The Games Institute acknowledges that we are living and working on the traditional territory of the Attawandaron (also known as Neutral), Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples. The University of Waterloo is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land promised to the Six Nations that includes six miles on each side of the Grand River.
Computer Science
Rina R. Wehbe (she/her) is an academic researcher at the University of Waterloo. She has successfully defended her Ph.D. Mathematics, Computer Science at the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo. Her research interests includes collaboration, equity, affective computing, user difficulty, and specialized design for expert users. She applies her work to the domains of games, interface design, and productivity applications. He unique interdisciplinary background B.Sc. Psychology and M.Sc. Computer Science informs her work. Wehbe has researched understanding difficulty and learning in games and productivity applications. Specific topics include comprehension and points of confusion detrimental to the User eXperience (UX), balancing help functionality to ensure the user is not needlessly interrupted. Despite her cognitive focus, she continues to have a soft spot for affective computing, which includes her work on emotional attachment to digital objects and characters (NPC-Ts). Furthermore, her research into Games for Change seeks to inspire, motivate, and spur small changes that can add up to bigger differences.
Highlighted Publications:
Rina R. Wehbe, Terence Dickson, Anastasia Kuzminykh, Lennart E. Nacke, and Edward Lank. 2020. Personal Space in Play: Physical and Digital Boundaries in Large-Display Cooperative and Competitive Games. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1–14. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376319
Rina R. Wehbe, Edward Lank, and Lennart E. Nacke. 2017. Left Them 4 Dead: Perception of Humans versus Non-Player Character Teammates in Cooperative Gameplay. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 403-415. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3064663.3064712
Rina R. Wehbe, Elisa D. Mekler, Mike Schaekermann, Edward Lank, and Lennart E. Nacke. 2017. Testing Incremental Difficulty Design in Platformer Games. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 5109-5113. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025697
For a full list of her publications check out her Google Scholar page and personal website https://rinawehbe.ca
Affiliation:
University of Waterloo