CHI PLAY is ACM’s international conference on human-computer interaction in play and games. This year, it is being held in Austin, Texas, from the 17th to 18th of October. I’ll be covering some of the spotlights of the conference daily here at the ACM XRDS blog!
After the official welcome, the first day opened with a keynote talk by Jamie Madigan from The Psychology of Video Games. It was a great talk filled with 30 research ideas for game and HCI scholars to investigate in the near future.
#CHIPLAY16 Monday Keynote. @JamieMadigan discusses the psychology of video games. pic.twitter.com/ehCEZ4f5aX
— ACM CHI PLAY (@acmchiplay) October 17, 2016
Lennart Nacke of the HCI Games Group has put together a nice summary of Jamie’s research ideas with links to papers that are already investigating some of these questions at CHI PLAY.
Hello #chiplay16 – I wrote up some impressions on the keynote here. Let me know if you can sort your research into one of the 30 ideas. https://t.co/ggj99n364H
— Prof Lennart Nacke, PhD (@acagamic) October 17, 2016
The first research session focused on player performance and experience. The highlight point was The Influence of Virtual Agents on Player Experience and Performance, presented by Katharina Emmerich, which was announced as the best paper of the conference this year. We learned that the presence of a virtual agent on screen did not always help the player, particularly when using a head mounted display, so it is definitely a topic that encourages further investigation!
#CHIPLAY16's Best Paper: The Influence of Virtual Agents on Player Experience and Performance presented by @KathiEmmerich ! Congrats! pic.twitter.com/GHNKn3fQoN
— ACM CHI PLAY (@acmchiplay) October 17, 2016
Another interesting discussion focused on The Convergence of Player Experience Questionnaires, presented by Alena Denisova. We learned that there is considerable overlap between different existing player experience questionnaires, thus some work needs to be done toward a unified version.
Some take homes from @SevenFridays on player experience questionnaires after comparing the IEQ, GEQ & PENS #chiplay16 pic.twitter.com/SETP7jJaXo
— Jo Iacovides (@JoIacovides) October 17, 2016
The first afternoon session focused on enhancing reality, where we saw some cool examples of mixed reality and alternate reality games for augment human-computer interactions, promoting learning, and arousing empathy. The second session focused on purposeful interactions, with interesting presentations on networking, learning, and human-computation games.
In the evening, participants had the opportunity to test some innovative games from the Student Game Design Competition. The nine finalists focused on different contributions, such as learning, exercising, asymmetric interactions, virtual reality, and more!
The Student Game Design Competition at #chiplay16 pic.twitter.com/8MfcPFTPfy
— Gustavo Tondello (@GustavoTondello) October 17, 2016
The competition counted with two games I contributed to design within the HCI Games Group: CLEVER: A Trivia and Strategy Game for Enterprise Knowledge Learning and ABOVE WATER: An Educational Game for Anxiety.
I’ll be back tomorrow with more information from the second day! Meanwhile, you can follow #chiplay16 on twitter for live news from Austin!