-
Milano
INTRODUCTION
Video games design is a fascinating field that exploits
research results form many different disciplines, apparently
far from each other, such as, e.g., computer science, maths,
music, visual arts, psychology and neurophysiology,
economy, etc. Italy has long been a “weird” country as for
the video games industry development: though resulting
among the first consumers in Western countries, its
investments and resources devoted to games production are
quite irrelevant. This situation is slowly changing, and this
spurs new research at both industry and academic levels. To
testify this new trend, video game design and development
have recently entered curricula in the Italian public
university. Actually, video games and their applications in
many different contexts have long fascinated researchers
from a broad group of different disciplines (moreover, video
games were born in the academy [
1
]). Video games are
intrinsically multidisciplinary artifacts, whose production
requires fusing different expertise: computer science, music,
visual art, industrial design, project management, marketing,
mathematics, physics, literature, storytelling, psychology,
economy, etc.
To fill a well-recognized cultural gap, the 1st Workshop on
Games-Human Interaction (GHItaly‘17), held in Italy, aimed
at bringing together scholars from the many different
disciplinary areas involved, with the goal of establishing a
common ground on the topic of designing and developing
video games. Arising from the overlapping among the
disciplines of Game Studies, Game Design and Human
Computer Interaction, GHItaly Whorshop is a deliberate
attempt to provoke debate, resulting a space of
interdisciplinary dialogue and exchange, where different and
complementary perspectives have been welcomed and
encouraged. In particular, user experience is the reference
point of view, which provides guidelines of paramount
importance for an artifact whose purpose is to entertain and
elicit fun [
2, 3, 4, 5
]. Discussions, exchanges of ideas, will
hopefully nurture and inspire the development of new ways
of researching, teaching, and working on HCI applied to the
design and production of video games, in their broadest role:
both entertainment and applied finalities.
GHITALY’17 CONTRIBUTIONS
The contributions collected by GHItaly’17 can be grouped
into two main areas. The first one deals with issues in video
game design and user experience. The second one includes
papers describing more specific achievements in applied
games and gamification.
The papers in the first group discuss how guidelines and
techniques borrowed from very different disciplines can
provide useful hints and be equally inspiring to devise robust
research approaches. Such approaches aim at producing
information and data, which are useful in game development
to gain awareness on how both design and technical issues
can affect the user experience. In particular, this group of
papers tackles aspects such as the evaluation of user
experience through Sentiment Analysis, Game Transfer
Phenomena, peculiar features of location-based mobile
games and general mobile issues, and game experience
improvement through variability and adaptation. It is
possible to observe that tools borrowed from psychology
research can be exploited in both the design phase - to better
tune game strategies and protocols to the player’s mood -,
and in the evaluation phase, in order to carry out a fair
investigation of players’ opinions.
The paper “Using User Created Game Reviews for
Sentiment Analysis: A Method for Researching User
Attitudes.” by Strååt and Verhagen [6] demonstrates an
interesting example of how users’ attitudes towards a certain
commercial game can be studied through Sentiment Analysis
[7] applied to gamers’ reviews. Sentiment analysis, also
referred to as “opinion mining” [
8
], is not new in psychology
research [9]. Psychological states have been long studied by
experts through observation of verbal behavior, facial
expression, and other cues revealing the attitude of a subject
whit respect to a specific object. At present, it is mostly
carried out automatically, and exploits several tools,
including natural language processing, text analysis,
computational linguistics, and biometrics to systematically
identify, extract, quantify, and study affective states and
subjective information. In particular, the authors discuss the
results obtained by Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis
(ABSA) [
10
] applied to data gathered from user reviews
regarding two video game series. ABSA implies measuring
user sentiment of certain aspects of a multi-aspect entity in a
dataset gathered from user comments. Examples of aspects
in video games include, e.g., playability, graphics, or
storyline. Aspects are represented by words or phrases that
exist either explicit or implicit in the dataset. The results
show that, if an aspect occurs in a review, the sentiment of
that aspect will reflect the rating of the review. In other
words, the relatively high frequency of an aspect is an
indication that that area is the most important one for the
users. It also indicates that the root cause of possibly low
rated reviews is to be found within the game features that the
aspect represents.
Continuing along a psychology line of research, video game
playing has been associated with absorption and immersion
experiences. This immersion in the gaming environment can
influence the player during the game and even afterwards (in
both physical and mental experiences). This is described in
literature as Game Transfer Phenomena (GTP) [
11
]. It is
possible to assume that this effect may be increased when
avatars are involved, whose virtual body can share (real or
desired) biological features with the player physical body.
The paper by Mattiassi “Command Systems And
PlayerAvatar Interaction In Successful Fighting Games In Light Of
Neuroscientific Theories And Models.” [
12
] approaches the
study of human-fighting game interaction by using
neuroscience theories and models. The paper compares
several different commercial fighting games from a
neuroscientific perspective, with the aim of understanding
not only how players’ cognitive processes differ in slightly
different games, but also which design flaws could interfere
with the players’ experience. Among the conclusions drawn,
the author notes that further research is needed to better adapt
the motor schemes requested to the players to those devised
for the avatars.
Mariani and Spallazzo in the paper “Interactive Players.
LBMGs - Location Based Mobile Games from a Design
Perspective” [
13
] study the relationships and interactions
that Location Based Mobile Games (LBMGs) activate at
three different levels of implication: social, technological
and spatial. Classical location-based games evolve and
progress via a player's location [
14
]. When such location can
be continuously reported by personal devices like
smartphones, such games, e.g., “urban gaming" or "street
games", are referred to as "location-based mobile games"
[
15
]. The analysis proposed in the paper starts from a
playercentered view point. It stems from a three-year work, with a
total amount of 180 students that were asked to face societal
problems or taboos, and evolve them into concepts to be
translated into LBMGs that challenge the common
assumption of being utterly and strictly digital/mobile
reliant. The aim was to study how such games can function
as engaging systems able to entertain players and convey
information in the meanwhile. Two main results are
discussed. The first is the possibility to interpret LBMG
players as “interactive agents”, engaged in meaningful
social, spatial and technological interactions. The second
entails interesting design potentialities coming from, e.g., a
thoughtful use of the surrounding spaces, contextual/situated
narratives, and from configuring mobile devices as
storytellers. This is possible because instead of being the
“place where everything happens”, the mobile device rather
triggers actions that are only partially performed on the
device itself. In this way the smartphone becomes also a
means of urban exploration and social engagement.
A more technical perspective on mobile-related issues is
adopted in the paper “Implementation and Evaluation of a
Multiplayer Pong Game” by Begolo et al. [
16
]. This work
exploits Multipong, a prototypal game for mobile devices,
allowing to interact through ad-hoc communications, to
explore how technical performances issues could affect the
gaming experience. As for many other interactive
applications, even games find their new frontiers in mobile
settings. The paper tackles this interesting challenge by
redesigning a classical game for the new platform. The main
challenges to address in mobile design are the same
identified long ago [
17
] and not completely solved yet, and
are related to the reduced amount of resources, both in terms
of computation and of space available for the interface. On
the other hand, the wide availability of Wi-Fi connections
makes it possible to devise new and engaging multiplayer
schemes. Of course, one of the issues to consider is the need
to maintain both consistency and low latency of gaming
events, therefore a good strategy must be implemented for
message exchange at application level. A further issue is
related to energy consumption, that is a common problem in
mobile world. It is to consider that mobile settings present
peculiar aspects that must be taken into consideration even
for their evaluation [
18
], and, for games, these aspects may
affect the so called “playability” [
19
]. The paper is
completed by the report of the results of a user study carried
out at the University of Padua and involved 168 subjects. The
study showed that Multipong collects some features that
users usually enjoy.
Finally, Norton et al. focus their work in the paper “Monsters
of Darwin: a strategic game based on Artificial Intelligence
and Genetic Algorithms” [
20
] on exploiting optimization
techniques borrowed from Artificial Intelligence and Genetic
Algorithms as tools for increasing variety in gameplay. As a
matter of fact, the final goal of game design is to keep
entertained the players, but this is possible by continuously
providing novel and challenging contents [
21
]. Of course
game variations must be timely, and tailored to the current
game/player state. This would usually require complex and
time consuming processing, but results from other fields can
be exploited. The paper proposes an example of strategic
card battle video game where the game contents are
dynamically adapted and produced during the game sessions.
This problem had been already investigated in [
22
] with the
proposed GOLEM (Generator Of Life Embedded into
MMOs)], which addresses explicitly the need to introduce
more variety and unpredictability in the monsters inside
Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games. Even in the
presented paper, new monsters are continuously created.
Each monster is described by a chromosome, which maps its
characteristics and skills. The exploited characteristics are
related to the physical aspect, to the force, and to the natural
element. Genetic Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence are
exploited as procedural and dynamic strategies to
continuously generate novel contents and to adapt the game
behavior to the players’ actions, in order to maintain the
game enjoyable and fun.
The second group of papers shifts the attention towards the
specific area of applied games and gamification. Widely
investigated and relevant application fields are concerned,
e.g., with games to enhance and facilitate rehabilitation
processes [
23
] or to diagnose specific sensory problems in
children [
24
], and strategies to positively affect learning
processes by making them more effective and less boring
through gaming [
25
]. The application scenarios of so-called
serious games are continuously increasing [
26
].
An interesting case study is that presented by Gaggi and
Favaro [
27
], whose paper “Euphoni: a system to support
speech therapy” presents a voice therapy protocol to help the
patient when performing exercises at home. In clinical voice
therapy, the protocols typically require daily activities and to
learn a target voice-production technique. The number and
frequency of exercises cause a high rate of patient drop-out
and poor adherence to the prescriptions [
28
]. The proposed
protocol exploits gamification to encourage the patient to
hold on. A further advantage over other approaches is the use
of mobile devices, so that it is not necessary to buy new
equipment. In order to increase user engagement, the
EuphoniApp does not reward the patient after each exercise,
but only when the patient performs all the exercises of a day.
Intermediate goals are also added, i.e. badges, which are
simple set of sub-goals and reward, whose function is to keep
the patient focused on the therapy and to encourage him/her.
Finally, the system reminds the user to perform the exercises
using a push notification system that could be customized
according to the patient’s preferences.
Learning through gameplay or gamified activities happens in
a variety of ways and applies both to a single person and to
collaborative environments. In these cases, how Knutas et al.
underline in the paper “Profile-Based Algorithm for
Personalized Gamification in Computer-Supported
Collaborative Learning Environments” [
29
], a context-aware
and personalized gamification approach is needed, and it can
be automatically created by using appropriate rulesets. The
learners can be guided towards educational goals, like
collaboration, by means of gamification, which is the
application of several game elements to non-game
environments. However, gamification is not a "one size fits
all" solution [
30
], and when the goal is “learning” the task is
especially delicate, since the educational process can be
affected. The proposed personalization for
computersupported collaborative learning environments is obtained by
synthesizing three existing design frameworks: intrinsic skill
atoms [
31
], gamification user type hexad (to create a
gamification task ruleset personalized for each user type as
defined in [
32
]), and self-determination theory-based design
heuristics (for effective gamification of education [
33
]). The
obtained ruleset is induced into machine-format rules that
can be used as a plugin algorithm for computer-supported
collaborative learning environments in order to select
personalized gamification tasks for specific user types and
situations.
Within a related context, the paper “A dialogue-based
software architecture for gamified discrimination tests“ by
Origlia et al. [
34
] discusses the development of a software
architecture designed to present discrimination tests to
preschool children in the form of gamified tasks. Such tasks are
customized on the basis of the child's performance. The
ability to discriminate linguistic sounds is associated to the
correct acquisition and production of the same sounds. As a
matter of fact, an alteration of the same ability is recognized
as a cause of speech and language disorders [
35
]. For this
reason, a timely and reliable evaluation of the phonetic
discrimination ability is important in order to individuate
atrisk subjects, allowing clinicians and caregivers to operate in
focused and specific ways. Due to the fact that an effective
diagnois should be done at a pre-school age, the use of games
or gamified approaches is of paramount usefulness, since it
helps in engaging the child and delaying boredom. The test
is modeled as a dialogue between the child and a group of
virtual characters controlled by a single artificial intelligence
agent. In order to increase the reliability of the analysis,
instead of providing pre-scripted tests, the authors propose
an approach in which the test is dynamically generated.
In a completely different perspective, approaches relying on
game-based methodologies can be exploited also to foster the
culture of participation in design activities. Of course, this is
an issue of transversal interest for the many application fields
involved. Fogli et al. address this specific topic in their paper
“Sustaining Cultures of Participation by Fostering
Computational Thinking Skills through Game-Play” [
36
].
The authors discuss a possible way to foster the learning of
Computational Thinking skills through gameplay, exploiting
tangible user interfaces and virtual reality. The aim is to
promote participatory design strategies, where the
communication between users and designers is
bidirectional. User-centered design, popular since the
introduction of the term by Norman and Draper in [
37
],
generally stems from pure user observation, and therefore
can be considered as a mostly one-way process. Participatory
design rather actively involves the final user in the design
process [
38
], and therefore adds further value to the user
participation. As a matter of fact, these two approaches are
deemed to be successful to design systems that really fit with
users' work practice, needs, and also individual preferences.
The paper develops along the line of game-based learning.
Being a general paradigm, it has also been exploited for
Computational Thinking [
39
]. The paper proposes an
approach to this aim that combines Game-Play Learning with
Tangible User Interfaces and Virtual Reality. The presented
proposal treats tangible user interfaces and physical object
manipulation as fundamental tools to make user activities
more engaging, especially for young learners.
Serious games for cultural heritage have long raised as one
of the most active lines in game-based design [
40
]. In their
paper “Establishing a theoretical background for a
museumcentric entertainment system” [
41
] Origlia et al. advocate for
the need of a novel methodological approach to the design of
games for museums. The aim to pursue is promoting the
value of cultural experience in itself, against the plethora of
technological instalments that often risk averting the
attention from the intrinsic value of objects in exhibitions. In
this perspective, digital games are meant to be part of a
continuing emotional experience, which is co-designed by
game designers and museum experts.
CONCLUSION
Video game design is a technically and culturally rich field
that involves issues from different other research fields,
among which interface design, neuro computing and
psychological research. This makes it fascinating for both
researchers and practitioners, and finally for users, especially
if and when they appreciate its results. Therefore, it can spur
different investigations with its rich set of interconnected
facets. These investigations can tackle either general aspects,
like design strategies, game aspects like playability and
engagement, and user evaluation, as well as specific
application contexts. Albeit their diverisity, each
contribution challenged the idea that games are artifact
aimed at producing mere fun and just-in-time amusement.
This workshop aimed at setting up a common venue for
researchers in the different areas involved. This summary
provides a glance at the interesting discussed topics, and sets
them within a unified framework.
2.