Experimental psychologists advocated for (video-)game-based research

One of the most important paper about the use of video games in experimental psychology: The games psychologists play (and the data they provide) by David Washburn, Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, Vol 35 (3), pp185-193.

The paper provides a brief history of psychological research with computer games (with a peculiar emphasis on psychology/physiological research). It also highlights the problems caused by the use of game-based reasearch: - difficult to use commercial video games for data capture (not designed for that) - experimenters have not full control over all the variables - consequently it requires to modify the game which is non trivial and time consuming - games can introduce complexity to the experimental situation that has negative consequences (too much context compared to simple psychological tasks) - there is a perception problem associated with the use of games of computer games in psychological research (because games = entertainment for them), not a problem for people who want to study the effects of game on a psychological process but it's an issue for researchers who want to use game-like task or technology to understand the basic process that underlie behavior. That is why people speak about "game-like tasks" and not just games (just to show that they're serious folks and not gamers )

Benefits of game-based research: - more motivation (also pointed by others) and then better performances - enjoyment and well-being - a common platform across researchers - new opportunities for science

Mediated Presence in Role playing game/Virtual game

I came across this paper by Tatiana Shulga: Mediated Presence in Role playing game/Virtual game. It's actually a french paper of sociology and it deals with how presence in mediated in two kind of game: RPG and MMORPG. The author presents interesting concepts (like how the tools used in RPG supports presence) and put them into a relevant sociological framework. She also describes a model made up of three "plans de présence" (presence levels).

Measurement Techniques and Game Design

A great article on Gamasutra: Measurement Techniques for Game Designers by Ben Cousins.It deals with the topic of measures (e.g. time, distance, density of game events) and agreed systems of units. He connects this with the notion of balance.

It’s amazing given the importance of measurement in so many trades and other aspects of our life that game design is in such a prehistoric, pre-measurement state. For whatever reason, game designers - working in a technological and logical field, hardly ever use measurement in their work

Of course, I particularly appreciate the conclusion:

In an ideal future, measurement and analytical data-gathering techniques will give us a proper academic foundation (a formal, data-driven academia, not the horrible cultural-studies influenced rubbish currently pervading videogame studies). Designers will be able share data in repositories that are accessible to all, just like any other logical and analytical field. Field manuals, dictionaries, encyclopaedias and papers will be published on the subject. People will be employed full-time as academic game analysts and surveyors. Our craft and trade will move from a prehistoric, "feel" focused method, governed by the gut-feelings of disagreeing experts to a mature, modern state, where opinion and expertise are supported or disproved by something close to absolute truth.

The author seems to dislike video game studies influence by the cultural-studies theory. Maybe, as a game designer he finds them pointless. It's not my point here. I can echo the authors' felling about the facts he describes concerning measurement. Since I run experiments (quasi experiments since we do not control the maximum amount of factors) and ethnographic studies of video game players, I have to deal with those issues:

• finding relevant indexes that describes players' behavior with regard to different dimensions: time, distance, division of labor among collaborative groups, spatial exploration/dispersion... This necessitates the definition of a proper metrics.
• using those indexes to analyze what happened during the game. Relying on such measures allows to compute statistics about players' behavior towards the game.

It's a promising field and I am happy to see that more and more game developers I meet or read want to take this topic into account.

Ubiquitous Computing, Entertainment and Games

Interesting workshop at Ubicomp 2005: Ubiquitous Computing, Entertainment and Games:

The workshop’s topics of interest include • New ubiquitous game designs • Mixed traditional and ubiquitous game design • Studies or reports on the compelling aspects of existing ubiquitous games • “Post-mortems” on past ubiquitous game experiences • Taxonomies of ubiquitous games • New, existing and emerging technologies supporting ubiquitous gaming platforms • Mechanisms to evaluate or test ubiquitous games • Design elements that can be learned or adapted from popular console/PC games for creating compelling ubiquitous games • Business models that will enable ubiquitous gaming to be successful in the marketplace

Great people on board! (hi Timo!) Maybe it would be nice to submit something about CatchBob ;)

A 3D projection console?

Interesting rumor by gamespot: The Nintendo Revolution will feature 3D projection

This week saw some new rumors about Nintendo's next-generation console surface. The most interesting of these came from Burgess, who has long-standing ties to Nintendo. In his blog, he reflected on attending the ShoWest conference in March. There, he heard Sin City director Robert Rodriguez mention how he and other filmmakers that are eager to make 3D movies, including James Cameron and Peter Jackson, had become "aware of a game machine beating them to the mainstream 3D market." Burgess then heard from an "industry pundit" that Nintendo had already shown off a stereoscopic peripheral capable of projecting 3D images at last year's E3 for the GameCube and was planning something even more advanced for the Revolution. A forum post on the same blog also claimed the Revolution will come "equipped with a short-range wireless mapping camera that will somehow make the software 'adapt' itself to [the player's] surroundings," presumably to customize the 3D projections. But since Nintendo is saying nothing, there's not enough information to call this one way or the other.

Will consumers play location-based games?

Another interesting discussion on the IGDA Mobile forum about how engage user paying for location-based games.Some people think it's not good since it's just reshaping existing games in the real world:

Joe schmo does not want to dress up like a fairy and run around his local apt. complex squawking at their cell phone. it just reminds me of kids jumping around and pointing invisible finger guns at each other. plus, it seems like some idiot will be hit by a car or cause an accident by doing this.

Maybe the guy who said this as a strong bias and think mobile game should be just like pc/console games. It would be better to think about how they can design innovative stuff taking advantage of the news technosocial situations created by the use of mobiles devices. Other persons tell this guy that are already strong sucesses liek MogiMogi, Dodgeball or Pacmanhatan.

There is also a liverly debate about location based gaming as defeating the value purpose of mobility:

I completely disagree. Is it the same as me being able to play 5 minutes of Ghost Recon while in line at the store? No, but that is the point. Does this short-area networking entrance (e.g. blue tooth, IR, etc.) meet the needs of ALL gamers? No, again part of the point.

I for one like to play paintball a couple of times a year and laser-tag when in Japan with work. As I live in downtown Chicago, I have to drive at least an hour outside of the city to find suitable facilities/land to play. If people tried playing either paintball or laser-tag in the city parks, the cops would surround the park and things might not be so fun. Enter LBG such as GunSlingers currently available through Sing-tel... Now, people can play virtual paintball wherever they want.

If you combine the idea existing ideas of LBG with short-area networking, additional possibilities arise.

Some concerns expressed by the game designers are also interesting to take into account:

A. Movement is mostly not designed as possibility but as necessity. B. Location Based Games can not simply be consumed. They constantly need the player’s action to entertain. C. Location Based Games often only make fun if there is a critical mass of players. D. A background story is almost nonrepresentational in the real world environment. In best case it fits in small well prepared local areas. So players must be willing to except a high level of abstraction.

Go check this debate ;)

BTW what is a mobile game?

An relevant discussion on the IGDA mobile forum about how to define a mobile game:

What exactly is a mobile game and why is there confusion? This may seem like a simple question, but there are many different opinions out there.

The schedule and sessions from this past GDC and Mobile GDC imply that mobile games are games to be played cell phones. At least, that was the topic of almost every session on mobile games. Haven?t we had mobile games for years with the Game Boy(s) and similar devices? (...) As we continue to expand into non-console mobile, such as cell phone based gaming, what elements of mobile console carry over to cell phone play, and what does not?

As for me, I think a mobile game takes advantage of mobility (= different context/places/location, integration of movement, different settings with regard to privacy/public display, connectivity/seamlesness...) to create challenging situations.

Psychological elements behind (video) games

A well-summarized introduction to the psychology of video games in gamasutra:The Psychology Behind Games By Anders Hejdenberg. The author first presents idea like Maslow's pyramid as well as basis concepts emerging from Roger Caillois or Csíkszentmihályi's (pronounce chick sent me high yeeeeee, this is true!). Then he describes the consequences for game designers. Event though it's a brief account, that should be seen as a good introduction for game designers.

I just put here the conclusion which is obviously interesting from a user-centered point of view:

We have to realize that making a great game is not about which features and components to add – it is about what those features and components do for the player. We have to learn not to underestimate how important certain aspects of the design are to the player – for example, difficult controls alone can transform any great game into a meaningless activity. We have to remember that we do not make games for ourselves – we make them for the player.

Sometimes game designers tend to forget this basic rule, they design for an audience not for themselves.

Extreme video gamers: wireless works at 400 feets!

Wired has a funny piece about extreme video gamers:For instance in the two following picture, the point was to "experiment to see what is possible using the wireless capabilities of the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP handheld gaming devices, a team of four sky divers played Super Mario Brothers against each other while jumping over California City, California".

Yet, notwithstanding the risks, the four sky divers proved that an ad hoc network set up using the wireless functions of a Nintendo DS works perfectly at distances of nearly 400 feet while falling 120 miles an hour.

Extreme behavior with technology, it's about pushing the limits...

Cool job for Starcraft experts

This seems to be a great job for Starcraft experts:

Experts of StarCraft: Help Analyze How Players Transfer Knowledge

We are studyiing how people pass their understanding and awareness of complex situations. To test how people 'pass the bubble' we are desiogning an experiment in which experts of StarCraft have to pick up a game that another expert has been playing for 25 mins. We need StarCraft experts who can play the game and analyze the way other experts pass their knowledge

Contact Bryan Clemons@ 858.822.2475

It's actually a research project carried out at University Of California San Diego in this lab.

Pervsive game research

The city shaman dances with virtual wolves – researching pervasive mobile gaming by Frans Mäyrä is an interesting accoung about pervasive games in Vodafone's receiver. Some excerpts:

Study of games is rather new in most universities, and that of mobile games even more so. Games have been a sort of blind spot for both human sciences and humanistic scholarship. (...) When games break away from computers and consoles, their boundaries become even harder to see and the nature of the game even harder to define. Yet this is exactly where researchers are currently focusing. (...) Mobile games are an important research field for the GameLab for numerous reasons. Mobile terminals are by their nature context-aware: the service provider gets information both about who the user is and where she is. That kind of contextual information is at the core of all traditional games, but has mostly been missing from digital games (...) The possibilities for new game mechanics, taking advantage of the full range of contextual information provided by pervasive systems, expand the research and design space further. This is one of the major research directions being explored by some ongoing projects in the Tampere GameLab. (...) It now appears that in order to understand the principles of the design of mobile pervasive games we first have to study ourselves. What is reality? How can we create and maintain multiple worlds or realities simultaneously in our minds, and negotiate between them as we cross from one context to another? How much of such multitasking can we tolerate and even enjoy before the associated cognitive demands change from refreshing and stimulating into stressful and confusing? Research into the ethics and information ergonomics for pervasive mobile games is still at an early phase, but it looks like the investigation into the future of entertainment will yield some important lessons about human nature.

2 examples of audio/music-based game controller

That's something I'm interested in (see here). I found two examples:

• Players of Organum: The Game navigate through a human voice box using their own voices as game controls.
• the Sonictroller whcih also allows the user to control a video game with sound

That seems to be good setp! I am still expecting MIDI guitar to control your WoW character ;)

Mobile games and innovation

An interesting account in The Guardian about mobile games:

There's a palpable feeling that mobile games are about to go big. Established publishers such as THQ are creating mobile divisions (...) Mobile phone gaming has yet to deliver a killer application. And before it does, the hurdles preventing this burgeoning market from reaching its full potential have to be removed. There are 60m handsets in the UK, 25% of which have colour screens and are capable of playing games. It's a potentially huge market, says iFone's marketing manager, Enda Carey: "The numbers are just frightening — in 12 months, everyone in the UK will have a colour Java-capable phone, and in countries like India and China, the potential is huge".

The article raises the problem of mobile game on cellphones:

When games are available, they often only work on a selection of handsets, which limits the potential audience.

Handsets also often remain "hot" for only a few months, so by the time a game is written — the development cycle is between six and nine months — the handset may be obsolete. And games themselves are not well designed for the phone's form factor, which is by necessity vertical and by preference small, while a game-pad is typically horizontal (...) This is a considerable array of obstacles, but the mobile gaming market is only four years old, and is changing rapidly. The problem of usability is being addressed with innovative form factors, such as Sony Ericsson's S700i, the keypad of which swivels to facilitate the ergonomic advantage of horizontal control combined with a vertical screen.

What is amazin is this:

The games industry wants to extend established console game brands on to mobiles, but figures show users prefer "casual" games, such as Pool and Tetris. (...) iFone has just released Lemmings. It is a port of an old Amiga game that is very addictive and ideally suited to mobile devices. But, says Vout: "Killer apps must be exclusive to a format. Lemmings is basically a clone of the Amiga version, so while it's great, it's not the killer app.

Yes that's what the users want! How to engage them in other scenarios (alternate reality gaming appears to be an interesting option)

A new journal about video game research

This seems to be brand new: Games & Culture: A Journal of Interactive Media:

Games & Culture is a new, quarterly international journal (first issue due March 2006) that aims to publish innovative theoretical and empirical research about games and culture within the context of interactive media. The journal will serve as a premiere outlet for ground-breaking and germinal work in the field of game studies.

Games & Culture's scope will include the socio-cultural, political, and economic dimensions of gaming from a wide variety of perspectives, including textual analysis; political economy; cultural studies; ethnography; critical race studies; gender studies; media studies; public policy; international relations; and communication studies.

Judging from the associate editor, it seems pretty valuable. I don't know why the psychological dimension is missing (for instance social and cognitive psychology are very keen on that topic...)

Mac-assisted tabletop role playing game

(via), nice programs for mac-assisted tabletop role playing game:

• Dice Utilities (DiceX 1.1.1, DiceBag X...)
• Character Apps: Character Sheet or character generator
• Misc. Tools: miniaturizer, mapmaker, spellbooks...

This sort of thing is very interesting. I was wondering about the mix of FOAF and character sheet to do something...

MMORPG addiction factors

Nick Yee has an interesting take on addiction factors used by game desginers in MMORPG. To put it shortly, there seems to be 3 main attraction factors of MMORPGs that encourage time investment and personal attachment:

1. the elaborate rewards cycle inherent in MMORPGs that works like a carrot on a stick. Rewards are given very quickly in the beginning of the game. You kill a creature with 2-3 hits. You gain a level in 5-10 minutes. And you can gain crafting skill with very little failure. But the intervals between these rewards grow exponentially fairly quickly. Very soon, it takes 5 hours and then 20 hours of game time before you can gain a level. The game works by giving you instantaneous gratification upfront and leading you down a slippery slope. And it overlays different reward cycles so you're always close to some reward - whether this be a level, a crafting skill, or a quest.
2. the network of relationships that a player accumulates over time. There are several reasons why relationships of a platonic or romantic nature occur so frequently in MMORPGs. The anonymity and computer-mediated chat environment facilitates self-disclosure, and many players have told personal issues or secrets to online friends that they have never told their real life friends or family. The high-stress situations inherent in the game also help build trust and bonds between players very rapidly. Of course, another important reason is that the games were designed so that you have to group to achieve most goals.
3. the immersive nature of these virtual environments. This factor works by encouraging players to become attached to their characters and the virtually valuable items that they own. The immersive nature also encourages players to become personally invested to what happens to their characters, and to be empathetic towards their characters. In the same way that a movie or fairy-tale enchants you, the immersive quality of MMORPGs tries to enchant you with a fantasy, and make you feel that you are part of something grand and extraordinary.

He gathered these information through a research process detailed here in the context of his Ariadne project.

What's your personal video game history?

The IFTF is starting new research project on games: What's your personal video game history?.

To help us develop this history, we’d like to invite you to share your personal experiences with electronic games. Videogames are definitely included, but even earlier is fine. As long as some bits and bytes are involved.

So what did you play? What games stand out in your memories? Did you play in groups, or by yourself – did this change over time, or from game to game? What skills do you think you learned from each game? Has a videogame ever helped you in “real life”?

Send your personal gaming history, or as much as your time allows, to games (at) iftf.org

What\'s your personal video game history?

The IFTF is starting new research project on games: What's your personal video game history?.

To help us develop this history, we’d like to invite you to share your personal experiences with electronic games. Videogames are definitely included, but even earlier is fine. As long as some bits and bytes are involved.

So what did you play? What games stand out in your memories? Did you play in groups, or by yourself – did this change over time, or from game to game? What skills do you think you learned from each game? Has a videogame ever helped you in “real life”?

Send your personal gaming history, or as much as your time allows, to games (at) iftf.org

Tetris and distributed cognition

David Kirsh and Paul Maglio wrote a very smart paper about Tetris and distributed cognition: Perceptive Actions in Tetris in Control of Selective Perception, Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium 1992 . Still have to put my summary here ;)

Monkey research and computer games

David Washburn a cognitive scientist, uses video games to investigate various monkey psychological processes. For instance, in his research about how macaques explore virtual mazes, he employed the following device:

The apparatus is used for computer task research with rhesus monkeys. The monkey reaches through the mesh of his home cage to manipulate a joystick, which in turn controls the movements of a cursor on the screen. Pellet rewards are automatically dispensed upon successful completion of each trial.