Games Institute members at CHI Play, 2019

Tuesday, December 3, 2019

chi play
Games Institute members Dr. Lennart Nacke, Dr. Jim Wallace, Karina Arrambide, and former members Katta Spiel, Katja Rogers, Elisa Mekler, and Stuart Hallifax attended the CHI PLAY 2019 conference in Barcelona, Spain. CHI PLAY is an annual, global conference focused on interdisciplinary research from researchers and professionals across game studies and human-computer interaction that was co-founded and chaired by Dr. Nacke in 2014 who co-chaired again this year.

Besides chairing the conference, Dr. Nacke presented research conducted together with GI member Dr. Gustavo Tondello about player typologies. He presented various models for player preferences toward games to understand how researchers can organize players based on their traits not types. The presented Five Factor Player Traits Model is currently the most evidence-based model for understanding player traits. With the Five Factor Player Traits Model, games researchers and industry partners can improve marketing to and designing for specific demographics.

Lennart

Matthew Lakier, a PhD student supervised by Dr. Daniel Vogel at the Computer Science Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the University of Waterloo, presented "Cross-Car, Multiplayer Games for Semi-Autonomous Driving". His paper was studying game design for futuristic cross-car game technologies such as full-window heads-up displays, vehicle-to-vehicle communication, and autonomous driving. Dr. Nacke was a co-author on this paper.

Jim Wallace was an Associate Chair for CHI PLAY 2019. His responsibilities included working with the committee to read research paper submissions and determine eligibility for the proceedings.

Karina Arrambide, PhD candidate supervised by Dr. Nacke in the Systems Design Engineering program, presented her dissertation plan at CHI PLAY's Doctoral Consortium. Her consortium paper, "Interactive Narratives in Games: Understanding Player Agency and Experience", looked at user engagement with interactive narratives, specifically their physiological and psychological experiences and responses to decision making while playing games. She aims to develop her research in order to better understand how to improve game user experiences overall.

Stuart Hallifax, PhD student at the LIRIS lab in Lyon, presented "Factors to Consider for Tailored Gamification" which looks at various motivational components for players in games to give designers the ability to develop more tailored user experiences. Hallifax explained that different implementations of the same motivational strategy have different impacts on motivation and that the Hexad typology is the most accurate system for tailored gamification. Hallifax's paper also received an honourable mention award at CHI PLAY.

Former members Katta Spiel, Katja Rogers, and Elisa Mekler all presented papers of their current research at the conference. Of particular note is Spiel's paper “It Started as a Joke”: On the Design of Idle Games, which was presented by Katta Spiel and Z Toups and co-authored together with GI members Andrew Jian-lan Cen and Lennart E. Nacke as well as former member Sultan A. Alharthi and collaborators Jessica Hammer and Theresa Jean Tanenbaum. The paper also won an honourable mention award at CHI PLAY.

To watch Lennart Nacke's presentation on the Five Factor Player Traits Model developed together with Gustavo Tondello please visit his personal Twitter here

To read about Matthew Lakier's research click here

To read about Karina Arrambide's research click here

To read more about Stuart Hallifax's "Factors to Consider for Tailored Gamification" click here

To read more about Katta Spiel's “It Started as a Joke”: On the Design of Idle Games click here

To read more about CHI PLAY 2019 click here