Posted by Lennart on December 1st, 2009
As a Christmas special, I will for once update this blog daily for the next 24 days with my favorite presentation slides about games, user experience, game design, emotion, affective and entertainment computing, etc.
On December 1, we start with a presentation from Amy Jo Kim, who runs Shufflebrain, a company that builds games for social networks (currently very successful). She is also author of the book “Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities” and can certainly be considered an expert on online communities. Her presentation is witty, sharp and to the point. But have a look at it yourself: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Lennart on November 4th, 2009
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Lennart on September 23rd, 2009
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. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by The Acagamic on August 15th, 2009
User Experience
Recently, my research was featured in an article by Harry Brignull for the UX community, entitled “UX for videogame design: Gameplay Research”, where he describes succinctly what some of my colleagues and me are doing in game science, where our main focus is to understand players from an empirical research perspective.
Digital Game Research and User Experience
If you are in London around first week of September, you can participate in a highly interesting panel about Playability and Player Experience Research I am chairing on September 1st, 2.00 – 3.30pm at DiGRA, where we will discuss UX methods for analyzing games and players. If you want to get a glimpse of what will be talked about, jump to Joerg’s game usability blog, read a brand new hot paper from Anders, Alessandro and Georgios entitled “Player Modeling using Self-Organization in Tomb Raider: Underworld” (pdf), read Hannu’s paper on Playability heuristics for mobile multi-player games or check the recent publications from the TU/e Game XP Lab. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by The Acagamic on July 1st, 2009
Eye tracking has – for quite a while – attracted game researchers to use this exciting technology to interact with new media, especially games, since from a viewpoint of game accessibility, it opens gaming up to people with severe motor disabilities. At the COGAIN conference in May, we have presented a paper with results from our 2007 study. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by The Acagamic on June 1st, 2009
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). Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by The Acagamic on May 18th, 2009
Having survived day one of GDC Canada, filled with meeting great people and listening to excellent talks, the next day would even top my experience. First, of course, I went to see the keynote by Bioware founders Dr. Ray Muzyka and Dr. Greg Zeschuk about their quest to fully engage a player emotionally in the interactive narratives they create. Again, it was a very friendly atmosphere, almost like you were hanging out at a friend’s place for watching game trailers and having barbecue. The presenters were excellent, however, contentwise I yearned for more than just a recap of Bartle’s player types and cool clips of their milestone games, but was left unserved. Then, there was also this trailer, which was different and disturbing: Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by The Acagamic on May 17th, 2009
Just came back from joint conferences GDC Canada and Future Play, a combination of events that I would like to call the perfect game-industry-academia cocktail mixed by some very talented Canadians. I had the pleasure to speak at both events about the subject I am passionate about: Psychophysiological Player Testing and Metrical Game Research.
Read the rest of this entry »
