User experience of computer games

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Clarke, D.W. and Duimering, P.R. (2006), “How computer gamers experience the game situation: A behavioral study,”, ACM Computers in Entertainment, 4(3). The article describes an exploratory interview-based study of FPS game play; it aimed at deepening the understanding of computer games as "complex, context-dependent, goal-directed activity". Some excerpts I found relevant:

Gamers’ perceptions and evaluations of several aspects of FPS game design and game play were documented, including positive and negative aspects of game interfaces, maps, weapons, bots, multiplayer gaming on LANs and the internet, and single player gaming.

The study results also contribute to a better understanding of the cognitive and perceptual processes involved in FPS gaming, which may generalize to other game genres and have implications for the analysis of human behavior in socio-technical contexts beyond games. FPS gaming is a fast-paced form of goal-directed activity, taking place in complex, dynamic behavioral environments where players must quickly make sense of changes in their immediate situation and respond with appropriate actions. Little is known about the cognitive and perceptual processes associated with such complex, dynamic behavioral phenomena. In general, the gamers interviewed in the study seem to have attended preferentially to aspects of the gaming situation that were most behaviorally relevant to goal attainment and drew meaningful distinctions at a level of detail appropriate to the perceived demands of their goal-directed activity. It has been argued that gaming goals influenced how players made sense of the complexity of the FPS gaming situation by filtering perceptual stimuli based on behavioral relevance. Specifically, it is proposed that aspects of the game most salient to gamers were those perceived to be most behaviorally relevant to goal attainment, and that the evaluation of various situational stimuli depended on the extent to which they were perceived either to support or to hinder goal attainment.

Why do I blog this? even though I am looking forward to see how these results could be generalized to different environements (for instance in "non game games" a la Animal Crossing with fuzzier goals), the results detailed in this paper are quite interesting, when looking at the players' verbalizations. This kind of cognitive preferences (aspects of the gaming situation that were most behaviorally relevant to goal attainment) are good markers for certain games and maybe for a certain audience.

Some visualization ideas

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I am still struggling to find ideas of visualizations to represent the exchange of coordination information between players of CatchBob! (see here for a more complete description). As I said earlier, what I am interested in is to depict a chronological account of collaborative processes drawing on system logfiles (and the researcher’s analysis in the form of messages categorizations, this packed in a XML file). Some of the viz I found that might fit are chronological account. For instance, I what Fabien did for an informative art project (it shows user’s activities on a portal over time. This synthetic representation is one my favorite.):

Furthermore, I am more and more curious about using music score-like representations because it nicely shows the chronological view (under the form of a staff) with possible multi occurences of events performed by players that could be represented as note symbols.

But, it's maybe good to go further into the deconstruction since there will be connections between events performed by players (represented as note symbols), something new might emerge as represented in the following picture (from Sylvano Bussoti, used in Milles Plateaux by G. Deleuze and F. Guattari)

Or also, from musician at McGill University:

What is pertinent in thes example is Bussoti's idea of musical graphical notation, "a form of music notation which refers to the use of non-traditional symbols and text to convey information about the performance of a piece of music".

H-C Steiner's Solitude is even more interesting for my purposes:

(more about graphical musical notations: Cage, J. and Knowles, A. (1973) Notations. Reprint Services Corp. ISBN 0-685-14864-5)

Some go even further by removing the idea of staff (hence the chronological order) and plotting the information, which can also fit with my needs (a triangle would then represent the 3 players):

betwixt: technology and transitional space

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betwixt: technology and transitional space is a workshop organized by Arianna Bassoli, Johanna Brewer and Karen Martin at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine on September 16, 2006. It's a follow up of the Why wait? workshop. The workshop tackles the notion of "transitional spaces" (sidewalks, highways, lifts, buses, tunnels, stairwells, bike paths, parking lots, lobbies, airports, waiting rooms, train stations, and drive-thrus) with regards to design questions such as "How can we begin to design technologies that recognize the richness of these transitional spaces?" or "Why aren't these places valued in their own right?".

What I am interested in is this idea of "traces":

Traces of Change - What physical traces of the different uses of a transitional space can we see? - Which of these uses have been embraced and legitimized, and how? - Which of these traces last the longest, and which are erased quickly? - What determines the duration of these traces?

Why do I blog this? I am more and more interested by the use of geospatial traces (in the broad sense) and how it can shape user experience in various contexts (potential projects here for the future).

Human-robot interactions: dance

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Fumihide Tanaka, Javier R. Movellan, Bret Fortenberry and Kazuki Aisaka Daily HRI Evaluation at a Classroom Environment – Reports from Dance Interaction Experiments Proceedings of the 1st Annual Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2006), p.3-9Salt Lake City, U.S.A., March 2006

An interesting paper that reports on a study about human-robot interactions:

In this paper we present preliminary results on a study designed to evaluate an algorithm for social robots in relatively uncontrolled, daily life conditions. (...) The goal of the pro ject is to explore the use of interactive robot technologies in educational environments. To this effects two robot platforms, RUBI and QRIO, are being tested on a daily bases for prolonged periods of time. (...) One of QRIO’s most striking skills involves motion generation such as dancing. QRIO is endowed with various choreographed dance sequences, and is also capable of mimicking the motion of its human partner in real-time

What is interesting to me is how the authors experimented "different methods for evaluating and leaning about the interaction developed between the children and QRIO". The paper reports this evaluation of the daily dance inetraction using qualitative methodologies (coding interactions) and quantitative techniques (counting diverse indexes).

Why do I blog this? since pervasive computing, tangible interfaces, everyware, blogject and all this crowd is going to converge, this kind of research is more and more interesting to me, both from the methodological and the design point of view. Issues like artifacts affordance and attributions might then converge.

"Leisure time" by Pierre la Police

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More and more intriguing is the work of Pierre la Police, who is definitely my favorite french comic book writer. His last piece of work "Leisure Time" is an odd 50-pages foldable book. A bit expensive (200 euros), it addresses the notion of "leisure", illustrating the leitmotiv "let's have fun a bit" ("profitez un peu" in french) with diverse representations of modern world situations ranging from surfing to pressing a button that would deliver tea or putting little masks on one's nails. He seems to be more and more into the same vein as Glen Baxter, which is worthwile too.

Why the hell do I blog this in a tech-oriented blog? because in my opinion Pierre la Police is one the most exciting thinker (with a cryptic humorous spin, at least to some folks) lately. The way he is depicting objects and artifacts is so representative of peculiar "technosocial situations". For instance, here is an old story extracted from (scanned here) the adventures of "Les Frères Thémistècles":

(captions: With his pager, Fongor contacts the mutant Chris Themistecle / But Chris is in Brasil and he's playing Zorro with his nudist adopted uncle / And now his pager is ringing in the pocket of his little jacket / But the jacket is still in his room in the United States of America)

Besides, I also found the way he works very compelling, as described in this interview:

Do you work according to specific plans or do you rely on your intuition ?

The way I set to work is different each time. I often accumulate elements that I classify according to a personal logic. I have piles of pictures with crabs, boxes filled up with magazines specialized in the study of charcoal. Sometimes all that gets mixed up, and when looking at this chaos, I manage to extract stories from it. Just in the same way you would remove sausages from a barbecue. It often occurred that things I had imagined eventually happened in real life. That’s not really surprising, it happens to everyone.

This nicely expresses how connection between dots (knowledge, people, ideas, meme) can be done today.

How to build foresight scenarios

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I finally ran across a relevant paper that clearly explain the methods of scenario-building in foresight. It's called "How to Build Scenarios" by Lawrence Wilkinson. Some excerpts of the methodology:

scenarios are created in plural (...) specially constructed stories about the future, each one modeling a distinct, plausible world in which we might someday have to live and work. (...) the purpose of scenario planning is not to pinpoint future events but to highlight large-scale forces that push the future in different directions. It's about making these forces visible, so that if they do happen, the planner will at least recognize them. (...) Note that the scenarios don't fall neatly into "good" and "bad" worlds, desirable and undesirable futures. (...) Once we've identified those implications that work in all of the scenarios, we get on with them in the confidence that we're making better, more robust plans. (...) For these we want to know the "early warning signs" that tell us those scenarios are beginning to unfold.

The method is pretty straight-forward:

  1. Scenario planning begins by identifying the focal issue or decision (...) So we begin the process by agreeing on the issue that we want to address
  2. we next attempt to identify the primary "driving forces" at work in the present. These fall roughly into four categories: Social dynamics , Economic issues, Political issues, Technological issues
  3. After we identify the predetermined elements from the list of driving forces, we should be left with a number of uncertainties. We then sort these to make sure they are critical uncertainties. (...) If we can simplify our entire list of related uncertainties into two orthogonal axes, then we can define a matrix (two axes crossing) that allows us to define four very different, but plausible, quadrants of uncertainty. Each of these far corners is, in essence, a logical future that we can explore.
  4. We return to the list of driving forces that we generated earlier; these dynamics become "characters" in the stories that we develop. (...) we recognize that the "real" future will not be any of the four scenarios, but that it will contain elements of all of our scenarios.

Nordichi workshop about near-field interaction

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We recently posted the 15 accepted papers for the NordiCHI workshop "Near field interactions" that Timo, Julian and myself organize. They tackle diverse aspects of the interactions that may emerge in the context of the internet of things, with cell phones as enabler. What is tremendously interesting is the large variety of disciplines we have: designers, hci people, architects, industrial designers. A selection of images from submitted papers:

Video Games evolution

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The Economist has an article about gaming, showing how "video games are evolving in ways that make them more compelling for adults than teenagers". Some excerpts I found interesting:

"Fun shouldn't be difficult," says George Harrison, Nintendo's senior vice-president of marketing and corporate communications. “People are looking for 15 minutes of diversion, often with their family.” It's this realisation that has the veteran video-game firm rethinking both its hardware and software offerings. (...) This method of operation [sony eye toy, sony-nike exercise game] is far less off-putting for casual or non-gamers than mashing the plethora of buttons in just the right order on the game controller. (...) But it's not just the hardware that has driven change; the games themselves are a key element. (...) This “non-game” [Elektroplankton] is as much an electronic musical instrument as a diversion. “Animal Crossing”, also for the DS, presents the player with a cartoon virtual world, and its multi-player elements—the DS has built-in Wi-Fi networking—make it a communication tool rather than a solitary, introverted escape.

Why do I blog this? some good trends are explained here. I like this concept of "non-game games".

What to do with geospatial traces

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Yesterday, the FT had a very interesting piece about "geospatial traces" (i.e cell phones and GPS signals). It's called "Rome – as you’ve never seen it before" (by Richard Waters). The question the author address is the very recurrent "What if the location of all those devices could be pinpointed at any moment, showing where their owners were coming from or going to?". Drawing on the example of "Real Time Rome" (aggregating data from cell phones, buses and taxis in Rome to better understand urban dynamics in real time), the article describes potentials uses for geospatial data gathered from various sources. This can help to get some representations (why not by using mash-ups), of traffic flows or pedestrian movements. Eventually, showing those information could influence people's behavior as the author says or "be a goldmine" for urban planners".

This is of course related to the "social navigation" issue developed by Dourish and Chalmers in the paper "Running Out of Space: Models of Information Navigation">:

In social navigation, movement from one item to another is provoked as an artefact of the activity of another or a group of others. So, moving “towards” a cluster of other people, or selecting objects because others have been examining them would both be examples of social navigation.

Why do I blog this? since my research interest are related to how people use/benefit/infer things based on others' whereabouts, this article was interesting for different reasons. First, the fact that it's in a business newspaper is interesting from a foresight viewpoint (it means that this sort of ideas get closer to people's reality and is trendy even out of academic or artist circle). Second, it shows that that apart from the "social navigation" usage as well as the "goldmine for urban planners" there is nothing new under the sun. I'd be interested in more playful ideas: a simple one would be what Justin Hall proposed: "Passively multiplayer gaming" (see description below), using geospatial traces could be a way to improve MMO character or so...

At that point, turning your life into one of Hall’s passively multiplayer games is simply a matter of adding game logic. (...) Your ‘character’ could gain levels and skill points by checking e-mail, going to saxophone lessons, or writing a column for Gamasutra. Spam e-mails could be turned into enemy fire. Heck, the aforementioned cigarette break could help your friend poison a horde of aliens with toxic chemicals, if you wanted it to!

What else? of course the opposite of social navigation could be cool too (not going where the crowd goes...) but it's way too simplistic.

Back on track

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Just came back from a part of France located in the Indian Ocean. It was basically for a trek but I could not help visiting superb mom and pop's shop like the following one who can fix EVERYTHING ranging from Nintendo portable console to old school cell phones: Electrorama

Experientia's new blog about playful learning with tangible interfaces

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Experientia's new blog about playful learning with tangible interfaces is there.

Playful & Tangible is about playful learning with new interfaces, particulary in museums and entertainment environments. It documents many inspirations and examples of playful and tangible interactions and interfaces, and has a strong interaction design focus. Most of the content is by Héctor Ouilhet and Alexander Wiethoff, who worked as Experientia interns during the summer of 2006.

Good stuff.

Futurology

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Michael Rogers a MSNBC columnist yesterday described his thoughts after the World Future Society’s annual meeting in Toronto dealing with foresights and futurology. Here are some excerpts I found interesting:

Some presentations were quite speculative: one fellow describes neural implants that would rewire our brains to let us perceive things like a fourth primary color. (“Why would we want to do that?” one audience member wanted to know. The speaker explained: “Because it would be interesting.”)

Other presentations were serious looks at corporate future-gazing by companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Philips and BASF. It’s clear that European firms tend to be more interested in futurism — which they often call foresight analysis — than are Americans. (...) There was, however, relatively little focus on more negative aspects of human behavior, beyond a few sessions on the future of law enforcement and terror prevention. On balance, the futurists seemed to be an optimistic bunch, which may be self-selecting. If you’re going to spend your career thinking about the future, you might as well feel good about it. (...) in the end, making lots of accurate predictions isn’t necessarily the job of the futurist. It’s more the act of stimulating creative thought about the future that, in turn, influences how we act today. At the Toronto conference, veteran futurist Joseph Coates put it this way: “Being right or wrong isn’t so much the point as being useful. The ultimate purpose is to change people’s minds.”

Innovation niches, beyond user-centered design

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In BW, an interesting article about next-to-be innovation niche: "What niche fields will contribute to tomorrow's great innovations? Ecology, gaming, and social networking, for starters" by Andrew Zolli. Some excerpts I found interesting below... first a statement:

Wander the halls of any of today's ever-multiplying corporate-innovation conferences, and you'll find experts playing to packed houses, evangelizing the power of user-driven design, the importance of ethnographic research, and the value of an internal "innovation culture." (...) Then what? To find the next deep wellsprings of innovation, you have to learn to listen to "weak signals"—fringe ideas today that will be common wisdom tomorrow.

It also addresses some innovation niches:

Videogames have begun to outgrow their entertainment context and find new uses as innovation discovery engines. That's because the agent-based models that drive games under the hood are becoming sophisticated enough to model real-world social, marketplace, and competitive scenarios. (...) Making the Invisible Visible: As companies such as Procter & Gamble (PG) and Target (TGT) increasingly look outside their walls for their next breakthrough, they must rely on specialized maps of their innovation networks. The fields of social network analysis and network cartography are rapidly maturing and allowing companies to visualize their customer base, their supply chain, and their field of influence.

Workshop about Mobile Multiplayer Games at CSCW 2006

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Mobile Multiplayer Games: Designs, Studies and Reflections a workshop at ACM CSCW 2006 by Matthew Chalmers and Steve Benford:

A number of researchers have used mobile multiplayer games either as a topic of study in itself or as a vehicle for more general investigations in computing, collaboration and information. Set within the context of increasing commercial significance of both games in general and mobile games in particular, this research has used the energy and ingenuity of players to test interfaces, infrastructure and design concepts, and to drive new technological developments. Commercial games are appearing that take advantage of commodity mobile phones’ burgeoning capabilities for interaction, awareness and collaboration. In-depth studies of mobile multiplayer games are also beginning to appear in greater numbers, and growing experience of design and use opens up new possibilities for conceptual work on the mixture of media, people and environments that constitute such games. This workshop’s aim is a broad view of this young research area, spanning and connecting system design, user studies and theoretical reflections.

Why do I blog this? this right on spot of what we do; I don't know whether it qualifies to be called "serious game" (i.e. using a game in another purpose than just entertainment) but that's how I used a pervasive game to deepen the understanding of socio-cognitive processes at stake in collaboration. Don't know whether I would have time (and $$ to go there) to write a position paper about that :(

Video games and innovation

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the age has a good article about John Buchanan (professor from Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Centre in Adelaide). Some excerpts I found interesting here:

"The video game industry has reached a point where its success is strangling innovation within the field. Developing games is now a high-risk endeavour. The cost of prototyping becomes expensive because of the technology needed to build it. When interacting with characters in a video game, their behaviour is scripted and hard coded. Programming the behaviour (by) anticipating for all possible scenarios makes it very expensive. The cost of failure is expensive, we need to fail cheaper."

His latest idea to keep costs down is game sketching, through which his team builds tools that are used in puppeteering to build a game idea.

"We use a puppeteer, an actor who sits in front of a computer and reacts in real time to what the guest is doing," he says.

"People with a game idea can send us a script and we can play through the sketch of the game. The guest can interact with the experience of the timing of the events of the game."

AOL dataset plots

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Some folks already plotted stuff coming form the super-quickly-available-and-vanished AOL datasets. See for instance u500k.erinye.com, who calculated various indexes and plotted some data (below is one of them that I picked up randomly). If you're one of the 10,000 users, this is a glimpse of your private life:

Kevin Kelly on "street use"

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Following William Gibson's quote, Kevin Kelly now has a blogpage about "Street use":

This site features the ways in which people modify and re-create technology. Herein a collection of personal modifications, folk innovations, street customization, ad hoc alterations, wear-patterns, home-made versions and indigenous ingenuity. In short -- stuff as it is actually used, and not how its creators planned on it being used. As William Gibson said, "The street finds its own uses for technology." I welcome suggestions of links, and contributions from others to include in this compendium. -- KK

Some examples (shovel pan and dashboard oven):

Why do I blog this? It seems that Michel de Certeau is very trendy lately. I already quoted Lucie Girard who summarized de Certeau's work:

Michel de Certeau’s social philosophy was based on the notion of détournement and collage (...) What was at stake for him was the way people use some readymade objects, the way they organize their private space, their office, or their working-place, the way they “practice” their environment and all public space available to them (shopping malls, town streets, airports and railway stations, movie theatres, and the like). By so doing, Certeau focused his reflection on the ordinary “practices” of every man and woman in his/her everyday life.

Interactive fiction programming language

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According to the Wikipedia, Inform is:

Inform is a programming language and design system for interactive fiction originally created in 1993 by Graham Nelson. In 2006, Graham released version 7, a completely new language based on principles of natural language and a new set of tools based around a book-publishing metaphor ("Inform 7" or "Natural Inform").

Why do I blog this? I wonder what would be the combination of this in a pervasive environment.