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The 36th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST ’23 Adjunct), October 29–November 01, 2023., Physiological measurement of player experience (PX) during gameplay has been of increasing interest within game research circles. A commonly-used non-invasive wearable device for physiological measurement is the Empatica E4 wristband, which offers multiple physiological metrics, ranging from electrodermal activity to heart rate. That said, the E4’s integration with popular game engines such as Unity 3D presents certain challenges due to non-obvious critical bugs in the library and limited documentation applicability within the Unity context. In this paper, we present an open-source Unity plug-in designed to mitigate the challenges associated with integrating the E4 into Unity projects: E4UnityIntegration-MIT. The plug-in exposes the E4’s API for interfacing with Unity C# scripts, thereby enabling realtime data collection and monitoring. E4UnityIntegration-MIT also provides the affordance of saving the E4 data into an external file for data analysis purposes.

© 2013 Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computational Creativity, ICCC 2013. All rights reserved. We introduce Slant, a system that integrates more than a decade of research into computational creativity, and specifically story generation, by connecting subsystems that deal with plot, figuration, and the narrative discourse using a blackboard. The process of integrating these systems highlights differences in the representation of story and has led to a better understanding of how story can be usefully abstracted. The plot generator MEXICA and a component of Curveship are used with little modification in Slant, while the figuration subsystem Fig-S and the template generator GRIOT-Gen, inspired by GRIOT, are also components. The development of the new subsystem Verso, which deals with genre, shows how different genres can be computationally modeled and applied to in-development stories to generate results that are surprising in terms of their connections and valuable in terms of their relationship to cultural questions. Example stories are discussed, as is the potential of the system to allow for broader collaboration, the empirical testing of how subsystems interrelate, and possible contributions in literary and artistic contexts.

Roleplaying has a history of serving diverse aims, including art, entertainment, therapeutic purposes, and political action (Piper 1973; Gygax 1978; Boal 1993; Matthews et al. 2014). This paper presents an interactive narrative called Grayscale that uses roleplaying to provoke critical reflection through modeling workplace gender discrimination. Grayscale's interface resembles a streamlined email system, constituting what Henry Jenkins has termed an “embedded narrative” since the narration is distributed across elements in the space (e.g. emails, notes, draft messages).

© 2017 IEEE. We conduct a mixed-method study to better understand the content consumption patterns of Middle Eastern social media users and to explore new ways to present online data by using automatic persona generation. First, we analyze millions of content interactions on YouTube to dynamically generate personas describing behavioral patterns of different demographic groups. Second, we analyze interview data on social media users in the Middle Eastern region to generate additional insights into the dynamically generated personas. Our findings provide insights into social media users in the Middle East, as well as present a novel methodology of using computational analysis and qualitative data enrichment to generate descriptive and culturally receptive personas from social media audiences.

Contemporary online learning systems are increasingly common elements of post-secondary, workplace, and lifelong education. These systems typically employ the transmission model of education to teach students, an approach ill-suited for fostering deeper learning. This paper presents our latest findings related to ongoing research developing a generalizable framework for supporting deeper learning in online learning systems. In this work, we focus on the self-debriefing component of our framework and its impact on deeper learning in online learning systems. To pursue this line of inquiry, we conducted an exploratory study evaluating the Chimeria:Grayscale MOOC, an online learning system that implements our framework. Our results suggest that self-debriefing is crucial for effectively supporting students' reflections.

Contemporary online learning systems are increasingly common elements of post-secondary, workplace, and lifelong education. These systems typically employ the transmission model of education to teach students, an approach ill-suited for fostering deeper learning. This paper presents our latest findings related to ongoing research developing a generalizable framework for supporting deeper learning in online learning systems. In this work, we focus on the self-debriefing component of our framework and its impact on deeper learning in online learning systems. To pursue this line of inquiry, we conducted an exploratory study evaluating the Chimeria:Grayscale MOOC, an online learning system that implements our framework. Our results suggest that self-debriefing is crucial for effectively supporting students' reflections.

Roleplaying has a history of serving diverse aims, including art, entertainment, therapeutic purposes, and political action (Piper 1973; Gygax 1978; Boal 1993; Matthews et al. 2014). This paper presents an interactive narrative called Grayscale that uses roleplaying to provoke critical reflection through modeling workplace gender discrimination. Grayscale's interface resembles a streamlined email system, constituting what Henry Jenkins has termed an “embedded narrative” since the narration is distributed across elements in the space (e.g. emails, notes, draft messages).

National Science Foundation (Grant 1064495)

This paper presents an overview of the MazeStar platform for Computer Science education. MazeStar is both a game (Mazzy) that teaches programming concepts like loops and conditionals, and a game editor which allows players to create and share their own game levels. By playing and creating, players are using computing concepts (e.g., block structuring, parallelism, etc.) and computing practices (e.g., debugging, iterative prototyping, etc.). To date the MazeStar platform has been used in controlled user studies involving > 10,000 participants. Here, our goal is to detail the different components of the MazeStar platform, and how we have/are leveraging these components to study the interplay of education, games/game-making, and virtual identity.

The human-computer interaction (HCI) field includes a long-standing community interested in designing systems to enable user reflection. In this work, we present our findings on how interactive narratives and roleplaying can effectively support reflection. To pursue this line of inquiry, we conducted an exploratory, cross-sectional study evaluating an interactive narrative we created, Chimeria:Grayscale. To address issues present in prior HCI studies on the topic of reflection, we grounded our system design methodology and evaluations in theories drawn from clinical psychology and education. The results of our study indicate that Chimeria:Grayscale, the interactive narrative we created by operationalizing our system design methodology, enabled our study participants to critically self-reflect.