Titulo Estágio
CrowdPlay - A Gameplay Analytics Engine for Gameplay Experience Research
Área Tecnológica
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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. Such a testbed will be instrumental in enabling further empirical research on design options with respect to various qualities transcending fun (rhythm, attention, engagement, challenge, learning, etc) and the impact of aesthetics of interactivity on perception/interpretation of gameplay. This wider metrics framework would be of interest to the general User Experience design research community as well as to specific domains (e.g, game-based learning, sensory stimulation, activism, gamification, etc).
Gameplay metrics collection can be coupled with brief post-experience self-reporting (e.g., asking for 3 ratings or 3 differential semantic gauges, or asking the user to introduce or select 3 tags for meaning). This would enable a basic level of triangulation of gameplay metrics with self-reporting that researcher could use to inspect and better the effectiveness of both instruments. Appropriateness of specific data analysis techniques will be tested and data visualizations explored.
Objetivo
This project follows a Design Research approach, and will aim at building a crowdsourcing Gameplay Analytics Engine prototype consisting of three main outcomes:
a) an high-performance gameplay events database;
b) a webservice interface for loading/exploring gameplay data;
c) a set of processing scripts for generating data visualizations for prioritized gameplay indicators.
A software architecture design will be followed by the agile development of the gameplay analytics service components.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 1
A1. (M1-M3) State of the art research in gameplay analytics - 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 📩