While I managed to get some momentum with this blog in December, my time has been sparse at the start of the year (especially January). Much has happened. I have successfully defended one of the first Ph.D. degrees in Digital Game Development (read about it and download my thesis from here) in Sweden. Leading up to this and following right after it are a bunch of talks concerned with the central theme of affective measurement of players, two of which I will be giving in Canada this week and the next. Besides the obvious question of employment and career direction, I am also evaluating my general research and identify promising paths for future directions. So, watch this space and everything unfolds in the next months.

Slideshare is down. Merry Christmas!

Alexei Kapterev is a visual communication specialist and presentation design consultant, who has assembled a great presentation on the current state of the art of happiness research. As part of this presentation he revisits central ideas of positive psychology, such as Flow, which have been discussed prominently in game research, especially game experience research as well. The talk also ties in nicely with yesterday’s presentation on the Future of Work. Since correlations between happiness and other areas of everyday life are discussed. The visual aesthetic of the slides speaks for itself. Again, keeping this brief. Enjoy the presentation.

Jeff Brenman’s talk about the future of work is a very inspiring and great presentation (he works at a presentation consulting firm) that might come off as a little bit off topic here, but substantially most of the changing circumstances of our working lives mentioned in his talk are due to the people growing up with games. I am currently reading the book “Got Game” (by Beck and Wade) which is exactly analyzing this aspect of the changed generation and culture that our gaming habit has created. Nevertheless, it is almost Christmas, so I will keep it brief. Enjoy the excellent presentation.

Today, we have more of a slide collection. But the main featured presentation is the one from Graham McAllister, who is a researcher in video game usability at the University of Sussex in the UK and also runs the company Vertical Slice that specializes in User Experience (UX; human perspective, not quality assurance) testing for games. Most of what I have been researching in the past 4 years is already starting to be employed in practice by them (quite fascinating, really).

First, he explains the different meanings of UX jargon, such as usability (can I do it?), user experience (do I like it?), user interface (how does it look?), interaction design (how is the interface used?). Then he mentions that UX is a key factor driving review scores of games (not the technical functionality alone), which then drive the sales. He backs up his claims with sales data. However, some games with good reviews may still fail financially. On the other hand, games with bad reviews are not very likely to sell well. He then discusses two case studies (Assassin’s creed and Bioshock) in terms of successful design intent or gameplay flaws. The rise of episodic gaming demands a higher level of quality even for vertical slices of games. He goes on to analyze UX flaws of games defaced by gaming magazine reviews.

Slide 89 gives an excellent overview of the profit distribution of a regular digital game (slide 92 does the same for an iPhone app) and clearly states the beneficial return on investment for iPhone developers. He then describes a local case study of an iPhone game called “Launchball.” Interestingly, the testing is presented with different target personas that are likely to be interested in such a game. A common approach from regular UX, which is starting to gain momentum in game user research. As a takeaway, from his presentation (and the others that I will be listing below), game developers and publishers should become more aware of human factors in playtesting and how this will drive the identity and sales of their gaming product. On to the slides…

Bonus Presentations

Usability Testing for Console Games is a short (but very stylish) presentation from Andy Budd, Director of User Experience at Clearleft.

Next Generation Testing: Biometric Analysis of Player Experience is a talk I gave at last year’s GDC Canada, where I am discussing traditional and next-generation (i.e., biometric or psychophysiological) testing methods for games.

Playability and Player Experience Research was a panel that I chaired at this year’s DiGRA 2009 conference in London. We had a number of specialists talking about all kinds of playability assessment and player experience research.

More Links

When Pundits Attack: Game Sales vs Game Quality

Vertical Slice

Gareth White’s Blog: Game Player Interaction

Eelke Folmer is a prominent game researcher, concerned with game accessibility at the University of Nevada, Reno. At the Games For Health Conference 2009, he gave a talk about his areas of research and an introduction to game accessibility in general. His argument is that games as a major force of culture should not exclude disabled individuals from playing and enjoying the benefits of them. He outlines a game interaction model, where we see different forms of sensory output of games: visual, tactile, and auditory, and similarly different standard devices, such as game controllers, allowing the player to physically enter information into the game system. Feedback and interaction work in synthesis in games, however often not accounting for all possible modes of interaction or feedback that might challenge so-called able gamers.

As gamers grow older the problem of interacting with games may grow (and they might become part of the accessibility statistics), but a large number of disabled people are currently excluded from playing games. This should not be a problem as games in general are about researching alternative forms of interaction and thus different interaction forms should be available in games, some of them may even be included as gameplay modes (adding bonus value to the product). Before we talk about this some more, first have a look at this presentation.

Professor Folmer outlines a few of the games spawned by his research. Blind Hero is a Frets-on-Fire variant which allows players to connect a guitar controller and a haptic feedback glove, so they are able to play the game by touch and sound alone. The game design had certain tradeoffs, such as removing a button and removing lookahead. He designed a user study to test the effectiveness of the game with 4 visually impaired and 8 regular participants and found the haptic feedback to be a viable strategy for music interaction games.

Next, he discusses one-switch games, which rely on a single switch and may be especially helpful for paraplegic gamers. Common controllers are for example, an eye tracker for gaze interaction, mouth controllers, or a one-handed joystick. For designing a one-switch game, it is important to focus on the smallest common denominator between game and input modality: What is the smallest amount of input that preserves gameplay? This requires a lot of extra work for the artificial intelligence that takes over most the steering, for example, in a first-person shooter (FPS), which is usually done with the mouse and keyboard. What he did in his example (see video below) is to basically put the FPS camera on top of a game bot that takes over the steering, while all the one-switch player has to worry about is the shooting. Although, certainly alternatives could be explored, such as focusing on exploration gameplay and steering with one switch, while the artificial intelligence (AI) takes care of the shooting.

The final case study, he presents is his experiences with TextSL (Download). This game interaction software uses the virtual world of Second Life, but removes the graphics interface and replaces it with a command-line interface (similar to a MUD) that allows to navigate in the world, but also puts an emphasis on the social interaction (in form of text chats) that is the primary driver of Second Life gameplay. More exciting game accessibility projects can be found on his research website.

Bonus Presentations on Game Accessibility

More Links

Barrie Ellis One-Switch Games

Eelke Folmer’s publications

IGDA Game Accessibility Special Interest Group

AudioGames.net

Deaf Gamers

Interaction Design Patterns for Games Library

A list of research papers concerned with game accessibility from the IGDA GA SIG

A list of videos dealing with game accessibility from the IGDA GA SIG

Improving Game Accessibility (Gamasutra Article by Kevin Bierre)

Accessible Game Controllers (PDF Fact Sheet)

Guidelines for the development of entertaining software for people with multiple learning disabilities (Article by Media Lunde Tollefsen)

One Button Games (Gamasutra Article by Berbank Green)

GDC: Success Factors of One-Button Casual Mobile Games (Gamasutra Article by Brandon Sheffield)

Universally Accessible Games at the Human–Computer Interaction Laboratory of ICS–FORTH

As a natural follow-up to yesterday’s slide deck, we have Mary and Douglas Kiang‘s presentation on digital games for the body, mind and soul today. Their talk outlines 21st Century skills expected from this generation, such as creativity, innovation, problem-solving, communication, and collaboration. If that does not sound like the core activities you do in your favorite game yet – the slides are going to persuade you.

First, we get a glimpse into the current student demographic. One thing, our generation needs to be really good at, is making strategic decisions and filtering information to our basic needs. As information around us grows and becomes widely available, a core skill in my opinion will be to be able to chose what information to take into account for making a strategic decision and what to leave out. Since we are a generation of active builders and learners, we are harder to teach, because for acquiring a skill we need to have just the right balance between a too easy or a too hard task. Often teachers are not equipped to generate this level of sophistication for their students, which is where digital games come into play (pun intended).

The slides discuss some of the factors that make great games, such as constructive (e.g., LEGO Digital Designer, Junkbot, Bridge CS, MIT Scratch, Alice, Squeak, or Microsoft Kodu), creative (e.g., Professor Layton, Enigmo, Crayon Physics, etc.), complex (e.g., Caduceus and Spore [see video below]), and collaborative (e.g., Rock Band, New Super Mario Bros. Wii) factors that are all somewhat aligned to create the big mysterious phenomenon called fun. The slides end a bit abruptly in the middle of examples. A takeaway summary would have been nice. Nevertheless, please have a look at the slides and their wiki site with resources.

Will Wright’s talk on TED (Video)

It is crystal ball time again. This time we are talking about the future of education. The claim: Game designers = Teachers. The presenter: Tim Hart. An instructional or learning technologist at the University of Maine in the USA. His presentation (with the title probably somewhat inspired by Steven Johnson’s book “Everything Good is Bad for You”) is about the potential of digital games for learning and education. It is partly a rant, partly visionary. I find it well-crafted and comprehensive. He begins by outlining a number of good resources on his topic and starts talking about the generation V (the currently 5-year-olds) and their expectation of the future education system. Kids that will live and breathe Microsoft Project Natal, browser games, the Zii (or Cii, Bii, Oii, Yii as it is speculated), mingle with friends in the next Facebook and PlayStation Home, and expect all movies to have the level of sophistication that Avatar is currently showing. On slide 30, he has a cartoon questioning whether we should be teaching our kids the old-fashioned way it is often still done.

He goes on and covers recent technical developments like augmented reality contact lenses, the Emotiv headset, and Sparkle in light of Moore’s law. He presents a bit of information on the average gamer from the ESA and makes his point of the financial (and with that cultural) significance digital games have. Then, he considers our motivation to play games. As we have seen in other presentations during this Advent special, this is one of the key points of games to understand, the compelling power that they have and how to use this to improve our lives (in this case our education). He also gives a nod to John von Neumann and the fact that one essential idea behind games is strategy building (which is the focus of game theory). A number of his own projects show how he is working with the idea of games for learning. And now on to his slides.

More Links

Resources on Edutainment and Serious Games from his slides

Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens (Picture)

Virtual Maine Wiki

Serious Games in Ning

It’s Not Whether You Win or Lose, but How You Play the Game: The Role of Virtual Worlds in Education

Six Wonderful Things About Games

Annakaisa Kultima is a game designer, game researcher, and very creative person, who works at the Game Research Lab of the Finnish University of Tampere. She focuses among other things on game idea generation with digital games. She uses general lateral thinking and idea engineering approaches to develop game specific ideas (similar to the German company called Zephram run by a former student colleague of mine). As with many idea engineering techniques, it is important to stimulate one’s creativity first, given a question or topic that people start thinking about. In a process of iterative refinement the large array of collected ideas is then filtered according to the more specific application area as in this case, digital games. Annakaisa’s slides themselves are a stimulating, colorful collection of interesting points, which I hope will inspire you as well.

More Links

Kultima, A., Niemelä, J., Paavilainen, J., and Saarenpää, H. 2008. Designing game idea generation games. In Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Future Play: Research, Play, Share (Toronto, Ontario, Canada, November 03 – 05, 2008). Future Play ’08. ACM, New York, NY, 137-144. DOI= 10.1145/1496984.1497007

Kultima, A. 2009. Casual game design values. In Proceedings of the 13th international Mindtrek Conference: Everyday Life in the Ubiquitous Era (Tampere, Finland, September 30 – October 02, 2009). MindTrek ’09. ACM, New York, NY, 58-65. DOI= 10.1145/1621841.1621854

Kultima, A. and Paavilainen, J. 2007. Creativity techniques in game design. In Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on Future Play (Toronto, Canada, November 14 – 17, 2007). Future Play ’07. ACM, New York, NY, 243-244. DOI= 10.1145/1328202.1328251

Annakaisa’s Publication List

Technology » Features » Experience. Experience is the product is a three-year old slidecast from Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path. In his slides, he explains the concept of product design in light of user experience and what design features successful products have. Data » Logic » User Interface was an early design approach for software, while now it is more User Interface » Logic » Data. Good development oscillates between those two. Essentially, the slides tell us that we design and develop for more than an artifact, but rather for a whole experience. I find this especially true in game design (again).