A. Imran Nordin

The influence of controllers on immersion in mobile games

The controls for digital games understandably have an important part in building up the gaming experiences that people have. Whilst there is substantial work on innovative controllers for consoles, like the XBox Kinect, relatively little has been done to understand the effect of the different control mechanisms that can be used to play games on mobile devices like smartphones. A well-defined framework of naturalness has emerged as potentially useful concept in area of game controllers. This paper reports two experiments that look at how the naturalness of the game controls influences the experience of immersion in mobile games. It seems that where there is an a prior natural mapping, this will improve immersion in the game but in the absence of a prior mapping, naturalness alone is not sufficient to account for immersion. This opens up the need for a more thorough investigation of this area.

Attention, time perception and immersion in games

Immersion is a phenomenon experienced whilst playing digital games. Some argue that it is linked to time perception, where gamers claim that they are losing track of time while they are immersed in the game. In this work in progress, we describe an attempt to investigate the relationship between immersion and time perception. We manipulated attention because it is known to influence immersion and time perception differently. The results suggest that the experimental manipulation only affects time perception but not immersion. We therefore argue that there is a dissociation between immersion and time perception but further work is needed to investigate this in detail.

Familiarity in Team-Based Online Games: The Interplay Between Player Familiarity and the Concepts of Social Presence, Team Trust, and Performance

Team-based gaming is now among the most popular forms of gaming, with games like League of Legends and Dota 2 attracting millions of players around the world. It is generally held that playing digital games with friends offers a different gaming experience to strangers. However the interplay between familiarity and social presence, a core experience in shared virtual environments, has yet to be thoroughly explored. This paper presents the results of a user experience survey of 821 gamers, which aimed to explore the interplay between familiarity and social presence. The results showed an interplay between familiarity and the social presence players felt with their team-mates, however this interplay varied across the various games in this study.

Understanding Hospitalized Pediatric Cancer Patients’ Activities for Digital Games Design Requirements

This research aims to understand activities performed by pediatric cancer patients at the pediatric oncology ward. The focus of this study is to identify activities performed by patients during their stay in the hospital. 10 parents/guardians of the patients were interviewed to collect the information and description of activities performed by patients under their care. A thematic analysis was conducted to analyze all collected and transcribed interviews. The result shows that pediatric cancer patients express either positive or negative feeling. This feeling is based on their actions in the ward. The consequences from this are alarming: pediatric cancer patients are in high stress and depressed which would not be good for their health. The understanding of their activities in the ward can be transformed into design requirements for designing patient support games. Moreover, designers and developers of games can refer to this finding to compare their current existing games for cancer patients to the actual of the activities performed by the patients.

The Effect of Time Manipulation on Immersion in Digital Games

Many empirical studies look into identifying factors that influence the quality of experience in video games. In this paper, we present research into the effect of playing time and players’ perception of the time on their immersion in the game. We invited 20 participants to play a puzzle game Bejeweled 2 for 7 min. They played the game in two conditions, namely, correct time (timer was programmed to be exactly 7 min) and wrong time (the countdown was set to be for 6 min, but was presented as a 7 min timer to the player). Players’ immersion scores were measured after the game using the IEQ. The results show no significant difference in immersion scores between the two conditions and participants’ comments also revealed that they perceived no difference in playing time between the conditions. This suggests that there is a dissociation between gaming time and subjective experience of gaming. Further research is required to investigate the relationship between playing time and positive gaming experiences.

Using Data Mining Strategy in Qualitative Research

Analyzing qualitative data can be tedious if it is done manually. There are several techniques available to conduct qualitative research such as thematic analysis, grounded theory and content analysis amongst other techniques. The data collected from these techniques are usually huge in amount. Little has been done to apply data mining strategy to analyzes data gathered using qualitative methodology. In this paper, we present a work done to apply text mining technique to analyzes data gathered from interviews – unstructured data. The aim of this study is to develop patterns of pediatric cancer patient’s activities in the ward. The result shows a pattern that suggests patients are mostly playing video games while receiving treatment and when they feel bored in the ward. This proposes that data mining techniques can be used to provide an initial insight of the information gathered qualitatively.

Optimization in heave buoy energy convertors using SOM clustering and simulation with an auxiliary mass

The design of wave energy converter (WEC) is crucial in order to generate the optimum power required to safely and reliably benefit from the available wave energy resource to produce electricity. The effects of the added mass on the idealized power take-off wave energy absorber in irregular waves are examined using a linear frequency domain method. Two strategies in this study are to maximize the converter power based on measuring the incident wave using the SOM clustering, and adding the auxiliary mass to the system. The objective of this study is to investigate the response of the added mass on heave buoy to optimize the annual power output without over the limit of the devices. The result shows that the heave buoy with added mass improves its ability to work in realistic wave conditions. The results also suggested the importance of tuning the system with wave data probabilistic to avoid the potential failures and to capture the maximum wave energy on the specific site.