Amon Rapp

Designing interactive systems through a game lens

This research has the aim to find new meaningful elements, in the video game world, that could inspire the design of novel gamified systems. Starting from the players point of view, I looked at the field of the Massively Multi Player Online Role-Playing Games as a source of inspiration, conducting an ethnographic study in World of Warcraft. Thus, drawing on the findings gathered in my empirical work, I identified 9 recommendations to suggest new directions for the gamification design of interactive systems. Some of these recommendations are devised to suit the applications that pivot on user social participation. Others are aimed at imagining new forms of online communities. Others address those interactive systems that aim at changing user behaviors. These recommendations, by suggesting to support the development of intrinsic motivations, proposing new and diversified game elements and recommending to look at systemic design strategies, aim at addressing the limits of the current gamification techniques. At the high grade of abstraction they are left, they are meant to be applied to different fields. We adopt an ethnographic approach to find new game elements for gamification design.We investigate how players are engaged, motivated and influenced in World of Warcraft.We define a set of 9 guideline to inspire the design of gamified systems.We identify how rewards, social interactions, user representations should be rethought.We suggest how game elements can motivate, engage and address behavior change.

Self-monitoring and Technology: Challenges and Open Issues in Personal Informatics

Personal Informatics (PI), also known as Quantified Self (QS), is a school of thought which aims to use technology for acquiring and collecting data on different aspects of the daily lives of people. These data can be internal states (such as mood or glucose level in the blood) or indicators of performance (such as the kilometers run). Some research was conducted in order to discover the problems related to the usage of PI tools, although none investigated how common users use these tools for tracking their behavior. The goal of this paper is to provide some insights about challenges and open issues regarding the usage of PI tools from the point of view of a common user. To this aim, we provide a theoretical background of personal informatics and a brief review on the previous studies that have investigated the usage pattern of PI tools.

Know Thyself: A Theory of the Self for Personal Informatics

Although Personal Informatics stresses the importance of “self”-awareness and “self”-knowledge in collecting personal data, a description of the “self,” to which all these knowledge endeavors are addressed, is missing in the current debate. In this article we first review how the different theoretical assumptions that currently inform the design of Personal Informatics tools fail to convey a convincing image of the self, which ought to be quantified by these technologies. We then move on to the outline of a theory of the self that may ground the current discourse in Personal Informatics. Building on this theoretical framework, we propose a set of design guidelines as its implications, which may drive the design of future self-tracking technologies. Finally, we outline a research agenda, organized around such guidelines, in the form of research questions to be addressed in the future.

From Games to Gamification: A Classification of Rewards in World of Warcraft for the Design of Gamified Systems

Background. Gamification commonly uses a limited set of design elements to enhance applications and services in a variety of contexts, such as learning, health and work. However, gamification techniques are based on well-established design practices and rarely new game elements are added to the catalogue available to gamification designers. Aim. This article enriches such catalogue by taking inspiration from WORLD OF WARCRAFT (WoW). Specifically, it focuses on WoW’s rewards to show how games are capable of creating complex and diversified design elements that may have different impacts on players. Method. Through an ethnographic study, this article defines a classification of WoW’s rewards based on the values that players ascribe to them, as well as on the effects that such incentives produce on players’ experience. Results. Starting from these findings, the article describes a series of design considerations for using rewards in different application fields, such as learning and behavior change. Conclusions. The considerations can be usefully applied to the gamification domain, as well as to the design of games with serious purposes.

Interacting with social networks of intelligent things and people in the world of gastronomy

This article introduces a framework for creating rich augmented environments based on a social web of intelligent things and people. We target outdoor environments, aiming to transform a region into a smart environment that can share its cultural heritage with people, promoting itself and its special qualities. Using the applications developed in the framework, people can interact with things, listen to the stories that these things tell them, and make their own contributions. The things are intelligent in the sense that they aggregate information provided by users and behave in a socially active way. They can autonomously establish social relationships on the basis of their properties and their interaction with users. Hence when a user gets in touch with a thing, she is also introduced to its social network consisting of other things and of users; she can navigate this network to discover and explore the world around the thing itself. Thus the system supports serendipitous navigation in a network of things and people that evolves according to the behavior of users. An innovative interaction model was defined that allows users to interact with objects in a natural, playful way using smartphones without the need for a specially created infrastructure. The framework was instantiated into a suite of applications called WantEat, in which objects from the domain of tourism and gastronomy (such as cheese wheels or bottles of wine) are taken as testimonials of the cultural roots of a region. WantEat includes an application that allows the definition and registration of things, a mobile application that allows users to interact with things, and an application that supports stakeholders in getting feedback about the things that they have registered in the system. WantEat was developed and tested in a real-world context which involved a region and gastronomy-related items from it (such as products, shops, restaurants, and recipes), through an early evaluation with stakeholders and a final evaluation with hundreds of users.

Using game mechanics for field evaluation of prototype social applications: a novel methodology

This paper describes a novel methodology to evaluate a social media application in its formative phase of design. Taking advantage of the experiences developed in the Alternate Reality Games, we propose to insert game mechanics in the test setting of a formative evaluation of a prototypical social system. As a use case, we present the evaluation of WantEat, a prototypical social mobile application in the gastronomical domain. The evaluation highlighted how the gamification of a field trial can yield good results when evaluating social applications in prototypical status. From a methodological point of view, gamifying a field trial overcomes the cold start problem, caused by the absence of active communities, which can prevent the participation of users and therefore the collection of reliable data. Our experience showed that the gamification of a field evaluation is feasible and can likely increase the quantity of both browsing actions and social actions performed by users. Based on these results, we then are able to provide a set of guidelines to gamify the evaluation session of an interactive system.

Narrating the quantified self

Quantified Self aims at providing people with self-awareness and self-knowledge through the collection of personal data. However, the modalities through which these information are presented often prevent individuals to gain useful insights. Numbers and graphs, in fact, are not suitable for all users. In this work, we suggest that storytelling can provide effective ways to present personal data to users. Looking at narrations and how they are told, Quantified Self tools can satisfy also the needs of those that have less experience in managing quantitative information.

New frontiers of quantified self: finding new ways for engaging users in collecting and using personal data

In spite of the fast growth in the market of devices and applications that allow people to collect personal information, Quantified Self (QS) tools still present a variety of issues when they are used in everyday lives of common people. In this workshop we aim at exploring new ways for designing QS systems, by gathering different researchers in a unique place for imagining how the tracking, management, interpretation and visualization of personal data could be addressed in the future.

The art of video MashUp: supporting creative users with an innovative and smart application

In this paper, we describe the development of a new and innovative tool of video mashup. This application is an easy to use tool of video editing integrated in a cross-media platform; it works taking the information from a repository of videos and puts into action a process of semi-automatic editing supporting users in the production of video mashup. Doing so it gives vent to their creative side without them being forced to learn how to use a complicated and unlikely new technology. The users will be further helped in building their own editing by the intelligent system working behind the tool: it combines semantic annotation (tags and comments by users), low level features (gradient of color, texture and movements) and high level features (general data distinguishing a movie: actors, director, year of production, etc.) to furnish a pre-elaborated editing users can modify in a very simple way.

Where Have You Ended Up Today? Dynamic TV and the Inter-tainment Paradigm

Traditional TV was based on a time-dependent and passive paradigm of use: the availability of audiovisual contents was pre-defined by a rigid scheduling, and users role was to choose among limited alternatives. A potential for active TV experience is now available: users should be allowed to access contents that fit their attitudes at any time, while being encouraged to discover new domains of interest. This paper outlines the basic elements of the new Inter-tainment paradigm, which builds on an active role of the user and on attitude-centred fruition. Successful applications of the new paradigm require flexible and reconfigurable structures of navigation: the development stages of an Inter-tainment system are reported here.