Titulo Estágio
CrowdPlay - Building an Engine for Gameplay Experience Research
Área Tecnológica
Interação com o Utilizador
Local do Estágio
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Enquadramento
The concept of User Experience plays a key role in informing Interaction Design activities and a special important role in the field of Digital Games Research where subjective perception, interpretation and appreciation of the experience with artifacts involves complex relations in the user's social and personal context. Evaluating User Experience currently relies on user self-reporting, ethnographic observation, biometrics measurement or the use of automated gameplay metrics. Under these methods, getting relevant and timely user data can be extremely difficult and costly thus significantly hindering progress on the exploration of potential design spaces and diverse aesthetics in gameplay. With a lack of formal gameplay modeling and gameplay experience evaluation quality metrics and methods, designers are left with their instinct, and frequently take refuge in known solutions reiterating know formulas under the mantra of fun.
With the CrowPlay exploratory project we want to build a game design testbed engine that will explore a crowdsourcing approach by delivering playable design proposals to users, and inviting them to voluntarily contribute their gameplay metrics as a valuable data source for researching and developing game play metrics from player behavior and feedback.
Objetivo
This project follows a Design Research approach, and will aim at building a crowdsourcing engine prototype on top of pre-existing open-source engine for tablets and mobile phones. A software architecture design will be followed by the agile development of engine and service components for registering and distributing game scenarios, and for collecting user interaction logs.
The main result will be an app for smartphones/tablets - the engine - designed and built to enable distribution and run of game scenarios and the collection of gameplay metrics from player interactions in each game scenario. Data thus collected will be anonymized and loaded into a gameplay analytics engine (other subproject) for analysis across wider populations and design spaces, enabling fast experimentation with game designs and differing elicited responses.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 1
A1. (M1-M3) State of the art research - research and document the relevant SoA, publications and software review, for the study of the problem at hand;
A2. (M2 - M3) Detailed proposal - detailed characterization of the problem to be solved stating specific goals and requirements, assumptions and milestones for the rest of the project;
A3. (M3 - M4) Initial Design - identification of quality attributes, and architectural drivers and initial design for the proposed solution, including interaction models and user interface drafts.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 2
A4. (M5 - M10) Prototyping - implementation and testing of a working prototype for the prioritized components; tunning or corrections based on evaluation results
A5. (M9) Evaluation - definition of evaluation criteria and method, performing evaluations and analysis of results
A6. (M10 - M11) Statement of Learning - production of paper/thesis with process report and reflection on knowledge production
Condições
O estágio será realizado em laboratório no DEI.
Orientador
Licínio Roque
lir@dei.uc.pt 📩