Inger Ekman

Social Interaction in Games: Measuring Physiological Linkage and Social Presence

Psychophysiological methodology has been successfully applied to investigate media responses, including the experience of playing digital games. The approach has many benefits for a player experience assessment—it can provide detailed, unbiased, and time-accurate data without interrupting the gameplay. However, gaming can be a highly social activity. This article extends the methodological focus from single player to include multiple simultaneous players. A physiological metric for investigating social experience within a shared gaming context is introduced: Physiological linkage is measured by gathering simultaneous psychophysiological measurements from several players. The authors review how physiological linkage may be associated with social presence among participants in various gaming situations or social contexts. These metrics provide such information about the interaction among participants that is not currently available by any other method. The authors discuss various measures used to calculate linkage, the related social processes, and how to use physiological linkage in game experience research.Psychophysiological methodology has been successfully applied to investigate media responses, including the experience of playing digital games. The approach has many benefits for a player experien...

Designing sound for a pervasive mobile game

We examine the role of sound design in pervasive mobile games. As a case study, we present the sound design and evaluation of a working prototype game called The Songs of North. A play-test with 19 players was conducted over a two-week period. The results imply that using sound information can facilitate physical movement as a main game mechanic. However, using sound to convey information is still an unfamiliar game mechanic to many sighted players. The research highlights the importance of social playability in the sound design of mobile games. Also, some insights on the role of sound in producing immersive gaming experiences are discussed.

What should it do?: key isssues in navigation interface design for small screen devices

One important application area for location-aware mobile devices is offering navigational support. This paper summarizes the results of preliminary user tests with different navigation interfaces designed for small screens. We focus on the effectiveness vs. likeability of the interface and explore how these two aspects can be combined to support the navigational task of the user. Our research shows, that offering rich contextual information can support the navigational task by providing the user with a feeling of familiarity and perceived credibility. At the same time it can be a source of distraction, and cause misinterpretations. We propose the use of a rotating route-model to provide the user with a navigational guidance system both effective and likeable.

Integrating a game with a story—lessons from interactive television concept design

Abstract This paper is a summary of the concept work on interactive stories done within the Future Interaction Television at the Hypermedia Laboratory, University of Tampere. One of the largest questions we dealt with in relation to the design of program content for interactive television was how to provide interesting interactive content for future television viewers. Television as a medium has established traditions for how it is used. These are not likely to change drastically overnight. Because of this, the context of viewing has to be considered when developing new concepts. Interactive television systems are still under development and standards are still pending. Although the aim of our research has been to consider interactivity from the viewers’ and the content production communitys perspective, work on this topic also provides insights into what kinds of iTV broadcasting techniques will be needed in the future. Most importantly, our work here shows an interactive television show concept that can be used already, with television broadcasting as it is done today, only using the Internet as the return channel. As households move into the digital era and the television sets become technically interactive (e.g. come with a built-in return channel), the interactive part can be shifted over from the Internet to be used via the television sets. In this paper we propose a solution that combines a game with a traditional story, which in our example prototype is a simulated television series. Our concept relies on the game having effects on the series and vice versa, but solves many of the familiar problems of interactive stories, as the parts still stay separate. Consequently, the concept gives viewers greater freedom of choice; in our concept one can choose to only watch the series or only play the game. However, the strength of the concept is that doing both adds something special to the experience of both watching and playing. We implemented this kind of concept as a prototype called Footprints of Power. The concept was tested and the test results indicate that interactive stories following this approach could enhance the experience of both playing and watching.

Experience Assessment and Design in the Analysis of Gameplay

We report research on player modeling using psychophysiology and machine learning, conducted through interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers of computer science, psychology, and game design at Aalto University, Helsinki. First, we propose the Play Patterns And eXperience (PPAX) framework to connect three levels of game experience that previously had remained largely unconnected: game design patterns, the interplay of game context with player personality or tendencies, and state-of-the-art measures of experience (both subjective and non-subjective). Second, we describe our methodology for using machine learning to categorize game events to reveal corresponding patterns, culminating in an example experiment. We discuss the relation between automatically detected event clusters and game design patterns, and provide indications on how to incorporate personality profiles of players in the analysis. This novel interdisciplinary collaboration combines basic psychophysiology research with game design patterns and machine learning, and generates new knowledge about the interplay between game experience and design.

Speech transcription and spoken document retrieval in finnish

This paper presents a baseline spoken document retrieval system in Finnish that is based on unlimited vocabulary continuous speech recognition. Due to its agglutinative structure, Finnish speech can not be adequately transcribed using the standard large vocabulary continuous speech recognition approaches. The definition of a sufficient lexicon and the training of the statistical language models are difficult, because the words appear transformed by many inflections and compounds. In this work we apply the recently developed language model that enables n-gram models of morpheme-like subword units discovered in an unsupervised manner. In addition to word-based indexing, we also propose an indexing based on the subword units provided directly by our speech recognizer, and a combination of the both. In an initial evaluation of newsreading in Finnish, we obtained a fairly low recognition error rate and average document retrieval precisions close to what can be obtained from human reference transcripts.