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Recent technological advances are enabling HCI researchers to explore interaction possibilities for remote XR collaboration using high-fidelity reconstructions of physical activity spaces. However, creating these reconstructions often lacks user involvement with an overt focus on capturing sensory context that does not necessarily augment an informal social experience. This work seeks to understand social context that can be important for reconstruction to enable XR applications for informal instructional scenarios. Our study involved the evaluation of an XR remote guidance prototype by 8 intergenerational groups of closely related gardeners using reconstructions of personally meaningful spaces in their gardens. Our findings contextualize physical objects and areas with various motivations related to gardening and detail perceptions of XR that might affect the use of reconstructions for remote interaction. We discuss implications for user involvement to create reconstructions that better translate real-world experience, encourage reflection, incorporate privacy considerations, and preserve shared experiences with XR as a medium for informal intergenerational activities., Comment: 26 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables

There has been a growing interest in HCI to understand the specific technological needs of people with dementia and supporting them in self-managing daily activities. One of the most difficult challenges to address is supporting the fluctuating accessibility needs of people with dementia, which vary with the specific type of dementia and the progression of the condition. Researchers have identified auto-personalized interfaces, and more recently, Artificial Intelligence or AI-driven personalization as a potential solution to making commercial technology accessible in a scalable manner for users with fluctuating ability. However, there is a lack of understanding on the perceptions of people with dementia around AI as an aid to their everyday technology use and its role in their overall self-management systems, which include other non-AI technology, and human assistance. In this paper, we present future directions for the design of AI-based systems to personalize an interface for dementia-related changes in different types of memory, along with expectations for AI interactions with the user with dementia., Comment: 7 pages

Technology based screentime, the time an individual spends engaging with their computer or cell phone, has increased exponentially over the past decade, but perhaps most alarmingly amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Although many software based interventions exist to reduce screentime, users report a variety of issues relating to the timing of the intervention, the strictness of the tool, and its ability to encourage organic, long-term habit formation. We develop guidelines for the design of behaviour intervention software by conducting a survey to investigate three research questions and further inform the mechanisms of computer-related behaviour change applications. RQ1: What do people want to change and why/how? RQ2: What applications do people use or have used, why do they work or not, and what additional support is desired? RQ3: What are helpful/unhelpful computer breaks and why? Our survey had 68 participants and three key findings. First, time management is a primary concern, but emotional and physical side-effects are equally important. Second, site blockers, self-trackers, and timers are commonly used, but they are ineffective as they are easy-to-ignore and not personalized. Third, away-from-computer breaks, especially involving physical activity, are helpful, whereas on-screen breaks are unhelpful, especially when they are long, because they are not refreshing. We recommend personalized and closed-loop computer-usage behaviour change support and especially encouraging off-the-computer screentime breaks., Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, originally published in the proceedings of the Asian CHI Symposium 2021. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 53 to 60

Physical activity plays a major role both in prevention and in the treatment of afflictions linked to a modern sedentary lifestyle and improvements on life expectancy, for example though the application area of physiotherapy. Motion-based games for health (MGH) are being discussed in research and industry for their ability to play a supportive role in health, by offering motivation to engage in treatments, objective insights on status and development, and guidance regarding treatment activities. Difficulty settings in games are typically limited to few discrete tiers. For most serious applications in health, more fine-grained and far-reaching adjustments are required. The need for applying adjustments on complex sets of parameters can be overwhelming for patient-players and even trained professionals. Automatic adaptivity and efficient manual adaptability are thus major concerns for the design and development of MGH. Despite a growing amount of research on specific methods for adaptivity, general considerations on human-computer interaction with adaptable and adaptive MGH are rare. This thesis therefore focuses on establishing and augmenting theory for adaptability and adaptivity in human-computer interaction in the context of MGH. Working with older adults and people with Parkinson's disease as frequent target groups that can benefit from tailored activities, explorations and comparative studies that investigate the design, acceptance, and effectiveness of MGH are presented. The outcomes encourage the application of adaptivity for MGH following iterative human-centred design that considers the respective interests of stakeholders, provided that the users receive adequate information and are empowered to exert control over the automated system when desired or required, and if adaptivity is embedded in such a way that it does not interfere with the users' sense of competence or autonomy., Comment: 200 pages. Dissertation ePrint. Original publication date: 2017 January 24

With the advent of mobile games and the according growing and competitive market, game user research can provide valuable insights and a competitive edge if methods and procedures are employed that match the distinct challenges that mobile devices, games and usage scenarios induce. We present a summary of parameters that frame the research setup and procedure, focusing on the trade-offs between lab and field studies and the related decision whether to pursue large-scale and quantitative or small-scale focused research accompanied by qualitative methods. We then illustrate the implications of these considerations on real world projects along the lines of two evaluations of different input methods for the action-puzzle mobile game Somyeol: a local study with 37 participants and a mixed design of qualitative and quantitative methods, and the strictly quantitative analysis of game-play data from 117,118 users. The findings underline the importance of small-scale evaluations prior to release., Comment: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2013, Workshop Paper, 5 pages

As smartphones become ever more integrated in peoples lives, a burgeoning new area of research has emerged on their well-being effects. We propose that disparate strands of research and apparently contradictory findings can be integrated under three basic hypotheses, positing that smartphones influence well-being by (1) replacing other activities (displacement hypothesis), (2) interfering with concurrent activities (interference hypothesis), and (3) affording access to information and activities that would otherwise be unavailable (complementarity hypothesis). Using this framework, we highlight methodological issues and go beyond net effects to examine how and when phones boost versus hurt well-being. We examine both psychological and contextual mediators and moderators of the effects, thus outlining an agenda for future research.

Tabletop fantasy role-playing games (TFRPGs) have existed in offline and online contexts for many decades, yet are rarely featured in scientific literature. This paper presents a case study where TFRPGs were used to generate and collect data for maps of belief environments using fiction co-created by multiple small groups of online tabletop gamers. The affordances of TFRPGs allowed us to collect repeatable, targeted data in online field conditions. These data not only included terms that allowed us to build our maps, but also to explore nuanced ethical problems from a situated, collaborative perspective., Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, 3 tables

As item trading becomes more popular, users can change their game items or money into real money more easily. At the same time, hackers turn their eyes on stealing other users game items or money because it is much easier to earn money than traditional gold-farming by running game bots. Game companies provide various security measures to block account- theft attempts, but many security measures on the user-side are disregarded by users because of lack of usability. In this study, we propose a server-side account theft detection system base on action sequence analysis to protect game users from malicious hackers. We tested this system in the real Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG). By analyzing users full game play log, our system can find the particular action sequences of hackers with high accuracy. Also, we can trace where the victim accounts stolen money goes., Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures, In Proceedings of the 15th Annual Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames 2017)

This paper presents a design of a non-player character (AI) for promoting balancedness in use of body segments when engaging in full-body motion gaming. In our experiment, we settle a battle between the proposed AI and a player by using FightingICE, a fighting game platform for AI development. A middleware called UKI is used to allow the player to control the game by using body motion instead of the keyboard and mouse. During gameplay, the proposed AI analyze health states of the player; it determines its next action by predicting how each candidate action, recommended by a Monte-Carlo tree search algorithm, will induce the player to move, and how the player's health tends to be affected. Our result demonstrates successful improvement in balancedness in use of body segments on 4 out of 5 subjects., Comment: A revised version of our paper for 2017 AAAI Spring Symposium Series (Well-Being AI: From Machine Learning to Subjective Oriented Computing), San Francisco,USA, Mar. 27-29, 2017. Revised contents, due to our correction of (8), are highlighted in red. Many apologies, but the effectiveness of the proposed method/approach in the paper still holds

Computer games play an important role in our society and motivate people to learn computer science. Since artificial intelligence is integral to most games, they can also be used to teach artificial intelligence. We introduce the Game AI Game Engine (GAIGE), a Python game engine specifically designed to teach about how AI is used in computer games. A progression of seven assignments builds toward a complete, working Multi-User Battle Arena (MOBA) game. We describe the engine, the assignments, and our experiences using it in a class on Game Artificial Intelligence.

We prove that completing an untimed, unbounded track in TrackMania Nations Forever is NP-complete by using a reduction from 3-SAT and showing that a solution can be checked in polynomial time.

We consider the following simple game: We are given a table with ten slots indexed one to ten. In each of the ten rounds of the game, three dice are rolled and the numbers are added. We then put this number into any free slot. For each slot, we multiply the slot index with the number in this slot, and add up the products. The goal of the game is to maximize this score. In more detail, we play the game many times, and try to maximize the sum of scores or, equivalently, the expected score. We present a strategy to optimally play this game with respect to the expected score. We then modify our strategy so that we need only polynomial time and space. Finally, we show that knowing all ten rolls in advance, results in a relatively small increase in score. Although the game has a random component and requires a non-trivial strategy to be solved optimally, this strategy needs only polynomial time and space., Comment: 10 pages

In this paper we show that gossip algorithms may be effectively used to disseminate game events in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Multiplayer Online Games (MOGs). Game events are disseminated through an overlay network. The proposed scheme exploits the typical behavior of players to tune the data dissemination. In fact, it is well known that users playing a MOG typically generate game events at a rate that can be approximated using some (game dependent) probability distribution. Hence, as soon as a given node experiences a reception rate, for messages coming from a given peer, which is lower than expected, it can send a stimulus to the neighbor that usually forwards these messages, asking it to increase its dissemination probability. Three variants of this approach will be studied. According to the first one, upon reception of a stimulus from a neighbor, a peer increases its dissemination probability towards that node irrespectively from the sender. In the second protocol a peer increases only the dissemination probability for a given sender towards all its neighbors. Finally, the third protocol takes into consideration both the sender and the neighbor in order to decide how to increase the dissemination probability. We performed extensive simulations to assess the efficacy of the proposed scheme, and based on the simulation results we compare the different dissemination protocols. The results confirm that adaptive gossip schemes are indeed effective and deserve further investigation., Comment: ICST/CREATE-NET DISIO 2011: 2nd Workshop on DIstributed SImulation and Online gaming. March 21, 2011, Barcelona, Spain

Gameplay research about experiential phenomena is a challenging undertaking, given the variety of experiences that gamers encounter when playing and which currently do not have a formal taxonomy, such as flow, immersion, boredom, and fun. These informal terms require a scientific explanation. Ludologists also acknowledge the need to understand cognition, emotion, and goal- oriented behavior of players from a psychological perspective by establishing rigorous methodologies. This paper builds upon and extends prior work in an area for which we would like to coin the term "affective ludology." The area is concerned with the affective measurement of player-game interaction. The experimental study reported here investigated different traits of gameplay experience using subjective (i.e., questionnaires) and objective (i.e., psychophysiological) measures. Participants played three Half-Life 2 game level design modifications while measures such as electromyography (EMG), electrodermal activity (EDA) were taken and questionnaire responses were collected. A level designed for combat-oriented flow experience demonstrated significant high-arousal positive affect emotions. This method shows that emotional patterns emerge from different level designs, which has great potential for providing real-time emotional profiles of gameplay that may be generated together with self- reported subjective player experience descriptions., Comment: 21 pages

This paper presents a brief review of current game usability models. This leads to the conception of a high-level game development-centered usability model that integrates current usability approaches in game industry and game research., Comment: 2 pages, 1 figure

Assessing gameplay experience for gaze interaction games is a challenging task. For this study, a gaze interaction Half-Life 2 game modification was created that allowed eye tracking control. The mod was deployed during an experiment at Dreamhack 2007, where participants had to play with gaze navigation and afterwards rate their gameplay experience. The results show low tension and negative affects scores on the gameplay experience questionnaire as well as high positive challenge, immersion and flow ratings. The correlation between spatial presence and immersion for gaze interaction was high and yields further investigation. It is concluded that gameplay experience can be correctly assessed with the methodology presented in this paper., Comment: pages 49-54, The 5th Conference on Communication by Gaze Interaction - COGAIN 2009: Gaze Interaction For Those Who Want It Most, ISBN: 978-87-643-0475-6

In this paper, we report a case study using two easy-to-deploy psychophysiological measures - electrodermal activity (EDA) and heart rate (HR) - and correlating them with a gameplay experience questionnaire (GEQ) in an attempt to establish this mixed-methods approach for rapid application in a commercial game development context. Results indicate that there is a statistically significant correlation (p < 0.01) between measures of psychophysiological arousal (HR, EDA) and self-reported UX in games (GEQ), with some variation between the EDA and HR measures. Results are consistent across three major commercial First-Person Shooter (FPS) games., Comment: CHI 2010 Workshop: Brain, Body, and Bytes

Computer games are motivating and beneficial in learning different educational skills. Most people use their fingers, hands, and arms when using a computer game. However, for people with motor disabilities this task can be a barrier. We present a new Sudoku game for people whose motion is impaired, called Sudoku 4ALL. With this special interface a person can control the game with the voice or with a single switch. Our research aims to cautiously search for issues that might be appropriate for computational support and to build enabling technologies that increase individuals' functional independence in a game environment., Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures

In the popular computer game of Tetris, the player is given a sequence of tetromino pieces and must pack them into a rectangular gameboard initially occupied by a given configuration of filled squares; any completely filled row of the gameboard is cleared and all pieces above it drop by one row. We prove that in the offline version of Tetris, it is NP-complete to maximize the number of cleared rows, maximize the number of tetrises (quadruples of rows simultaneously filled and cleared), minimize the maximum height of an occupied square, or maximize the number of pieces placed before the game ends. We furthermore show the extreme inapproximability of the first and last of these objectives to within a factor of p^(1-epsilon), when given a sequence of p pieces, and the inapproximability of the third objective to within a factor of (2 - epsilon), for any epsilon>0. Our results hold under several variations on the rules of Tetris, including different models of rotation, limitations on player agility, and restricted piece sets., Comment: 56 pages, 11 figures