gameplay
Wiimote vs. Controller: Electroencephalographic Measurement of Affective Gameplay Interaction
Tue, 10/08/2010 - 22:04 | 
acagamic
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
Psychophysiological methods provide covert and reliable measurements of affective user experience (UX). The nature of affective UX in interactive entertainment, such as digital games, is currently not well understood. With the dawn of new gaming consoles, scientific methodologies for studying user interaction in an immersive entertainment context are needed. This paper reports a study on the influence of interaction modes (Playstation 2 game controller vs. Wii remote and Nunchuk) on subjective experience assessment and brain activity measured with electroencephalography (EEG). Results indicate that EEG alpha and delta power correlate with negative affect and tension when using regular game controller input. EEG beta and gamma power seem to be related to the feeling of possible action in spatial presence with a PS2 game controller. Delta as well as theta power correlate with self-location using a Wii remote and Nunchuk.
79 reads | 
Tags: brain-computer interface, brainwave, controller, controller, eeg, Electroencephalography, Experience, Fun, gameplay, immersion, interface, Nintendo, Physiology, playstation 2, PlayStation 2, Presence, Technology, Technology, ui, Video games, wii, Wii, Wii Remote, wiimote
"You Shoot Like A Girl!": The Female Protagonist in Action-Adventure Video Games
Thu, 08/07/2010 - 21:04 | smgrimes
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
This paper was inspired by the popularity of female video game protagonists despite girls’ and women’s continued hesitance to participate in digital gaming activities. The pilot study examines how the imagery and narrative structure of popular, contemporary video games construct a paradigm of the ideal female heroine. An in-depth content analysis of three best-selling action-adventure video games was conducted. Key findings indicate the recurrence of a paradoxical interplay between beauty ideals and characterization, wherein the female protagonist must reconcile traditional ideals about beauty and body type with the decidedly untraditional gender roles and actions she engages in.
User-experience game research?
Mon, 14/06/2010 - 15:41 | sharritt
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
Situated Research offers in-depth video game analysis, accomplished by recording and analyzing player interaction within situated gaming environments. Techniques will be presented which uncover user practices and behaviors, aimed at uncovering a balance between aesthetics and functionality while maximizing interactive experiences. Research will be presented that outlines how to unpack gameplay experiences, so designers can design situations that yield intended, meaningful outcomes with lasting results. The cutting-edge research approach described draws from a multi-disciplinary background to construct a very detailed picture of actual use, which informs the design process. Existing literature supports the idea that games can communicate complex ideas through exploration and play-testing, using constant feedback and assessment, by observing players’ behavior through interaction with other related objects in an environment. The design of specific visualizations, rules, and behaviors will be discussed, with impacts on human interaction and game play. By studying relationships among game interfaces and player behavior, patterns can be found that help to maximize motivation and flow, a feeling where one loses track of time and their surroundings (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). In addition, research outlining the importance of role specialization and complimentary virtual identities in games like MMORPGs is presented, highlighting the importance of role-specialization, where group participation is required for success: such as guild formation, where characters of different ability work together towards mutual goals. Research methods addressing group activities and specialization (assuming roles) will be described, with effects on engagement: e.g., social ties to play games. A blended method drawing from ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967; Clayman & Maynard, 1995) and grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Charmaz, 2005) will describe how to go about finding patterns in gameplay, helping to design situations that yield intended, meaningful outcomes with lasting results. This open-ended approach allows observation of game players while they act in their natural environment, “in-situ”, obtaining information that is highly relevant to the players themselves. Applying these results to game design can yield more effective, fun and playable games.
185 reads | Tags: Affordances, Analysis, Clan, Cognition, Education, Educational psychology, Ethnomethodology, Experience, Flow, flow, Game design, Gameplay, gameplay, Games, learning, Madison, method, Michel A.
Source, motivation, Play, player, player experience, Psychology, research, serious games, sharritt, situated, situated learning, situated research, Technology, Technology, United States, usability, User experience, user-experience, ux, Video game, Video Games
A mixed method approach to studying collaborative video game play
Mon, 14/06/2010 - 15:37 | sharritt
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
Activity Theory supports the idea that human activity is hierarchically organized. Our research follows a qualitative case study that highlights the use of affordances, or potentials for action, during video game player interaction among peers and the game interface. Activity Theory’s meditational triangle will shed light on motivated activity itself, the tools available to complete the activity, and peer relationships (such as role specialization and rules of interaction) to evaluate game designs and their ability to fulfill serious purposes with meaningful outcomes. This presentation will focus on Activity Theory and how the meditational triangle can be used to evaluate peer relationships within game play. A blended approach incorporating features of Ethnomethodology and grounded theory will be used to construct an open-ended, bottom-up approach to studying collaborative game play. A true Ethnomethodological approach would reject the top-down, theory-driven approach required by Activity Theory, Activity Theory can highlight particular relationships during game player interactions to provide a frame for game player activity. Activity theory, when applied in conjunction with an emergent approach, can both broaden our concept of affordances and remind us to look for action potentials on the various levels of activity, and does not necessarily have to constrain findings by introducing preconceptions. While bound to the specific situation being studied and not seeking of patterns in observations, Ethnomethodology can be a very useful starting point for the analysis of game player activity in order to reveal underlying, and commonly overlooked, social assumptions. Activity theory can be incorporated following an initially open-ended, emergent Ethnomethodological approach to highlight relationships and game player motivations that might have been initially overlooked. While this process becomes partially theory-driven in the end, it also allows us to obtain some of the benefits of initially using an open-ended ethnomethodologically inspired approach. This approach can help construct a context-dependent, bottom-up, indexical and descriptive representation of game player activity, which is crucial to understanding interactions within Serious Games and their associated meaningful outcomes.
152 reads | Tags: activity, Activity theory, Activity Theory, Affordances, approach, Collaboration, collaboration, collaborative learning, Education, Educational psychology, Ethnomethodology, Game design, game player, gameplay, Games, Human behavior, learning, Madison, mediation, method, Michel A.
Source, mixed method, player, Psychology, qualitative, research, serious games, Technology, Technology, United States, Video game, Video Games
Evaluating Video Game Design and Interactivity
Mon, 14/06/2010 - 15:19 | sharritt
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
An emergent, bottom-up construction of video game interaction is presented, drawing from influences in ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967), grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), and activity theory (Vygotsky, 1978; Cole & Engeström, 1993; Kaptelinin & Nardi, 2006). Following, a qualitative case study highlights the use of affordances, or potentials for action, during video game player interaction among peers and the game interface. Relationships among affordances and levels of activity are presented, which broaden the concept of affordances to include motivations. Additionally, activity theory will complement analysis by introducing the mediational triangle (Cole & Engeström, 1993), providing a guide with which to analyze game player interactions and motives. The mediational triangle sheds light on the motivated activity itself, the tools available to complete the activity, and peer relationships (such as role specialization and rules of interaction) to evaluate game designs and their ability to fulfill serious purposes with meaningful outcomes.
207 reads | Tags: activity, Activity theory, Activity Theory, Affordance, Affordances, collaboration, collaborative learning, Document, Education, EDUCATION, Educational psychology, Ethnomethodology, Game design, gameplay, Games, Hershey, interaction, learning, Matthew J.
Source, Play, player, Psychology, Science, serious games, sharritt, situated learning, Technology, Technology, usability, Video game, Video Games
Audio and Gameplay: An Analysis of PvP Battlegrounds in World of Warcraft
Sun, 13/06/2010 - 10:40 | Kristine Jørgensen
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
This article addresses how audio works as support for gameplay while remaining true to the perceived reality of the game world in World of Warcraft's PvP Battlegrounds. The argument is that the interpretation of game audio is highly contextual, and that the player must understand the specific situation as a whole in order to understand what a specific auditory signal indicates.
Video game representations as cues for collaboration and learning
Fri, 04/06/2010 - 21:55 | sharritt
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
Literature suggests that games can support learning in schools by enabling creative problem solving, allowing dynamic resource allocation, by providing a motivating, immersive activity, and by supporting explorations of identity. A descriptive, inductive study was carried out to identify how high school students in a school setting make use of the video game interface and its representations. Results demonstrate that specific cues direct attention, helping to focus efforts on new or underutilized game tasks. In addition, consistent and well-organized visualizations encourage learning and collaboration among students by providing shared referential resources and scaffolding coordinated sequences of problem solving acts during gameplay. Conversely, when affordances are inconsistently represented, students’ focus can shift from problem solving at the goal level (game strategy, etc.) to problem solving why the game interface is frustrating their goals. In general, the design of game representations and behaviors can help guide or hinder student learning.
111 reads | Tags: Affordances, collaboration, collaborative learning, cues, Daniel D.
Source, Educational psychology, gameplay, Games, learning, Problem solving, representations, Science, Simulation, Video Game
Software Studies in Computer Gameplay
Fri, 04/06/2010 - 10:59 | LGrace
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
The computer game software with which we interact on a daily basis not only entertains us, it trains us into specific patterns. Critical Gameplay is a design practice which endeavors to expose and redesign the patterns to which standard gameplay subscribes. The ongoing project seeks to identify the dominant values, philosophies and problem solving models reinforced by computer games and provides prototypical alternates to those standards.
121 reads | Tags: Academia, Atlanta, critical design, game design, Game design, gameplay, Lindsay Grace
Source, Science, software, Software Design, software studies, Software studies, Technology, United States
An Analysis of Persistent Non-Player Characters in the First-Person Gaming genre 1998-2007: a case for the fusion of mechanics and diegetics.
Fri, 05/02/2010 - 16:42 | danpinchbeck
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
This paper describes the results of an analysis of persistent non-player characters (PNPCs) in the first-person gaming genre 1998-2007. Assessing the role, function, gameplay significance and representational characteristics of these critical important gameplay objects from over 34 major releases provides an important set of baseline data within which to situate further research. This kind of extensive, genre-wide analysis is under-represented in game studies, yet it represents a hugely important process in forming clear and robust illustrations of the medium to support understanding. Thus, I offer a fragment of this illustration, demonstrating that many of the cultural and diegetic qualities of PNPCs are a product of a self-assembling set of archetypes formed from gameplay requirements.
Add new comment | 207 reads | Tags: Agency, agent, Diegesis, diegetics, First person, first-person, FPS, gameplay, Gameplay, Gaming, Leisure, mechanics, non-player character, Non-player character, NPC, Video game genres
An Investigation of Visual Attention in FPS Computer Gameplay
Fri, 22/01/2010 - 09:20 | Jason Rutter
New entry in Digiplay games research bibliography:
Cognitive science provides a useful approach to studying computer gameplay, especially from the perspective of determining the cognitive skills that players learn during play. Computer games are highly visual medium and game interaction involves continuous visual cognition. A system integrating an eyetracker with a 3D computer game engine has been developed to provide real time gaze object logging, a fast and convenient way of collecting gaze object data for analysis. This system has been used to test three hypotheses concerning visual attention in close combat tactics as simulated by a first-person shooter (FPS) computer game. Firstly, the cuing effect of the player's gun graphic on visual attention was tested, but no evidence was found to support this. Data supported the second hypothesis, that a player attends to the target opponent while shooting at them, in most cases, while in a small percentage of cases this is achieved in peripheral vision. Finally, in most cases, a player targets the nearest opponent. These results provide a baseline for further investigations in which the stimulus game design may be modified to provide more detailed models of the visual cognitive processes involved in gameplay. These models document the learning outcomes of game interaction and provide a basis for improvements, such as the optimization of combat survival tactics.
Add new comment | 97 reads | Tags: decision-making, eye-tracking, Game design, gameplay, player, Visual attention
Digiplay Bibliography Updates
- 'It's in the Game' and Above the Game: An Analysis of the Users of Sports Videogames
- Theoretical Consoles: Concepts for Gadget Analysis
- Avatar motion control by natural body movement via camera
- Adoption of Mobile Games as Entertainment Technology : A Test of Extended Technology Acceptance Model
- Serious Video Games for Health: How Behavioral Science Guided the Development of a Serious Video Game
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