1 INTRODUCTION
Playing has a fundamental role for animal development.
Puppies learn adults’ actions by imitation, that in many cases
works through playing with peers. As for human childhood,
the attractiveness of games extends for an even longer time
[
16
], and also spans adult life. This especially holds in our
digital era, where technology multiplies and extends the
possibilities to design a huge variety of di erent categories of
games. Increasingly sophisticated electronic devices, the
possibility of online sharing and communication, and nally
virtual, augmented and mixed reality represent a set of
advanced building blocks for game design and development.
At the same time, playing is not synonym for pure
amusement anymore. It nds a growing number of di erent
applications. As a consequence, the design and development
of video games can be considered as a fascinating and
multifaceted research eld, that embeds the results from both
science and humanities regarding several technological,
cognitive, and social aspects. Topics from many computer
science areas are involved, from computer graphics to software
engineering and usability evaluation. But also physics,
psychology and neurophysiology, industrial design, and, on the
other side, literature, history, economy, visual arts, semiotics,
etc., provide useful elements for an e ective game design.
On one side, video games represent, now more than ever,
a growing industrial eld, as clearly testi ed by the
increasing revenues and the impact on the job market. On the other
side, the deeper and deeper e ect on di erent aspects of
people’s everyday life calls for a true research commitment.
Gaming scope has gone well beyond the original boundaries
of enjoyment to extend to novel targets, from learning to
rehabilitation and promotion of cultural heritage [
6
][
8
].
Unfortunately, just due to the variety of involved knowledge
and skill, the eld still presents a high fragmentation.
In its rst two editions [
5
][
7
], the GHItaly workshop aimed
at constituting a bridge among the many di erent disciplinary
areas involved, trying to decrease the still existing cultural
gaps and to establish a common ground and a crossroads
for related research. Since the workshop series continues as
a space of interdisciplinary dialogue and exchange, also the
third edition has encouraged and welcomed the presence
of di erent and complementary perspectives. Some papers
dealt with User eXperience and preferences: the analysis of
the users’ attitudes is a necessary condition to increase the
quality of artifacts whose purpose is both to entertain and
elicit fun [
3
][
9
][
13
][
19
], and also to support serious
activities, e.g., education. The emerging ideas can inspire new
ways of researching, teaching, and working on the design
and development of video games, in their broadest role: both
entertainment and applied goals.
2
GHITALY19
GHItaly19 included contributions that can be divided into
two broad groups. The papers in the rst group deal with
game design issues. The papers in the second group focus
on both static and dynamic analysis of player’s preferences.
The paper “Analysis of Advertising in E-Sports Broadcasts”
by Kareinen, et al. [
12
] proposes to develop a new strategy
for advertisement in e-sports broadcasts. It uses game data,
to increase the audience interest. The video game
CounterStrike represents the case-study. In Global O ensive (CSGO),
two teams of ve players try to reach 16 round wins to
achieve a map win. The “commentators” discuss the actions
of the previous round in a “freezetime” at the beginning of
every round. The proposal is in a preliminary stage and
develops a new analytic tool for commentators that uses the
Game State Integration of CSGO. In this way, their
analysis is better supported in order to provide a new advertising
element for more attractive broadcasts. Viewers get
information in the form of game statistics. At the same time, the
display shows a possible new spot for advertising the
sponsors of the broadcast in the place of the more traditional
static advertising. Unfortunately, a survey carried out with
some volunteers revealed that, though the new strategy was
appreciated, the new kind of advertisement was not better
remembered than the traditional static one.
Cavicchini and Mariani, in their paper “Hybrid board game:
Possibilities and implications from an interaction design
perspective” [
14
], deal with interaction design. They
investigate the combination of digital and analog media in the
context of IoT (Internet of Things). The case study is represented
by boardgames. The authors consider that an object-based
system such as a tabletop represents an e ective support
https://blog.counter-strike.net/index.php/about/
for smart interactions. The progressive prototype
development suggests a series of guidelines and best practices, but
also leaves open problems concerning the hybridisation of
digital means in an analog play experience. A hybrid board
game could simplify the playing experience by entrusting
data to the game system itself. The players are not forced to
elaborate and remember the information necessary to set
up a gaming strategy, so that their enjoyment can be
increased via a lower e ort. The developed prototype relies
on the strategy of “putting knowledge” in the world [
15
].
Among the problems underlined by the experiments, it is
worth underlining a series of implications able to reduce the
feasibility of designing hybrid artefacts. Establishing share
and exchange of data between di erent electronic
components, each with very speci c tasks, might lead to problems
concerning the e ciency, noise and latency of the
communication.
The paper “A.T.L.A.S.: Automatic Terrain and Labels
Assembling Software” by De Francesco et al. [
4
] presents a tool for
the automatic creation of complex imaginary worlds, that
make up the basis for video games. Game designers or game
writers can testify that making an imaginary world
“credible” and convincing for the player, requires it to be
“consistent”. In other words, no aspect should be perceived as
“weird” or “out-of-place”. The proposed tool is
methodologically di erent from other imaginary world generators
proposed in the Procedural Content Generation (PCG) eld [
18
].
It was developed as one of the components of a more
complex story-driven approach to the generation of video games:
in fact, A.T.L.A.S. smoothly integrates its output with that of
GHOST [
11
]. The latter tool semi-automatically produces
the main narrative structure of a story and its characters.
This provides a solid backbone to be lled by the game/level
designer. A.T.L.A.S. follows a top-down approach to
generate the features of the imaginary worlds. It moves from
the general/outer level (i.e., the generation of the Earth’s
crust) to the particular/local (roads, villages, speci c
buildings and locations). The generation process is divided into
two phases. The rst phase creates the orography of the
environment, according to elements of physical geography,
that can be controlled by the game/level designer. The
second phase follows political geography principles, and adds
points of interest to the map (i.e., cities, villages, roads, etc.).
Most of them can be imported directly from a structure for
a story produced by GHOST.
In the second group, the paper “A BCI-based Assessment of
a Player’s State of Mind for Game Adaptation” by Caro glio,
et al. [
2
] discusses how a passive Brain Computer Interface
(BCI) can be used to enhance the gaming experience through
adaptation by assessing the state of player’s mind. The
authors assume that both cognitive and emotional factors drive
the process of playing videogames [
20
]. Therefore, they
focus on the e cient recognition and classi cation of states
of the players during gameplay, including boredom, ow
and stress. Features extracted from EEG signals should
allow state classi cation. The authors performed an
experiment collecting data from 35 subjects playing at a horror
video game, for a total of 240 EEG signals recordings. The
horror video game presented speci c features and
mechanics causing emotional impact on the player, e.g., the use of
a measure of “mental health”, an adaptive use of rendering
e ects and sounds, the behaviour of Non-Player Characters
(NPCs). At the end, the players had to answer to a
questionnaire to assess their perceived emotions, engagement, and
the appropriateness of their skills with respect to the game
challenges. The answers of the questionnaire allowed the
interpretation of the physiological data, and the annotation of
the collected data. Results showed that the emotional states
extracted by BCI are coherent with the self-evaluated
measures. In particular, the level of engagement was mainly
coherent with experimental conditions.
The paper “Towards a model to meet players’ preferences
in games” by Bellini [
1
] presents a di erent approach to the
adaptation of a game to players’ attitude. The author
analyses the approaches based on Procedural Content Generation
via Machine Learning (PCGML) [
21
]. PCGML represents a
new paradigm for the self-driven creation of new contents.
With respect to Procedural Content Generation, the
quality of the created content is generally higher. It is achieved
by integrating automatic creation techniques with Machine
Learning models. The latter models are trained on existing
content. PCGML has been applied to create video game
contents (e.g., levels structure, story progression), but not yet to
generate the complete video games. The author applies
Machine Learning for the recognition of a player’s attitudes,
and proposes a PCGML model able to adapt a game to
players’ preferences. The game content is procedurally customized
according to the single player’s pro le and to a Player Model
built during an in-game opaque survey, This entails that,
during playing, the model records the player’s path, made
up by each chosen action, and updates the player’s pro le
accordingly. At each new level, the algorithm picks a
subsequent level according to a probabilistic distribution, that
takes into account what is more likely to be interesting for
the player, following the current Player Model.
The last paper presented at the workshop is “Faster is
Better: The Speed of Player Character Growth a ects
Enjoyment and Perceived Competence” by Guardini et al. [
10
]. It
presents an interesting study on the perceived competence
and enjoyment of video game players, based on the
SelfDetermination Theory (SDT). SDT turned out to be a highly
successful tool for the investigations on video games
under several perspectives. It predicts that people tend to be
proactive and engaged in activities that can satisfy three
speci c intrinsic needs: the need for competence (the
human innate desire to grow one’s own abilities), the need for
autonomy (the human innate desire to be the causal agent
of one’s own life), the need for relatedness (the human
innate need for meaningful interactions with peers) [
17
]. In
the paper, the authors test the SDT predictions by
manipulating the amount of reward given to the player within
Torchlight II commercial video game, in opposition to
applied games and gami ed application used in previous
studies. The collected data include game metrics, video
recordings, and self-reported feedback. The analysis was carried
out on information from two groups of video game players
that participated in a 60-minutes play session. The control
group played the standard version of the game, while the
experimental group played a version of the game that provided
ve times the amount of rewards. Results showed that the
speed of player character growth a ected the participants’
perceived competence and their enjoyment of the game,
although the game metrics indicated that the two gameplay
sessions were almost identical.
3
CONCLUSION
Video games are still almost universally considered as pure
amusement artifacts, and assigned a secondary role in both
editorial, artistic and scienti c worlds. However, a growing
number of studies and experiences demonstrate that video
game design and development is a technically and
culturally rich and challenging area. It is continuously expanding
to “serious” applications like healthcare and education. In
this context, it exploits the results from several di erent
research elds. In a complementary way, it can contribute to
the research in neighboring areas. The works presented at
GHItaly19, as well as those in the previous workshop
editions, clearly demonstrate the interest and relevance of this
fascinating eld for both researchers and practitioners. The
results obtained include new approaches, techniques, and
interdisciplinary exchanges characterizing game design and
development. However, they are signi cant to the extent
that they can support an improved and more engaging User
eXperience. It is important to achieve this goal whether the
players are people playing for fun or for more serious
reasons, since it is the nal expected outcome of any technical
as well as theoretical investigation. However, as already
observed in the previous editions, the complexity implicit in
https://www.torchlight2.com
video game design and implementation can stimulate di
erent investigations on several game aspects. These include,
e.g., design strategies and techniques, playability and
engagement, and user evaluation, as well as speci c
application contexts. Applied games extend their target from
education to cultural heritage to healthcare. Albeit their diversity,
each contribution presented at the GHItaly19 workshop
underlines that games are artifacts by far more complex and
cross-disciplinary than generally deemed. Moreover, the
experience lived by the player has deep implications for their
fruition, whatever is the category they belong to, and
especially if their goal is not pure amusement. As a consequence,
they can no longer be classi ed as only “simple” software
applications. A more frequent, intense and fruitful exchange
of ideas, experiences and results among the di erent
disciplines involved should take place, as we hope this will
happen in the next future.