Titulo Estágio
CrowdPlay - Crowdsourcing Gameplay Experiences
Área Tecnológica
Interação com o Utilizador
Local do Estágio
DEI-CISUC
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 project we want to build a game design testbed that will explore a crowdsourcing approach by delivering playable game designs 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 and 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).
Objetivo
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.
This project follows a Design Research approach, and will aim at building a crowdsourcing gameplay engine prototype consisting of three main outcomes:
a) a parameterizable game demo (real-time strategy) built on top of a pre-existing open-source engine smartphone/tablet;
b) a webservice interface for generating and serving game instances;
c) a logging service for gameplay events and data visualization of gameplay indicators.
A software architecture design stage will be followed by the agile development of engine and service components for registering and distributing game scenarios, and for collecting user interaction logs.
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
with end users;
A6. (M10 - M11) Statement of Learning - production of paper/thesis with process report and reflection on knowledge production;
Condições
Estágio a realizar em ambiente laboratorial no CISUC com integração com projecto em curso e com a possibilidade de atribuição de bolsa de 6 meses.
A conclusão de EDJ é um factor preferencial.
Orientador
Licinio Roque
lir@dei.uc.pt 📩