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.
#CHIPLAY16 Day 2 Keynote by @Wanais! pic.twitter.com/YUSmqFiOk9
— ACM CHI PLAY (@acmchiplay) October 18, 2016
Guidelines for making great transparent educational #games by @DS_Cohen at #chiplay16 #gbl #gamification pic.twitter.com/d6HrEbXKyv
— Gustavo Tondello (@GustavoTondello) October 18, 2016
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!
@Floydmueller demonstrates playing the body – #vertigoGames. No one at #chiplay16 was harmed during this demo. We think. 😉 pic.twitter.com/VTt1CElwZj
— Roger Altizer (@real_rahjur) October 18, 2016
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!
'Plant-game for Anxiety Reduction' I love everything about this talk! #chiplay16 pic.twitter.com/PLLfmQI1iE
— Roger Altizer (@real_rahjur) October 18, 2016
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.
Collection interfaces for digital game objects – by @toupsz at #chiplay16 pic.twitter.com/zNEAZok17B
— Gustavo Tondello (@GustavoTondello) October 18, 2016
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!