CHI PLAY 2016 – Day 2

The second day at CHI PLAY had a lot of fun and important research! In case you’ve missed it, read about the first day before continuing.

Annika Waern presented the keynote of the day on Play, Participation and Empowerment, and left everyone reflecting about the opportunities that arise when designers let the players co-create the game rules and boundaries. It was followed by David Cohen‘s talk on Transformation Through Transparency, in which he emphasized the importance of collaboration between educators and game designers for building educational games, as well as the importance of embedding learning in a transparent way to allow players to enjoy playing and increase learning effectiveness.

The morning’s technical session focused on new interactions and left the audience excited with the innovative format of the presentations as well. The highlight goes to Floyd Mueller’s presentation of their work Balance Ninja: Towards the Design of Digital Vertigo Games via Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation: he made the audience actually get up and spin around the room to experience vertigo first hand!

Another memorable point was Taiwoo Park, Tianyu Hu, and Jina Huh’s Plant-based Games for Anxiety Reduction: the audience thrilled at the idea of using a plant as a game controller!

The afternoon’s first technical section focused on tools for design and counted with research on designing serious games, understand gamification user types, classifying procedurally generated content, and playtesting with a purpose. I will take the opportunity to highlight my own presentation on the The Gamification User Types Hexad Scale, a new tool to evaluate user preferences for different game design elements.

https://twitter.com/acagamic/status/788463932226670592

The last session of the day focused on rewarding play. I choose to highlight Zachary Toups’s talk on Collection Interfaces for Digital Game Objects, a research I collaborated with and received an honorable mention as one of the conference’s best papers! Our work suggests creating curation interfaces for digital game objects and means to collect and share objects across different games and platforms. Max Birk’s talk on The Motivational Push of Games added important knowledge regarding intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in games for training: their results showed that while extrinsic rewards can increase motivation for players who were not previously intrinsically motivated, it can decrease task performance for intrinsically motivated players. Thus, designers of training games might need to consider different motivational elements for intrinsically motivated and amotivated players.

Tomorrow I will bring more news from the last day of CHI PLAY, so stay tuned and meanwhile don’t forget to check #chiplay16 on twitter for more live news!

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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