Do people use games to cope with adverse life events and crises? Research informed by self-determination theory proposes that people might compensate for thwarted basic psychological needs in daily ...life by seeking out games that satisfy those lacking needs. To test this, we conducted a preregistered mixed-method survey study (n = 285) on people’s gaming behaviours and need states during early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic (May 2020). We found qualitative evidence that gaming was an often actively sought out and successful means of replenishing particular needs, but one that could ‘backfire’ for some through an appraisal process discounting gaming as ‘unreal’. Meanwhile, contrary to our predictions, the quantitative data showed a “rich get richer, poor get poorer” pattern: need satisfaction in daily life positively correlated with need satisfaction in games. We derive methodological considerations and propose three potential explanations for this contradictory data pattern to pursue in future research.
Within the wider open science reform movement, HCI researchers are actively debating how to foster transparency in their own field. Publication venues play a crucial role in instituting open science ...practices, especially journals, whose procedures arguably lend themselves better to them than conferences. Yet we know little about how much HCI journals presently support open science practices. We identified the 51 most frequently published-in journals by recent CHI first authors and coded them according to the Transparency and Openness Promotion guidelines, a high-profile standard of evaluating editorial practices. Results indicate that journals in our sample currently do not set or specify clear openness and transparency standards. Out of a maximum of 29, the modal score was 0 (mean = 2.5, SD = 3.6, max = 15). We discuss potential reasons, the aptness of natural science-based guidelines for HCI, and next steps for the HCI community in furthering openness and transparency.
How to Play Video Games Payne, Matthew Thomas; Huntemann, Nina B
2019, 2019-03-26, Letnik:
1
eBook
Forty original contributions on games and gaming culture
What does Pokémon Go tell us about globalization? What does Tetris teach us about rules? Is feminism boosted or bashed by Kim Kardashian: ...Hollywood ? How does BioShock Infinite help us navigate world-building?
From arcades to Atari, and phone apps to virtual reality headsets, video games have been at the epicenter of our ever-evolving technological reality. Unlike other media technologies, video games demand engagement like no other, which begs the question—what is the role that video games play in our lives, from our homes, to our phones, and on global culture writ large?
How to Play Video Games brings together forty original essays from today’s leading scholars on video game culture, writing about the games they know best and what they mean in broader social and cultural contexts. Read about avatars in Grand Theft Auto V , or music in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time . See how Age of Empires taught a generation about postcolonialism, and how Borderlands exposes the seedy underbelly of capitalism. These essays suggest that understanding video games in a critical context provides a new way to engage in contemporary culture. They are a must read for fans and students of the medium.
Ethereum crypto-games are a booming and relatively unexplored area of the games industry. While there is no consensus definition yet, 'crypto-games' commonly denotes games that store tokens, e.g. ...in-game items, on a distributed ledger atop a cryptocurrency network. This enables the trading of game items for cryptocurrency, which can then be exchanged for regular currency. Together with their chance-based mechanics, this makes crypto-games part of the recent convergence of digital gaming and gambling. In a first effort to scope the field, this paper surveys popular crypto-games, which use the Ethereum cryptocurrency, to tease out characteristic technical properties and gameplay. It then compares the games' features with criteria found in current legal and psychological definitions of gambling. We find that the popular crypto-games selected meet a combined legal and psychological definition of gambling, and conclude with ramifications for future research.
Playing a game is a complex skill comprising a set of more basic skills. These skills commonly map onto the main mechanics of the game, and build and depend on each other in a nested learning ...hierarchy, which game designers have modeled as skill chains made of skill atoms. For players to optimally learn and enjoy a game, it should introduce skill atoms in the ideal sequence of this learning hierarchy. However, game designers typically construct and use hypothetical skill chains based solely on design intent, theory, or personal observation, rather than empirical observation of players. This risks creating incomplete or suboptimal progression designs. In response, this paper presents an adapted cognitive task analysis method for eliciting the empirical skill chain of a game. A case study illustrates and critically reflects the method. While effective in foregrounding overlooked low-level skills required by a game, its efficiency and generalizability remain to be proven.
Microtransactions have become a major monetisation model in digital games, shaping their design, impacting player experience, and raising ethical concerns. Research in this area has chiefly focused ...on loot boxes. This begs the question whether other microtransactions might actually be more relevant and problematic for players. We therefore conducted a content analysis of negative player reviews (n=801) of top-grossing mobile and desktop games to determine which problematic microtransactions are most prevalent and salient for players. We found that problematic microtransactions with mobile games featuring more frequent and different techniques compared to desktop games. Across both, players minded issues related to fairness, transparency, and degraded user experience, supporting prior theoretical work, and importantly take issue with monetisation-driven design as such. We identify future research needs on why microtransactions in particular spark this critique, and which player communities it may be more or less representative of.
Influencers in Multiplayer Online Shooters Canossa, Alessandro; Azadvar, Ahmad; Harteveld, Casper ...
Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems,
05/2019
Conference Proceeding
Odprti dostop
In a wide range of social networks, people's behavior is influenced by social contagion: we do what our network does. Networks often feature particularly influential individuals, commonly called ..."influencers." Existing work suggests that in-game social networks in online games are similar to real-life social networks in many respects. However, we do not know whether there are in-game equivalents to influencers. We therefore applied standard social network features used to identify influencers to the online multiplayer shooter Tom Clancy's The Division. Results show that network feature-defined influencers had indeed an outsized impact on playtime and social play of players joining their in-game network.
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