A few weeks ago I attended CHI PLAY 2015, the second edition of the ACM SIGCHI Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play. CHI PLAY is an international and interdisciplinary conference for researchers and professionals of all areas of play, games, and human-computer interaction, which fosters discussion of current high-quality research in games and HCI as foundations for the future of digital play.
It was a great opportunity to talk about game design and gamification, with a lot of useful insights, and to present some of the works we have in progress at the HCI Games Group.
I also took part of the Workshop on Personalization of Serious and Persuasive Games and Gamified Interactions. It was a great opportunity to discuss the implications of building generic serious games or gamified applications, a practice that usually leads to the exclusion of a portion of the intended audience, as not all individuals are motivated by the same kind of interactions. At the Workshop I contributed with the presentation of two papers: Towards a Personalized Playful Digital Wellness Assistant, which describes ideas for personalization of gamified health systems that I am investigating as part of my Ph.D. research, and The HEXAD Gamification User Types Questionnaire : Background and Development Process, a collaboration with the Austrian Institute of Technology and with Gamified UK to develop a questionnaire for evaluating different user behaviours towards gamified systems.
At the main Conference, I presented a poster: Understanding Player Attitudes Towards Digital Game Objects, a collaborative work with the New Mexico State University and the University of California at Irvine that studies what motivates people to collect digital game objects, with possible future implications for gameful design. The HCI Games Group also presented a game into the Student Game Design Competition: CHI Playgue, a gameful experience aimed at fostering networking and facilitating interactions during the conference.
I plan to talk about some of the insights related to gameful design and gamification in future posts. Meanwhile, since I have already talked a lot about CHI PLAY 2015 in other blogs, I suggest you also check these two other accounts of the Conference:
We just published “Playful Interactions at CHI PLAY 2015”! https://t.co/DCoDq10m13
— HCI Games Group (@hcigamesgroup) October 27, 2015
ACM CHI PLAY 2015: XRDS insider’s view! http://t.co/PNLpb39R2q pic.twitter.com/ln7qXE65vT — ACM XRDS Magazine (@XRDS_ACM) October 8, 2015
