CHI PLAY 2016 – Day 1

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.

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.

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!

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.

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 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!

This entry was posted in Computer Science Education, HCI and tagged , , , by Gustavo Fortes Tondello. Bookmark the permalink.

About Gustavo Fortes Tondello

Gustavo is a Ph.D. student at University of Waterloo under supervision of Dr. Lennart Nacke and Dr. Daniel Vogel. His main interests include gamification and games for health and learning. His research focus on the design of gameful applications. He earned his M.Sc. in Computer Science and his B.Sc. in Information Systems from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil. His M.Sc. thesis in Software Engineering focused on the semantic specification of Quality of Service for Semantic Web Services. His B.Sc. thesis focused on configuration management of Embedded Operating Systems using Application Oriented System Design. Before coming to Canada, he worked for several years as a Software Engineer in Brazil. Gustavo is also a researcher of the Logosophical Science affiliated to the Logosophical Foundation of Brazil.

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