The Acagamic

Two students I supervised last year have finished their theses this year. We decided to hand their work in for publishing in the GameCareerGuide this month and they did publish both works. Both theses were conducted as part of the EU-financed research project FUGA and both achieved outstanding grades at their respective defenses. The publications are:

• A Psychophysiological Logging System for a Digital Game Modification by Sophie Stellmach (Bachelor Thesis)
• A Framework for Psychophysiological Data Acquisition in Digital Games by Dennis Sasse (Master’s Thesis)

So, neurotechnology for games is definitely on the rise. Usability and interaction research in games and player experience as well, judging from the positive reception of the talk I gave on the Quo Vadis 2008 Entwicklerkonferenz in Berlin last week. Now, I finally found the time to upload the slides. Hope they are helpful to you. If you have any questions concerning biofeedback gaming, game usability research or interaction techniques, please do not hesitate to write an email!

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After having the great chance to speak in Helsinki at our recent FUGA project meeting about Game Design and Player Emotions, where I talked about using psychophysiological measurements to validate game design elements for specific player emotions, I had the pleasure of being invited to Germany’s Quo Vadis Entwicklerkonferenz (game developers conference).

While last year, I could only interest a small number of people for the topic of our European Community FP6 NEST project: The Fun of Gaming: Measuring the Human Experience of Media Enjoyment. This year was different. I was surprised and very happy to see my talk jam-packed full with more than 80 interested people from the German games industry, research, and education.

Thanks to former Gamestar scribe Peter from the games section at Golem and a remark I made about Lara Croft’s butt, the talk has created a decent media echo in Germany.

However, unfortunately the press text people all somehow totally forgot to mention that my work is done within an EU project, which I clearly stated during my talk and especially at the end. Now, I would really like to emphasize this fact, since none of our groundbreaking work could be possible without the support of all our European partners! Also, the sites got the link to our research group wrong and directly link to bth.se, from which the Game and Media Arts Laboratory is quite hard to find.

Well, except for the minor glitches in detail and accuracy (for example we use EMG for measuring emotions, not GSR) in the text, I am pretty thankful for all the great feedback on talking at Quo Vadis and I am really excited about the fact that the game industry is looking towards academic research with interest and respect in Germany.

Guess that means we are on the right track. Stay tuned as I will be putting up the slides of my talk very soon. And to those of you that came to Quo Vadis. Thanks for your interest and contact! For all others out there that are interested in biofeedback gaming, and using eye tracker and psychophysiological methods to test gameplay features, feel free to drop me a line.