Games and Entertainment Community SIG: Reaching beyond CHI

Abstract Games and Entertainment have become important areas of research within the field of Human-Computer Interaction. The community has grown dramatically in the past years. During the previous CHI conference, there were a growing number of game-oriented submissions demonstrating the increased importance of the field. In 2014, the successful Student Games Competition and the Games User Research workshop (in its third iteration) continue to tie together students, researchers and practitioners. Games and Entertainment is one of the five research areas that have been selected as Spotlights in CHI 2014. Given the increase in quantity and variety of submissions, and the involvement and engagement of practitioners within the community, it is important for the community to have this SIG as a forum.

Author Keywords Video Games, Entertainment, HCI, Games, Play, Gamification, CHI PLAY, Player

ACM Classification Keywords H.5.0. General; H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces - Interaction styles; K.8.0. General: Games

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Lennart E. Nacke University of Ontario Institute of Technology 2000 Simcoe Street North Oshawa, Ontario, Canada Lennart.Nacke@acm.org Pejman Mirza-Babaei University of Ontario Institute of Technology 2000 Simcoe Street North Oshawa, Ontario, Canada Pejman.M@acm.org Magy Seif El-Nasr Northeastern University 360 Huntington Avenue Boston, MA 02115 USA magy@neu.edu

Heather Desurvire User Behavioristics Research, Inc. 578 Washington Blvd. #179 Marina del Rey, CA 90292 Heather3d@gmail.com Regina Bernhaupt IRIT- ICS 118 Route de Narbonne 31062 Toulouse, France regina.bernhaupt@irit.fr

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Introduction Games and entertainment have been represented at CHI during the past 20 years in almost all venues including workshops, tutorials, papers, notes and demonstrations [1,4,5]. In 2012 we started a Student Game Competition, which continued in CHI 2013, and CHI 2014. Similarly, we have been involved in running Games User Research workshops [4,5] that have attracted a wide variety of industry participants and researchers working within this area. This workshop was first held in 2012 with great success and was held again in 2013 with equal success. We expect to continue the success of this workshop at CHI 2014. For the games and entertainment community at CHI we are looking forward to identify new ways, possibilities and strategies for 2015 and beyond.

The community of games and entertainment includes researchers and practitioners focusing on player- centered design and evaluation of games and entertainment applications. Topics of interest include player-oriented game development including analysis, design, games user research and evaluation of desktop games, mobile games, mixed reality games, table top games, serious and educational games, exertion games, affective games; development of (interactive TV) formats, DVDs and related media; interactive applications for media consumption and usage on the web, in the car, and using mobile platforms; and other entertainment-focused applications.

Games and entertainment is an extraordinary community because interaction with entertainment-oriented software and applications is different from interaction with standard (productivity-focused) information systems. In that, players/users of these

kinds of applications care most about the moment-to-moment experience, rather than task outcomes, and may be driven just as much by their emotions as by logic and reason. What is usable and satisfying may not always be the easiest or most straightforward interface. These criteria make development and evaluation of video games more challenging, hence cutting-edge research, methods and tools are being evolved to meet the needs of the industry, designers, developers and players.

The games and entertainment community is of great current and potential value to CHI. One of the research directions that has produced significant impact is the development for better methodologies to understand engagement and player experience [1-6]. This push of new methodologies is useful for other CHI areas and not limited to games and entertainment alone. Another important area is innovation in interaction paradigms that have impact on almost all platforms and services – creating new forms of interaction technology. In addition, the use of gaming techniques are now pervading new applications, allowing software applications to be more playful (for lack of a better term: “gamification”) or to mimic interface and other designs. This has a big impact on HCI.

Issues to cover during the SIG The aim of this SIG is to listen to members of this important sub-community of CHI, to plan ways to serve the community best at upcoming CHI conferences. The following issues have been identified:

New perspectives for 2014 and onwards: Given that the Games and Entertainment Community is the first community that got the agreement to be continued

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beyond the initial three-year term, it is important to discuss how to change perspectives and enhance the possibilities of participation for CHI attendees interested in this area. Goal: identify new venues, formats, and ways of participation.

Attracting young researchers to CHI and mentoring them: While games content as of today can be found in almost all categories, it is important now to keep this level of submissions - still aiming for a healthy growth of submissions related to entertainment and games. Goal: Continue to grow the amount of high-quality CHI gaming submissions, mentor young researchers about CHI review procedures and quality standards

Student Game Competition (SGC) and identify possible additional submission topics for the SGC. Our goal is to grow the SGC and continue the successful steps to ensure that the topics for submission are appropriate.

Extending impact beyond the CHI conference: A tremendous number of games and entertainment-related conferences have emerged in the last few years, as well as sub-communities in major ACM conferences (such as SIGGRAPH). For the first time, CHI games researchers have come together to organize a new conference series for CHI game researchers and practitioners this year, called CHI PLAY (The ACM SIGCHI Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play)1, which will be organized in Toronto, Canada in October 2014. For the near future, we are looking forward to integrate the CHI gaming community into CHI PLAY and supporting the HCI

1 www.chiplay.org

community focused on games and play with more opportunities to present and publish their research.

Intended Audience One of the goals of this SIG is to help people interested in the field of games and entertainment form the community and organize action groups. Our goals and action items are more specifically:

• To bring the community together to share their work (conferences and workshops)

• To bring experts together to identify directions for research and standards for reviews and excellence within this new emerging field

• To ensure that the feedback of the review process of game-oriented submissions is of CHI quality by mentoring researchers new to the conference

• To publish white papers that identify open problems and goals in the field

• To publish a regular newsletter of current activities and highlights of research in the field

• To continue the Student Games Competition as a way to bring young students and researchers into the field

• To make games and entertainment content even more prominent during the conference, including on-site games during the conference

• To document the community efforts beyond the standard publications by extending existing work in the area of games user research

How to reach them Overall the SIG is of interest to a broad range of regular CHI attendees. Using our involvement in industry and using the over 300 contacts (games community "members") we have been gathering during

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previous CHIs. We do want to increase the representation of commercial game practitioners at CHI. For example, we organized the CHI GUR workshops in collaboration with industry and facilitated the submission process for practitioners. This led to more than half of the attendees being practitioners and sharing their experience at the conference. We will also ask all CHI 2014 game-related workshop organizers to communicate this SIG to all their participants.

Process/Schedule/Agenda We will inform the games community members about the SIG goals beforehand to enable participation of the attendees in the organization of the SIG (e.g., by communicating topics to the organizers). As this SIG is central to the success of games and entertainment related activities in 2015 and beyond, the agenda is planned as follows:

Intro and Recap (10 minutes) of what was done this year in preparation for the Special Community, and how we interfaced with the main conference planning. Gathering ideas and aspects on how to move forward with the community beyond 2014 (using whatever game-like support people feel comfortable with). The following topics will be discussed 15 min each:

(1) Identification of tasks/topics that the community should focus on in 2015 (Next step action items); (2) Summary (3) Identification of volunteers that are willing to lead community actions in 2015 and beyond (4) Summary of action items for next year(s). (5)

Wrap-up, Collate and write up results and action items. It is our plan to conclude the meeting with a concrete plan of how to move forward with the community in the following years based on the input of everyone attending the SIG.

References [1] Bernhaupt, R., Ijsselsteijn, W., Mueller, F., Tscheligi, M. and Wixon, D. (2008). Evaluating User Experiences in Games. In Proc. CHI 2008, ACM Press (2008), 3905-3908.

[2] Isbister, K. (2006). Better Game Characters by Design: A Psychological Approach. Morgan Kaufmann.

[3] Isbister, K. and Schaffer, N. (2008). Game Usability: Advice from the Experts for Advancing the Player Experience. Morgan Kaufmann.

[4] Seif El-Nasr, M., Desurvire, H., Nacke, L., Drachen, A., Calvi, L., Isbister, K. and Bernhaupt, R. (2012). Game user research. In CHI EA'12. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 2679-2682. DOI=10.1145/2212776.2212694

[5] Mirza-Babaei, P., Zammitto, V., Niesenhaus, J. Sangin, M. and Nacke, L. (2013). Games user research: practice, methods, and applications. In CHI EA '13. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 3219-3222. DOI=10.1145/2468356.2479651.

[6] Seif El-Nasr, M., Drachen, A., and Canossa, A. (2013). Game Analytics: Maximizing Value of Player Data. Springer.

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