The Acagamic

Here is a deck of slides that you should not miss when talking about player emotions and fun. Nicole Lazzaro‘s four fun keys should not be missing in any good game design collection for that matter. She runs a company called XEODesign, which does player experience design research. In her presentation, she talks about the 4 fun keys, namely hard fun (e.g., fiero), easy fun (e.g., curiosity), people fun (e.g., amusement), serious fun (e.g., relaxation). These fun keys were generated throughout a large number of interviews, lots of research and observations. They are discussed in the slides with vivid game design examples. Here goes her excellent presentation: Read the rest of this entry »

For December 8, I have selected a presentation from Jon Radoff, who runs GamerDNA, a social media company working with tracking player behavior. This means they run a service or community that allows gamers to connect and compare all their gaming goodness (player statistics) in one place. This enables GamerDNA to have fascinating insights into the trends of online gaming and gameplay in general. His presentation gives reasons to finally put away stereotypes of gamers and demographic limitations of gaming. Today, everybody plays in one way or another, which emphasizes an increasing need for diverse genres, styles, or generally form and content of games. I hope you feel inspired by his nice presentation (especially the stats). Read the rest of this entry »

Today, on a quick note, we have an old presentation from Jerome Sudan, who runs Advertising Pawn. It presents a lot of very interesting statistics and trends of the recent development of video gaming alongside a set of well-crafted slides. Please enjoy his presentation: Read the rest of this entry »

Today, I am blogging this web seminar presentation from Frank Spillers, a usability design expert and user experience consultant who runs Experience Dynamics. The slidecast is a very interesting primer about emotional design and what he calls pleasurability of a product. For us as player researchers and game designers, this topic is especially interesting, because games tend to be product that leverage this positive emotional power. His claim that when you design any kind of product, you should think about the experience (essentially created in the interaction with humans) it creates. A major takeaway here is also that problem-solving can be enjoyable if done in the right emotional context. On the other hand, his claims that PrEmo and LEMtool “are the only proven and practical tools for measuring product emotion” should be taken with a grain of salt (there are others out there, e.g., SAM). Nevertheless, it is a very interesting and nice presentation as a primer of emotion design and I highly recommend it for today’s dark afternoon. Read the rest of this entry »

December 5 brings us a very clever, sober, and insightful presentation about eye tracking. Harry Brignull, who runs 90percentofeverything is a User Experience Consultant at Madgex in Brighton, England. In his presentation he manages to demystify some of the initial preconceptions one might have about eye tracking. He describes the effect eye tracking has on the user researcher and how to make the most of it. He manages to add in a few quotes and quirks to keep the presentation exciting (my favorite quote is from Jared Spool, who apparently hates eye trackers). I hope you enjoy watching his presentation as much as I did. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, our advent calendar leads us to a highly interesting presentation from the innovative company otoinsights (a One to One Interactive company), who has Jeffrey and Shaowen Bardzell as academic advisers. In-game advertising is already a highly interesting subject by itself that will generate more interest in the coming years, but also thrilling is the research methodology of otoinsights, since they attempt to measure engagement with a research lab called Quantemo. Quantemo seems to collect all the “good stuff” for quantitative, psychophysiological research:

• Real-Time Eye Tracking
• Heart Rate
• Respiratory Rate
• Galvanic Skin Response
• Facial Recognition
• EEG Brain Activity (Electroencephalography)

The field of study that uses such measures to investigate marketing is called neuromarketing, according to otoinsights “a field of marketing that studies consumers’ sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective responses to marketing stimuli.” While I remain skeptic (as I did with EmSense) of the “quantemo physiological index = heart rate + respiratory rate + galvanic skin response” and the “quantemo algorithm, which dynamically weights each measure according to the particular situation,” I do appreciate a company that embraces this field of study with such fascination. The study presented here is very compelling and the use of eye tracking is even more exciting (the only downside being that participants only watched game clips and did not play the actual games; the SVEETER eye tracking tool might actually hold the solution for such real-time game interaction while recording eye tracking data). So without further ado, please have a look at the presentation. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, on the third of December, we tackle a serious (and very good) presentation from James Burke, a Ph.D. student from the University of Ulster, who researches games for serious purposes (so-called Serious Games) such as stroke rehabilitation. Games can be ideal motivators for patients to engage in upper limb post-stroke rehabilitation exercises. For this purpose, Burke and his team developed a number of Webcam games to foster patient exercise (and Wii games are also discussed such as the Wii Vibraphone game for wrist rehabilitation).

Similar to what is done with the Wii Fit and EA Sports Active exercise games, the patient (or gamer) profile is stored to track progress of the exercises. The presentation also talks about the technology and game design ideas behind making these health games. The main takeaway here for me is that the intuitive input control of camera and sensors has great potential for rehabilitation or serious games. Read the rest of this entry »

For December 2, I have chosen a very nice presentation from Nadya Direkova, who is now a Senior Interaction Designer at Google. When working for Razorfish, she gave a presentation about applying game design techniques for web designers.

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