While I managed to get some momentum with this blog in December, my time has been sparse at the start of the year (especially January). Much has happened. I have successfully defended one of the first Ph.D. degrees in Digital Game Development (read about it and download my thesis from here) in Sweden. Leading up to this and following right after it are a bunch of talks concerned with the central theme of affective measurement of players, two of which I will be giving in Canada this week and the next. Besides the obvious question of employment and career direction, I am also evaluating my general research and identify promising paths for future directions. So, watch this space and everything unfolds in the next months.

Recently, I have been busy getting my dissertation out of the door. It is done now and in printing as the packshot on the right shows. More about the topic of my dissertation will be posted here later. In recent time, I have come across a few calls for papers, which I thought would be good to post here.

I will start with our own CHI workshop call, which is for those of you interested in sensor measurement, affective and cognitive aspects of human-computer interaction. The call for position papers goes like this:

Brain, Body and Bytes: Psychophysiological User Interaction

The human brain and body are prolific signal generators. Recent technologies and computing techniques allow us to measure, process and interpret these signals. We can now infer such things as cognitive and emotional states, to create adaptive systems and gain an understanding of user experience. In this workshop, we aim to bring together researchers from fields such as HCI, interaction design, cognitive science, psychology, psychophysiology, game research, neural or bioengineering, and BCI.

The workshop will feature small group brainstorming sessions. Participants will discuss situations that arise when researchers attempt to understand requirements for sensors and devices that measure psychophysiological signals; brainstorm how the data may be processed; but perhaps most importantly evaluate the scenarios and applications that the technologies enable.

For more details, see our Workshop Abstract. Please follow us on Twitter.

Submissions

To participate, please submit position papers (3-4 pages in CHI extended abstract format) to agirou01 at cs.tufts.edu by 6 Jan, 2010. Papers may describe ongoing work, recent results, or opinions and approaches related to the workshop topic. Papers should include a short biography of the author(s) attending the workshop (100-150 words).

Papers will be peer-reviewed and the organizing committee will select 15-20 participants according to relevance, quality of reported results, diversity of research area and experience, and likelihood that they will stimulate and contribute to the discussion. If accepted, at least one author must register for the workshop and for one or more days of the conference.

Important dates

Paper submission: January 6, 2010
Acceptance notification: February 1st, 2010
Final paper submission: March 1st, 2010
Brain Body and Bytes Workshop @ CHI 2010: 11 April 2010

Another CHI workshop on “Video Games as Research Instruments“. Highly interesting and I recommend to participate:

Call for Participation

Video games have a history of being used to study phenomena in HCI and other disciplines. They offer an excellent way to motivate participants in HCI studies, and by using online casual games researchers can potentially access hundreds of participants. The use of video games as research tools is becoming more widespread in areas such as addiction, user experience, immersion, strategy, decision making, etc. In this workshop we are interested in identifying the range and characteristics of the current use of video games as research instruments. Unlike the development of games for entertainment or serious games, the workshop will focus on the use of games to study more general phenomena (although this may itself have applications to video games).

The workshop will bring together a diverse selection of research that uses video games in order to develop a better understanding of the specific issues, challenges and opportunities that they provide, and to demonstrate how games can be used as an effective part of research. The workshop should motivate researchers to use video games, but also to learn from the experiences of other research areas.

We invite researchers in all disciplines that use video games as research instruments to submit a four page position paper in which you describe: the general problem your research addresses, how and why video games are used, an overview of results and a discussion of experiences and issues specific to using video games. Further information can be found in the workshop website.

Feel free to address any questions or informal enquiries about submissions to Eduardo H. Calvillo-Gámez ( e.calvillo-at-upslp.edu.mx)

The deadline to submit papers is January, 6th 2010.

Workshop Overview

In this workshop we are interested in addressing how video games are used as stimuli, to study concepts and phenomena in different areas of HCI and related disciplines. We hope to draw together the diverse experiences of researchers working with games.

The workshop will focus on research that uses games to contribute to an understanding of more general phenomena, such as user experience, human error, addiction, almost any topic that is not aimed exclusively (or at all) at the development of games for entertainment or education.

The objective of the workshop is to share expertise, experience and research methodologies on the effective use of video games as research instruments. During the workshop the participants will present research focusing on the use of the video games as instruments. The outcome of the workshop would be to identify the characteristics of video games being exploited across research areas, and an understanding of the requirements and possibilities of video games as instruments.

From an HCI perspective, the importance of understanding video games as part of the experimental setting is that they offer a rich interaction, which makes them work as effective research instruments. What is it about interacting with games that makes them such a valuable research tool? This is an HCI question we want to initially address within this workshop.

Important Dates

• Submissions start – 1 December 2009
• Submissions end – 6 January 2010
• Notification – 20 January 2010
• Workshop – 10 April 2010

Another interesting workshop on eye tracking at IUI:

International Workshop on Eye Gaze in Intelligent Human Machine Interaction

February 7, 2010, Hong Kong, China

Workshop website

Eye gaze serves multiple functions in human-human communication. The speaker may use gaze to reference an object in the environment, or to indicate attention to the listener, and or to manage who has the floor, among other functions.

Researchers have long been interested in the role of eye gaze in human machine interaction. It has been used as a pointing mechanism in direct manipulation interfaces, for example, to assist users with “locked-in syndrome”. It has also been used to reflect information needs in web search and tailor information presentation. Based on joint attention indicated by eye gaze, it has been used as a facilitator in computer supported human-human communication. In conversational interfaces, eye gaze has been used to improve language understanding and intention recognition. It has also been incorporated in multimodal behavior of embodied conversational agents. Recent work on human robot interaction has further explored eye gaze in incremental language processing, visual scene processing, and conversation engagement and grounding. Given the recent advances in eye tracking technology and the availability of non-intrusive and high performance eye tracking devices, there has never been a better time to explore new opportunities to incorporate eye gaze in intelligent and natural human machine communication.

This workshop intends to bring researchers from academia and industry together to share recent advances and discuss research directions and opportunities for next generation of human machine interaction that incorporate eye gaze. We invite submissions of research papers and position papers that address the following areas (but not limited to):

• Empirical studies of eye gaze in human-human communication which have implications in human machine communication. Examples include new empirical findings of eye gaze in human language processing, in human vision processing, and in conversation management.
• Algorithms and systems that incorporate eye gaze for human computer interaction and human robot interaction. Examples include gaze-based feedback to information systems, gaze-based attention modeling, incorporating gaze for automated language processing, controlling gaze behavior for embodied conversation agents or robots to enable grounding, turn-taking, and engagement.
• Applications that demonstrate the value of incorporating eye gaze in practical systems to enable intelligent human machine communication.

Submission Guidelines
There are three categories of paper submissions.
Long paper: a maximum of 8 pages in the two-column SIGCHI conference format.
Short paper: a maximum of 4 pages.
Position paper and project notes: a maximum of 2 pages.

All submissions should be prepared according to the standard SIGCHI publications format. Each submission will be reviewed by three members of the program committee.

The accepted papers will be distributed during the workshop. After the workshop, the final version of workshop papers will be published in Springer’s LNCS series.

Important Dates
Paper Submission: November 26, 2009
Notification of Acceptance: December 18, 2009
Final Version for Distribution at Workshop: January 8, 2010
Workshop: February 7, 2010
Camera-ready version for Springer book series: presumably March 2010

Workshop Organizers
Elisabeth André, University of Augsburg, Germany
Joyce Chai, Michigan State University, USA

Program Committee

• Donna Byron (Northeastern University, USA)
• Justine Cassell (Northwestern University, USA)
• Cristina Conati (University of British Columbia, Canada)
• Neil Cooke (University of Birminghan, UK)
• Andrew Duchowski (Clemson University, USA)
• Fernanda Ferreira (University of Edinburgh, UK)
• Louis-Philippe Morency (University of Southern California, USA)
• Yukiko Nakano (Seikei University, Japan)
• Toyoaki Nishida (Kyoto University, Japan)
• Helmut Prendinger (NII, Japan)
• Kari-Jouko Raiha (University of Tampere, Finland)
• Candy Sidner (BAE Systems AIT, USA)
• Songhua Xu (Zhejiang University, China)
• Tohru Yagi (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan)
• Mike Yao (City University of Hong Kong, China)

and finally something more game-centric…

The Inaugural Game Education Summit Europe 2010

Copenhagen, Denmark, June 22-23, 2010

The Game Education Summit EUROPE (GES EUROPE) hosted by National Academy of Digital, Interactive Entertainment at The National Film School of Denmark is seeking paper proposals from the academic, creative and industrial communities for our inaugural European GES. Through this annual event we aim to disseminate the most recent, groundbreaking work on games as education as well as game research. The conference will also have a strong focus on curriculum development and design. The 2010 GES EUROPE mission is to bring academia and the industries that create video games together to share research and foster relationships that will benefit both groups.

Submissions will be accepted until January 31, 2010.

The focus of the 2010 GES Europe is on video games and creativity. With video games merging into more and more aspects of our lives, game education plays an important role in shaping how students view the world.

Types of submission

Panels or Presentations: Submissions are solicited of long papers, panels or presentations that address the following:

• Course Development
• Curriculum Design
• Teaching Methods
• Writing for Games
• Career Development
• How to Define a Game Designer
• Women and Video Games (and general diversification of game developers)
• Mentoring Programs
• IGDA Curriculum
• Serious Games
• Effective Development of Links with the Games Industry
• Industry Requirements and Needs
• Program Design & Methodologies
• Accreditation
• Games as Art
• Sound Design for Games
• Game Development for Governmental Use
• Should Student Games be commercialized
• Ethics and Game Design
• Games and Professional Training
• Integration of Games Education into existing media education programs

See more detailed instruction for paper submissions here.
Short Papers:

Submissions are solicited for short papers that address research on the game industry or technical game-related fields.

Authors are encouraged to demonstrate work in progress and late-breaking research results that show the latest innovative ideas.

Visit the website to submit your proposal through the on-line form. Short papers should be 3-6-pages in length.

Important dates

31 January 2010: Deadline for submission in all categories
1 March 2010: Notification of acceptance
31 May 2010: Deadline for providing names and affiliations for all panel members
10 June 2010: Deadline for Long Papers

Submissions procedure

The submission form can be found at www.geseurope.com

All submissions will be reviewed by members of the Games Education Summit Advisory Board. All accepted speakers and panel participants will be granted gratis admission to the conference and accepted papers will be posted on the Game Education Network after the conference.

If you have any questions please contact Suzanne Freyjadis at suzanne at gameducationnetwork.com

For past conference information, please visit www.gameeducationsummit.com

Just given birth to a journal paper publication about silver gamers. For all my press friends out there, the (immediate) release goes like this:

Solving arithmetic challenges is more efficient and effective with pen and paper, but brain training with video games is more exciting and may be connected to positive feelings for elderly gamers, according to a study to be published in the forthcoming issue of the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior.

A research team from the Blekinge Institute of Technology surveyed people aged above 65 years, when playing an arithmetic brain training game on paper and on a Nintendo DS portable gaming console and recorded the time it took them to complete the game and the errors they produced. They uncovered a positive relation between playing with the portable console and the fun this age group reported. To ensure that these effects were genuine to older gamers, they gathered and compared results from a control group of adolescents.

“It was quite surprising that we found an association of the game condition with positive feelings for the elderly but arbitrarily with negative feelings for the young,” says main investigator Lennart Nacke, who is currently completing his doctoral degree at the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden. The research implies that elderly might indeed appreciate the logic-training puzzles of brain training games for their mental benefit than younger gamers.

Journal reference

Lennart E. Nacke, Anne Nacke, Craig A. Lindley. Brain Training for Silver Gamers: Effects of Age and Game Form on Effectiveness, Efficiency, Self-Assessment, and Gameplay Experience. CyberPsychology & Behavior. -Not available-, ahead of print. doi:10.1089/cpb.2009.0013.

Related Links

• Dr. Shock wrote a nice treatment on the brain-training study. Thank you.
• Does the Brain Like E-Books? – Discussion on the impact of paper vs. digital

Microsoft’s press conference on this year’s E3 is just over and they have, of course, positioned their box as an allround entertainment platform, incorporating possible competitive online media (like social media platforms Twitter and Facebook) and offline passive entertainment (music from last.fm, movies from netflix). But, the largest announcement was probably the long-awaited full body motion sensor, nicknamed “Project Natal” (or controllerless game interaction).

Now, as recently mentioned here, there was panel on Exergaming at this year’s Future Play conference, where scientists presented things like a full body interaction kung fu game, which was conceived in a lab. Thus, seeing Microsoft pick full body interaction for games is somewhat magical as it shows the direct impact HCI game research can have on the industry (at least the way I see it, there must be a connection).

What could be seen from Project Natal so far is that it is an additional hardware device that will work with Xbox 360 (and future models). We could see features like full body movement recognition, facial recognition, voice recognition, which of course raises the question whether the biometric data is also stored somewhere on the box or even added to your live profile (since it allows logging into your account by recognizing you). But privacy consciousness aside, the main application areas for this new, probably (infrared and) camera-based device seem to be exergames (as the demonstrated dodgeball-style game Ricochet will make you jump around like you have been spending the night in a beehive), but also creative applications like the Pollock-style painting application Paint Party, which lets you use paint a canvas by squirting paint on it.

Microsoft currently calls this true interaction, but given its camera recognition algorithms, it could possibly also allow for some biofeedback magic by doing face recognition. Peter Molyneux touched on this subject in his very own presentation of Project Natal, where he introduced a virtual character that interacts naturally with the player. Since it is perfectly possible to recognize human emotions with a high-resolution camera (and the right room lighting), I am waiting for the first game to try this out with Project Natal. Maybe our research is not so far away from the reality as we sometimes think and biofeedback games are just waiting around the corner being the next big thing to happen at E3 in 3 years. In any way, it will be interesting to try out Project Natal and see how it delivers in the living room!

After a recent discussion about centers of game research around the world and the responses it generated on the DiGRA mailing list, I have created a Google Map that shows the institutions doing game research around the world. Interestingly, most of them are in the United States and Europe. Of course the results may be biased, since only institutions on the DiGRA mailing list were giving input. However, if you feel that you do higher education (University level) game research and should be on this map, please feel free to add yourself.

View Larger Map

Photo by chefranden (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License)

What Are Mailing Lists Good For?
Why should you care about Mailing lists? Have you ever missed a conference deadline or wondered what could be interesting areas of research related to gaming? Heck, maybe you have just started studying in higher education and wondered whether all those professors do is play games. No time to waste, because if you want to find out what is going on inside the community and get a good feeling of gaming Zeitgeist, you have found the right place to start.

Wouldn’t You Like To Know The Inside Scoop
A (moderated) discussion mailing list usually has netiquette guidelines (e.g. “read first, post later”, “remember you are talking to a human being”), but the value you get out of a list once you are on it for a while, is tremendous. Game researchers on those lists are usually very open-minded, friendly, multidisciplinary and scientific people. They will keep you up to date with conference calls, job adverts and hot research topics (potentially for grant proposals or other things). All you need to do is subscribe with your email address to the list and after confirmation this whole new world opens up to you. The only thing left to do is to filter your email inbox, so it does not become crammed as some lists can have high traffic at times. And remember, the list are run by professionals, so you can always opt out at any time without any need for justification.

The Top Five Mailing Lists

1. Gamesnetwork DiGRA Email List. The Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) has its own mailing list, filled mostly with people from a game studies background. Most discussion related to DiGRA take place here. Regular announcements include academic job offers and call for papers (Cfps).
2. Entertainment Computing Community Mailing List. The International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) provides this news and announcement service to all researchers interested in the area of entertainment computing. The community is probably a bit more technical than on the DiGRA list.
3. IGDA’s Game Education SIG Mailing List. The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) has a special interest group dealing with all things related to game education. List membership is massive and if you are living on the American continent and do game education, there is no excuse not to be on that list. Topics are however more related to teaching than to researcher, but you do get industry and academia Cfps as well as academic job offerings.
4. CHI-WEB Mailing List. Organized by the ACM special interest group on Computer-Human Interaction, this is a rather large resource, not just focused on interaction and entertainment, but on all facets of HCI. If you prefer more focused lists, the ACM SIGCHI also offers CHI-Resources, CHI-Jobs, and CHI-Announcements.
5. Serious Games Discussion Listserv. Serious games is a big topic for professionals and academics alike and this is the official list.

Is This Really It?

Think that I might have missed a good discussion place? Feel free to add a comment!

My colleague Karolien from the Game Experience Lab in Eindhoven has drawn some attention to a survey from them about your thoughts, opinions and feelings about advertising in general, and about digital games & advertising more specifically. They are investigating how people feel about advertising & digital games. Should that strike a chord with you, please surf right over there quickly and fill out the questionnaire. As someone that partly worked with communication scientists or social scientists, I know how difficult it is to get enough participants for significant data sets, so please support their research.

Our paper “Sound and Immersion in the First-Person Shooter: Objectively Measuring the Player’s Sonic Experience” got accepted at the Audio Mostly 2008 conference a while ago and thanks to Inger’s blog I discovered that their conference program is now online as well. It is the first paper in the first session! That really is kind of cool! I would like to go to the conference, but my schedule this month is busier than ever with teaching my new course “Game Systems Engineering” (part of our Game Design Master’s program) and preparing my talk for the paper “Log who’s playing: psychophysiological game analysis made easy through event logging“, which will be presented at the International conference on Fun and Games in Eindhoven, followed directly by a meeting of our EU FUGA (“Fun of Gaming”) project, which is now coming close to its end. The latter being the reason for me not attending Audio Mostly 2008, where it would have been great to meet some research friends that will give talks there as well. But, nevertheless, I have not seen my FUGA colleagues in a while and it is great to meet them again and see how our projects are progressing. Looking forward to the next weeks.

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)

Everybody still searching for an excuse of the cultural impact or significance of games, will be delighted to hear that the guardian site has decided to have a whole week dedicated to press coverage of gaming. This special includes a tech weekly gaming related podcast, an over-the-top statement piece from acclaimed MUD godfather Richard Bartle (Quote: “they” [the gamers] “aren’t psychopathic killers, and they resent those boneheads – that’s you – who imply that they are addicted and are psychopathic killers”), a nice snippet about Sony’s London Studio and of course not missing the gigantic release of Grand Theft Auto IV this week. Yes, GTA IV will again provoke public debate about gaming, let’s hope this time around, we will get some insightful reflections.