To achieve high performance in esports, players must be able to effectively and efficiently control input devices such as a computer mouse and keyboard (i.e., input skills). Characterizing and quantifying a player’s input skills can provide useful insights, but collecting and analyzing sufficient amounts of data in ecologically valid settings remains a challenge. Targeting the popular esports game, League of Legends, we go beyond the limitations of previous studies and demonstrate a holistic pipeline of input behavior analysis: from quantifying the quality of players’ input behavior (i.e., input skill) to training players based on the analysis. Based on interviews with five top-tier professionals and analysis of input behavior logs from 4,835 matches played freely at home collected from 193 players (including 18 professionals), we confirmed that players with higher ranks in the game implement eight different input skills with higher quality. In a three-week follow-up study using a training aid that visualizes a player’s input skill levels, we found that the analysis provided players with actionable lessons, potentially leading to meaningful changes in their input behavior.

Understanding the experiences of players with disabilities is a key research issue in game accessibility. However, less is known about the values that young players experience from games, particularly in relation to their situational context as adolescents and young adults with disabilities. We explore how the values of accessible gaming are created in players’ lives by analyzing interviews with five players with cerebral palsy (CP) (age range 13–25 years) and their parents through the lens of developmental tasks theory. Using thematic analysis, we discovered three themes that illustrated how video games’ roles changed according to their life stages: “Establishing Healthy Self in Family”, “Navigating Peer Culture”, and “Preparing Adult Life”. Our results indicated that young players with CP made active decisions in their life and developed supportive relationships from playing accessible games. The changes in their desired developmental task and social contexts influenced the values they found in games. We discuss video games as a sociocultural resource that assists young players with CP to attain the developmental tasks they desire and achieve social inclusion. We conclude with design insights for creating more inclusive gameplay experiences for young players with CP.

Bill Yuchen Lin, Seyeon Lee, Xiaoyang Qiao, Xiang Ren. Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2021.

Pre-trained language models (PTLMs) have achieved impressive performance on commonsense inference benchmarks, but their ability to employ commonsense to make robust inferences, which is crucial for effective communications with humans, is debated.In the pursuit of advancing fluid human-AI communication, we propose a new challenge, RICA: Robust Inference using Commonsense Axioms, that evaluates robust commonsense inference despite textual perturbations.To generate data for this challenge, we develop a systematic and scalable procedure using commonsense knowledge bases and probe PTLMs across two different evaluation settings.Extensive experiments on our generated probe sets with more than 10k statements show that PTLMs perform no better than random guessing on the zero-shot setting, are heavily impacted by statistical biases, and are not robust to perturbation attacks.We also find that fine-tuning on similar statements offer limited gains, as PTLMs still fail to generalize to unseen inferences.Our new large-scale benchmark exposes a significant gap between PTLMs and human-level language understanding and offers a new challenge for PTLMs to demonstrate commonsense. 1 Logical TemplateRel(A,B,r) à Comp(Prop(A,p), Prop(B,p))

Recent works show that pre-trained language models (PTLMs), such as BERT, possess certain commonsense and factual knowledge.They suggest that it is promising to use PTLMs as "neural knowledge bases" via predicting masked words.Surprisingly, we find that this may not work for numerical commonsense knowledge (e.g., a bird usually has two legs).In this paper, we investigate whether and to what extent we can induce numerical commonsense knowledge from PTLMs as well as the robustness of this process.To study this, we introduce a novel probing task with a diagnostic dataset, NUMERSENSE 1 , containing 13.6k masked-word-prediction probes (10.5k for fine-tuning and 3.1k for testing).Our analysis reveals that: (1) BERT and its stronger variant RoBERTa perform poorly on the diagnostic dataset prior to any fine-tuning; (2) finetuning with distant supervision brings some improvement; (3) the best supervised model still performs poorly as compared to human performance (54.06% vs 96.3% in accuracy).

This study explores whether a life metaphoric game can effectively facilitate communication between senior participants and young adult partners during a life review activity. Life review provides older adults with opportunities to organize their past experiences, rediscover the meaning of life, and prepare for their future life and eventual death. We held workshops in which 33 senior participants (ages 51-85) co-played a commercial game, titled "Long Journey of Life," paired with young adult partners (ages 19-23). The young partners asked senior participants about their associated memories during the life review activity. Through inductive thematic analysis, we found seven communication themes during the life review activity: reminiscence, future and death preparation, life advice, appreciation and evaluation, small talks involving self-disclosure, interpretation of metaphors, and explanation of game control methods. We investigated the relationships between communication themes and game design elements that promote conversation. In addition, we identified how participants' responses to the game differ depending on the player's characteristics and generation. Game design suggestions for an effective intergenerational life review using digital games were offered.