Stefano Gualeni

Grounded Zoomorphism: An Evaluation Methodology for ACI Design

This paper proposes and evaluates a novel method for the analysis and the refinement of products and designs that participate in playful, digitally-mediated human-animal interactions. The proposed method relies on a Grounded Theory approach and aims at guiding design and research in the field of Animal Computer Interaction in a way that is better focused on the experience and needs of the animals interacting with playful, digital artefacts. In order to validate the proposed techniques, we designed a video game (Felino) in which cats and humans play together on a single tablet. Felino was then tested together with cats (N=19). Guidelines for the refinement of the game itself emerged from the process, and are presented as exemplary outputs of the proposed method at the end of this study.

Becoming with: towards the inclusion of animals as participants in design processes

In this exploratory paper, we advocate for a way to mitigate the anthropocentrism inherent in interaction-design methodologies. We propose to involve animals that live in anthropic environments as participants in design processes. The current relationships between animals and technology have an inevitable impact on their well-being and raise fundamental ethical questions concerning our design policies. Drawing from the work of Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, we argue for a situated approach in which we reflect upon concrete design contexts. We explore the notion of becoming with as a conceptual framework for the intuitive and bodily understanding that takes place between humans and animals when they encounter one-another in shared contexts. Adopting a research through design approach, we further explore this notion by reflecting upon two different participatory design projects with two dogs. We found these reflections to offer valuable perspectives for designers to analyse and discuss their iterative processes.

Improving level design through game user research : a comparison of methodologies

In this article we compare the benefits for game design and development relative to the use of three Game User Research (GUR) methodologies (user interviews, game metrics, and psychophysiology) to assist in shaping levels for a 2-D platformer game. We illustrate how these methodologies help level designers make more informed decisions in an otherwise qualitative design process. GUR data sources were combined in pairs to evaluate their usefulness in small-scale commercial game development scenarios, as commonly used in the casual game industry. Based on the improvements suggested by each data source, three levels of a Super Mario clone were modified and the success of these changes was measured. Based on the results we conclude that user interviews provide the clearest indications for improvement among the considered methodologies while metrics and biometrics add different types of information that cannot be obtained otherwise. These findings can be applied to the development of 2-D games; we discuss how other types of games may differ from this. Finally, we investigate differences in the use of GUR methodologies in a follow-up study for a commercial game with children as players.

Self-transformative effects of designing videogames and the challenge of capturing them quantitatively: a case study

In this work we discuss the self-transformative effects that can be elicited through the practice of videogame design. We focus on the problems and limitations that we encountered in trying to quantitatively capture psychological changes in videogame designers. Our work involved two experiments, each of them observing a group of M.Sc. students in a digital games course working on small, serious videogame projects. In these experiments, we attempted to identify and track transformations that the students themselves underwent while trying to stimulate psychological changes in their players by means of gameplay. The results of our case study suggest that the research setup we designed could not rigorously measure the quantitative kinds of self-transformation we were after. Even so, our work takes some important, initial steps in the direction of understanding and exploring the practice of videogame design as offering novel possibilities and advantages in the contexts of self-transformation.

A Philosophy of “Doing” in the Digital

Playing in counterpoint with the general theoretical orientation of the book, this chapter does not focus its attention on the recording and archiving capabilities of the digital medium. Instead, it proposes an understanding of the digital medium that focuses on its disclosing various forms of “doing.” Gualeni’s chapter begins by offering an understanding of “doing in the digital” that methodologically separates “doing as acting” from “doing as making.” After setting its theoretical framework, the chapter discusses an “interactive thought experiment” designed by the author (titled Something Something Soup Something) that is analyzed as a digital artifact leveraging both dimensions of “doing in the digital” for philosophical purposes. In extreme synthesis, one could say that this chapter is about several kinds of soups.

Virtual Worlds and the Human Condition: Cognitive, Perceptual, Critical, and Operational Limitations

This book has articulated a vision in which digital simulations can be understood as mediators capable of granting human beings access to artificial worlds. This specific affordance offers us, for the first time in history, the possibility of developing human kinds of ontologies in ways that do not exclusively emerge from our relationships with the actual world. Through the mediation of videogames and digital simulations, augmented ontologies can be structured in relation to worlds that are independent from, and often incongruent with, the one human beings share as biological creatures and depend on as organisms. Virtual worlds disclose interactive experiences and phenomenologies that are not simply actually present but effectively extend toward what is virtually possible. In this particular age of anthropological enhancement, humans no longer simply design their lives existentially, but they also do so biologically and experientially.

Augmented Ontologies and a Challenge to Western Philosophy: Videogames and Simulations as Mediators of Human Thought and Experience

The previous chapter discussed the possibility of employing the virtual worlds of computer simulations and videogames to influence human cognition at a basic, structural level. Even when directed toward more practical fields of application, such as ethics and self-discovery, the perspectives on the philosophy of technology offered in Chapter 4 examined the possibilities and effects of digital mediation in very abstract and almost entirely theoretical terms.

Playing with Puzzling Philosophical Problems

The academic context from which the following essay understands mediation (and from which it presents its claims) is commonly referred to as the ‘digital humanities’. By definition, the work of a digital humanist is interdisciplinary, interpretive, experiential and generative (Gold, Debates in the digital humanities. The University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2012). Offering perspectives and ideas that contribute to the shaping of a ‘digital humanism’, the present work necessarily involves a degree of praxis and implicates ‘the creation of new technologies, methodologies, and information systems, as well as in their detournment, reinvention, repurposing […]’.

Worlds in the Age of Digital Simulation

Stemming from a traditional ontological divide, the field of digital media studies still distinguishes the digital experiences accessible via computers into two broad categories: The first is that of telepresence, a family of technologies that affords various degrees of agency and the exchange of information between users and actual environments that are not immediately present for them. The experiences and worlds made possible by teletechnologies and robotics are, therefore, qualified as telepresent. In other words, telepresence technology allows humans to establish aesthetic and interactive relationships with their world in ways that transcend their scale, their spatial location, and, often, their native biological capabilities. The Mars Exploration Rover that was sent to Mars by NASA in 2003 is an extreme example of the experiential extension afforded by telepresence. The rover extends and dislocates the cognitive and interactive capabilities of the NASA scientists both in space (they can observe and analyze chemical samples in a part of the universe that is several million miles away), and in time (the radio signal-based interactions between NASA and the rover have an average time delay of 20 minutes between inputting the controls for action and the perception of the results).

Thinking with Virtual Worlds

In his philosophy-inspired work, Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges often suggested imaginative alternatives to the customary Western understanding and representation of the world. In the short story, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” for example, Borges informed his readers that, in “a certain Chinese encyclopedia” (the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge), the animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.1 (Borges, 2001, 231)