learning curve as each game had it's own set of instructions that we had to read through, but since there was some crossover between games it wasn't too bad. What was annoying was the tiny writing the instructions were displayed in. One of the things we noticed while playing was how in some games e.g. tether ball, you could quite easily strain your arm. Ok, so part of this is due to getting a bit excited waving the Wii remote around (which also tends to something getting knocked over) but it must have something to do with the feedback from the game. This came up in a meeting with my supervisors a little while ago when we were talking about Wii Sports (the gameplay in Playground is pretty similar to this). We talked about how the feedback from the remote is not the same as you get in real life when performing the same actions. The fact that you don't 'feel' the ball when you hit it seems to make you more likely to try and hit it harder. Since there isn't actually anything there, you just end up straining yourself. If the Wii is trying to tap into 'natural' movement, this could end up confusing the learning process when you realise it's not quite the same as in real life.

We did enjoy playing Playground though and I reckon this was because it is set up as a number of different competitions. You can play in the same team for some of the games, but the goal is still to win. Super Mario Galaxy requires a lot more investment in terms of time, and is not so easy to dip in and out of. So for what we wanted - to spend an hour or two playing games - we were much better off with something like Playground where we could try out different games that were relatively short and had clear cut goals for each of them. I think it might be quite difficult to find a dedicated co-star to play Mario with over long periods of time. In contrast, the single player mode in Mario is probably a lot more interesting. Though kids can play both games, EA Playground comes acorss as a bit more simplistic and with less to explore than in Super Mario Galaxy.

I guess it partly comes down to what you want to play games for and to everyones' personal preferences. It seems to be the case that when it comes to playing a game with a group of people, you don't want something with a high learning curve that requires a lot of investment. What seems more popular are games where you can compete against each other, or a computer controlled team, and that you can play in short bursts (or longer if you so choose). So far, the Wii seems to be catering for both the dedicated single player and the more casual group of multi-players.