My Games Design

At the beginning of the month CHI Play took place in London, and I think I've just about recovered :-) The papers should be accessible to the public for a whole year from here so make sure to check them out. Anna Cox and Paul Cairns chaired the conference, while I served as local arrangements chair - while there were probably a few challenging moments along the way, it was all worth it in the end. I also learnt an awful lot and promise to never take conference organisation for granted again! The conference kicked off the workshops on Sunday, where I helped run " The false dichotomy between positive and negative affect in gameplay ", co-organised with Max Birk , Regan Mandryk and Dan Johnson . The workshop came out a discussion we had earlier in the year at CHI2015 about the lack of nuance around the concept of negative affect within gameplay experiences. We had a great mix of participants and some intense discussions about why we engage in gameplay we don't alway...

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 her...

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 followin...

 Last month I was invited to present at the Aarhus University's Interacting Minds mini-conference on "Failing and Confusion in Games and Gaming" along with Jesper Juul , Dennis Ramirez and Charlotte Janasson . Thanks to Andreas Lieberoth for the invite and organising a seriously interesting day :-) Mine was the final talk of the day, where I presented some of my PhD research on Investigating Game-play: Are Breakdowns in Action and Understanding Detrimental to Involvement? (see pic below). You can find my slides here . I'm waiting to hear back about a journal paper we put together on the findings but in the meantime you can check out my DiGRA paper on why I did not find physiological data to be useful for identifying breakdowns and breakthroughs in game-play. My main argument was that action and understanding breakdowns will contribute to involvement when the player feels responsible for overcoming them but that they will decrease involvement if they take too long ...

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 ach...

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 col...

As I mentioned in the last post, my recent part-time work where I've been looking at digital scholarship at the OU, has got me thinking about what it might mean to be a scholar in the digital age and how openness can be a part of that. I have touched upon aspects of my research in this blog, but mostly I tend to use it as a way to reflect about my own gaming experiences and as a way to keep track of my thoughts about different events I go to. As I was writing up the post about ECGBL 2011 , I realised that I really did want to say more about what I had been doing and this might be quite a useful thing to do, especially as I'm currently writing up my PhD thesis. So, in terms of what I have done my research, consists of three phases. Phase one included a conceptual overview of different frameworks of engagement and motivation and a set of interviews with a range of different games players (from casual to hardcore). This led to the development of a set of learning categories, which...

After rearranging flights to avoid the air traffic control strike, I made it to Athens last week for the 5th European Conference of Game Based Learning . Not everyone was so lucky but I was pretty impressed with the conference organisers for managing to make sure the conference went ahead and that we all were looked after so well whilst we were there. It was a bit surreal having to avoid the crowds of protesters on the way to the conference venue and trying to make sure we didn't get caught up in any of the running battles with riot police on the way back... We did avoid the worst of it (which, on the first conference day involved ducking into a restaurant for a little while until the trouble outside died down!) with only piles of burnt rubbish around the city to remind of us of what was going on (see below). Oh, and t-shirts like this :-) In terms of the conference itself, I am very glad I managed to make it as it was a great opportunity to meet up with people I had met before, li...