Video games are an important area of entertainment in popular culture and therefore it is a matter of social inclusion that they are designed to be accessible for people with disabilities. While there is a large body of research and guidelines that identify design solutions to accessibility issues, we still see many mainstream games missing important accessibility features; just a relatively small portion of the literature considers the experiences of game developers. By interviewing game developers at a single large-scale studio, the present research illuminates the accessibility challenges faced by developers within a realistic organisational context. Using a reflexive thematic analysis approach, we identify various key areas where accessibility challenges might arise at an organisational level, as well as how developers feel these challenges might be resolved. This research has significant implications for game developers looking to implement processes to facilitate accessible game development, and we provide recommendations relating to areas including responsibility, prioritization, feedback and goal clarity.

Low mood and depression are one of the most prevalent mental health problems [2]. Video games are cheap, accessible and show promise in improving people's mental and emotional wellbeing. The amount of research focusing on gaming and wellbeing has increased over the last couple of years, but there is a distinct lack of research focusing on player preferences, attitudes and what factors they identify as helpful or harmful. This qualitative study used a semi-structured interview format to ask 18 participants with persistent low mood about what they liked to play, what aspects of games they found appealing and how they felt about their gameplay in order to better understand the interactions gaming can have with a low mood population. Through reflexive thematic analysis, 5 themes were found: 1) Finding consolation in predictable experiences, 2) Finding a focus in engaging games, 3) Gaining a sense of success, 4) Valuing games and what they can offer and 5) Exacerbating the negative aspects of gaming. These themes are discussed in terms of the current literature, as well as potential future directions and applications of this work.

There are many questionnaires to assess player motivation, originating from a diverse range of disciplines. Each discipline differs in their usage and reporting of questionnaires, but there has been no attempt to standardise their application. No standard approach leads to a lack of transparency in usage reporting, which affects the ability of the field to synthesise. This has made it unclear whether player motivation research is a unified community, or a collection of individuals with a similar goal. Therefore, the current work assesses the transparency of reporting practices of player motivation questionnaires published within the last 15 years. 18 questionnaires were identified via a scoping review, then papers citing these questionnaires were analysed for their transparency of reporting practices (n=238); first via a content analysis of justifications for use, then followed by an analysis of transparency against eight criteria created for this work. Overall, reporting transparency is lacking, driven by little priority for presenting items alongside text. Many papers use questionnaires because they are theory-based or have measured specific variables in previous works, but explicit justification is rare. The work concludes with a transparency checklist based on the eight criteria used, which authors can use to standardise the field and allow for more cohesive research synthesis.

Digital games are well known for holding players’ attention and stopping them from being distracted by events around them. Being able to quantify how well games hold attention provides a behavioral foundation for measures of game engagement and a link to existing research on attention. We developed a new behavioral measure of how well games hold attention, based on players’ post-game recognition of irrelevant distractors which are shown around the game. This is known as the Distractor Recognition Paradigm (DRP). In two studies we show that the DRP is an effective measure of how well self-paced games hold attention. We show that even simple self-paced games can hold players’ attention completely and the consistency of attentional focus is moderated by game engagement. We compare the DRP to existing measures of both attention and engagement and consider how practical it is as a measure of game engagement. We find no evidence that eye tracking is a superior measure of attention to distractor recognition. We discuss existing research on attention and consider implications for areas such as motivation to play and serious games.

Reflection is an important precursor to attitude and behavior change, but existing advice on designing for reflection in games is mixed and requires further empirical investigation. We report on the design and evaluation (n=32) of a game to prompt student reflection on work-life balance. Participants played as themselves or a third person character (Alex). An inductive qualitative analysis of post-play interviews, and a follow-up one week later, resulted in four themes relating to how gameplay facilitated reflection: making (sensible) consequences visible; it's like MY life; the space between Alex and I; and triggers in everyday life. A deductive qualitative analysis also indicated that while both games resulted in different forms of reflection for the majority of players, those who role-played as Alex appeared more likely to experience higher levels of reflection. Through exploring the ways in which the two versions of the game succeeded, and failed, to support reflection, we highlight the importance of providing a relevant context to players (so the game feels close to their experience), and allowing them to role-play as someone other than themselves (but not too close).

Digital games represent a prominent element of popular culture, with the ability to play as well as participate in video game discourse being a matter of inclusion and equality. However, many digital games are inaccessible for players with disabilities. Only a small amount of literature has sought to understand the difficulties developers experience when making an accessible game. This literature indicates that developers experience numerous difficulties making accessible games, yet underlying causes of these difficulties are not well understood. The present research uses interviews and a grounded theory approach to illuminate the experiences that developers encounter when trying to make accessible games. We identify several difficulties that the game developers experience and describe how these difficulties are affected by knowledge and motivations of the individual developer, organisational attributes of the work environment, and the use of external resources such as drawing upon the experiences of players with disabilities.

Abstract The profile of accessible design of digital games has increased rapidly in both research and practice. Whereas at one time accessibility was a niche area of interest, it is now a key feature promoted in commercial gaming. Typically, games achieve accessibility by offering a range of options, both in settings and gameplay, that players can customize to meet their individual needs and preferences. However, there is a distinct lack of systematic data regarding the accessibility options that players prefer, how options can be prioritized in design or how options can impact player experience. This paper presents a study that collects data about options preferred by players and uses it to expand and validate a design vocabulary for accessible design in games. Further, the results point to a need to prioritize particular types of options, specifically those relating to the player-feedback loop of games, before implementing options that modify the challenges encountered by players.

Uncertainty has previously been identified as an important ingredient of engaging games. Design in games can create different levels of uncertainty in players that they can recognize and describe as being either attributable to external forces, such as chance or hidden information, or internal to their own understanding of what to do in relation to their own goals. While it appears that uncertainty can contribute both positive and negative play experiences, there is little work in trying to operationalize and measure this concept as a component of player experience. Reported in this article is an analysis of data from over 700 players using modern bi-factor analysis techniques resulting in a five factor psychometric scale which captures the broad feelings of players about uncertainty in games. Three of these specific factors appear to point toward a single generic factor of uncertainty that is internal to the players, one captures experiences relating to external uncertainty, with the final factor relating to player’s experience of exploring the game to resolve uncertainty. In order to further validate the scale, we conducted an experiment with a commercial puzzle game manipulating the duration of play with predicted outcomes on the different specific factors of the scale. Overall the scale shows promise with good statistical reliability and construct validity of the separate factors and so will be a useful tool for further investigating player experiences in digital games.

Abstract In research and practice into the accessibility of digital games, much of the work has focused on how to make games accessible to people with disabilities. With an increasing number of people with disabilities playing mainstream commercial games, it is important that we understand who they are and how they play in order to take a more user-centered approach as this field grows. We conducted a demographic survey of 154 players with disabilities and found that they play mainstream digital games using a variety of assistive technologies, use accessibility options such as key remapping and subtitles, and they identify themselves as gamers who play digital games as their primary hobby. This gives us a richer picture of players with disabilities and indicates that there are opportunities to begin to look at the accessible player experiences (APX) players have in games.

User engagement (UE) and its measurement have been of increasing interest in human-computer interaction (HCI). The User Engagement Scale (UES) is one tool developed to measure UE, and has been used in a variety of digital domains. The original UES consisted of 31-items and purported to measure six dimensions of engagement: aesthetic appeal, focused attention, novelty, perceived usability, felt involvement, and endurability. A recent synthesis of the literature questioned the original six-factors. Further, the ways in which the UES has been implemented in studies suggests there may be a need for a briefer version of the questionnaire and more effective documentation to guide its use and analysis. This research investigated and verified a four-factor structure of the UES and proposed a Short Form (SF). We employed contemporary statistical tools that were unavailable during the UES’ development to re-analyze the original data, consisting of 427 and 779 valid responses across two studies, and examined new data ( N =344) gathered as part of a three-year digital library project. In this paper we detail our analyses, present a revised long and short form (SF) version of the UES, and offer guidance for researchers interested in adopting the UES and UES-SF in their own studies.

Archaeologists are currently producing huge numbers of digitized photographs to record and preserve artefact finds. These images are used to identify and categorize artefacts and reason about connections between artefacts and perform outreach to the public. However, finding specific types of images within collections remains a major challenge. Often, the metadata associated with images is sparse or is inconsistent. This makes keyword-based exploratory search difficult, leaving researchers to rely on serendipity and slowing down the research process. We present an image-based retrieval system that addresses this problem for biface artefacts. In order to identify artefact characteristics that need to be captured by image features, we conducted a contextual inquiry study with experts in bifaces. We then devised several descriptors for matching images of bifaces with similar artefacts. We evaluated the performance of these descriptors using measures that specifically look at the differences between the sets of images returned by the search system using different descriptors. Through this nuanced approach, we have provided a comprehensive analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the different descriptors and identified implications for design in the search systems for archaeology.

Safety critical number-entry tasks, such as programming syringe pumps, are common occurrences in healthcare settings. However, humans are prone to error and healthcare staff must often work in distracting and high stress environments. Previous work has developed a potential intervention that could reduce errors using a phenomenon called the Perceptual Interference Effect (PIE). In this paper, the numbers to be entered are presented in a hard-to-read form and experimental studies showed that this reduced the errors that people made. The aim of this paper is to investigate the robustness of this effect in the context of a distracting environment and therefore to begin to move towards investigating its efficacy in real-world settings. We report on an experiment, which uses auditory distractors alongside the PIE effect to investigate the effect on number-entry errors. The results are promising: the number of errors is significantly reduced by PIE and the rate of making errors is reduced though significance is marginal. Nonetheless, the results are suggestive that the PIE could work even in distracting circumstances though the isolation of this phenomenon in experimental studies is challenging. We explore the implications for future studies into this effect for eventual application in real-world contexts.

Number entry is a mundane and error-prone task. To find errors, users often rely on visual checks to compare the differences between their instructions and the numbers they have actually input, a task that is difficult for users to do accurately. We therefore propose the use of number-based graphical representations (GRs) as a complement to conventional numeric representations (NR) to enhance visual checks, so users can examine both GRs and NRs to detect errors. We conducted two experiments to explore the issues raised. Experiment 1 examined the effects of GRs and NRs on representation difference detection (i.e. checking if two GRs or NRs are identical). The two representations had a comparative performance by time and error rate. In Experiment 2, we investigated the performance of GRs and NRs with number entry tasks. While extending the task time (increased by 38%), number entry with GRs resulted in significantly fewer errors than without GRs (decreased by 60%). Participants also had a high preference for number entry with GRs. Therefore, the proposed technique is promising for number entry error reduction, and that in safety critical applications improved safety can be achieved.

Contemporary digital game developers offer a variety of games for the diverse tastes of their customers. Although the gaming experience often depends on one's preferences, the same may not apply to the level of their immersion. It has been argued whether the player perspective can influence the level of player's involvement with the game. The aim of this study was to research whether interacting with a game in first person perspective is more immersive than playing in the third person point of view (POV). The set up to test the theory involved participants playing a role-playing game in either mode, naming their preferred perspective, and subjectively evaluating their immersive experience. The results showed that people were more immersed in the game play when viewing the game world through the eyes of the character, regardless of their preferred perspectives.

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.

Given the proliferation of devices like infusion pumps in hospitals, number entry and in particular number entry error is an emerging important concern in HCI. There are clearly design features that could greatly improve accuracy in entering numbers but the context of the task could also play an important role. In particular, the emotional state of a person is known to strongly influence their response to a difficult situation and hence the errors that they make. In this paper, we consider the impact of the emotional state of the user on the accuracy with which people enter numbers. Our experiment shows that participants who are in a more positive emotional state are more accurate. The effect is small but could be very important when considering the potentially highly-charged emotional contexts where many healthcare devices are used.

Agile development processes and User Centred Design (UCD) integration have been gaining increased interest, in part due to the complementarity of the techniques, the benefits each can apply to the other, and the challenges associated with their combination. This paper describes a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) that was conducted on Agile and UCD integration. The aim of this SLR was to identify various challenging factors that restrict Agile and User Centred Design Integration (AUCDI) and explore the proposed practices to deal with them. The study included a total of 71 papers and excluded 80 papers published from the year 2000 till 2012. AUCDI challenges and their respective proposed practices and success factors were synthesized. A description and taxonomy of AUCDI challenges and its respective success factors and practices were reported. Practitioners can utilise the results in identifying potential AUCDI challenges and practices or success factors to deal with them.

Usability is an important aspect of any interactive system, but only one aspect leading to its success. Thus, when evaluating a system, it is useful to have short questionnaires that can lead to reliable, sensitive and valid measures of usability. In this commentary, I discuss two papers that aim to develop two such measures: one is for a four-item usability metric and the other a single-item usability. Whilst care is taken in both cases to produce suitable metrics, the processes have flaws that influence the value of these metrics. The underlying problem seems to lie with the application of psychometric methods when there are better methods available in this context. Even allowing for this, in the end there remains the problem of construct validity that undermines any such efforts.

Previous research into the experience of videogames has shown the importance of the role of challenge in producing a good experience. However, defining exactly which challenges are important and which aspects of gaming experience are affected is largely under-explored. In this paper, we investigate if altering the level of challenge in a videogame influences people's experience of immersion. Our first study demonstrates that simply increasing the physical demands of the game by requiring gamers to interact more with the game does not result in increased immersion. In a further two studies, we use time pressure to make games more physically and cognitively challenging. We find that the addition of time pressure increases immersion as predicted. We argue that the level of challenge experienced is an interaction between the level of expertise of the gamer and the cognitive challenge encompassed within the game.

Computational analysis of player style has significant potential for video game design: it can provide insights into player behavior, as well as the means to dynamically adapt a game to each individual's style of play. To realize this potential, computational methods need to go beyond considerations of challenge and ability and account for aesthetic aspects of player style. We describe here a semiautomatic unsupervised learning approach to modeling player style using multiclass linear discriminant analysis (LDA). We argue that this approach is widely applicable for modeling player style in a wide range of games, including commercial applications, and illustrate it with two case studies: the first for a novel arcade game called Snakeotron, and the second for Rogue Trooper, a modern commercial third-person shooter video game.

Haptic feedback has the potential to enhance users’ sense of being engaged and creative in their artwork. Current work on providing haptic feedback in computer-based drawing applications has focused mainly on the realism of the haptic sensation rather than the users’ experience of that sensation in the context of their creative work. We present a study that focuses on user experience of three haptic drawing interfaces. These interfaces were based on two different haptic metaphors, one of which mimicked familiar drawing tools (such as pen, pencil or crayon on smooth or rough paper) and the other of which drew on abstract descriptors of haptic experience (roughness, stickiness, scratchiness and smoothness). It was found that users valued having control over the haptic sensation; that each metaphor was preferred by approximately half of the participants; and that the real world metaphor interface was considered more helpful than the abstract one, whereas the abstract interface was considered to better support creativity. This suggests that future interfaces for artistic work should have user-modifiable interaction styles for controlling the haptic sensation.

This paper introduces an adaptive narrative-based learning environment (AEINS) which supports teaching in the domain of ethics and citizenship [1]. AEINS is an inquiry-based teaching system that adopts educational theories and classroom strategies, such as the Socratic Method. AEINS targets students aged 8 to 11 years. The idea is centered around presenting and involving students in different moral dilemmas (teaching moments), where the Socratic Method is used to lead the student and allows him to examine the validity of an opinion or belief. AEINS monitors and analyzes students' actions in order to provide an individualized story-path and a personalized learning process. We present preliminary evaluation results.

Sites like YouTube offer vast sources of data for studies of human computer interaction. However, they also present a number of methodological challenges. This paper offers an example study of the initial reception of the iPhone 3G through YouTube. It begins with a quantitative account of the overall shape of the most frequently viewed returns for an iPhone 3G" search. A content analysis of the first hundred videos then explores the returns categorized by genre. Comments on the most popular video "Will It Blend"are analysed using grounded theory. It is argued that social science methods are not sufficient for a rich understanding of such material. The paper concludes with an analysis of"Will it Blend"that draws on cultural and critical theory. It is argued that a multi-methodological approach is necessary to exploit such data and also to address the challenges of next generation Human Computer Interaction (HCI).

People within and outside the information visualization community are motivated to create new tools to address their own unique problems of understanding data. However, the techniques which visualizations use to enhance cognition of data are not widely known outside the field. Also, there are currently few resources which comprehensively describe methods for designing novel visualizations. Consequently, people who seek to build new information visualization tools are left to consult design examples, guidelines, and reference models, which do not adequately describe the visualization design process or suggest ways to undertake the process. We identify some of these shortcomings, provide an overview of methodological knowledge in information visualization design to date, and suggest that methods from other design-oriented disciplines can bridge these shortcomings.

Affordance is a widely used term in human–computer interaction (HCI) that, while familiar and attractive, does not have a clear operational definition. Using the mathematical concept of symmetry, this paper shows that it is possible to begin developing an operational definition for significant aspects of affordance by forming the theoretical concept of symmetry-affordance. The proposed definition restricts symmetry-affordance to particular contexts but in doing so makes it more useful, as it is clear how to exploit symmetry to aid design. The definition is in standard mathematics (in fact, group theory and model theory) and requires little additional structure. In examining symmetry-affordance, it becomes clear that some other HCI notions can be similarly interpreted by symmetry. The paper provides examples and design insights. Symmetry, as wide or as narrow as you may define its meaning, is one idea by which man through the ages has tried to comprehend and create order, beauty, and perfection. Hermann Weyl [(1952) Symmetry, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ]

As researchers we are constantly working with academic literature. Literature data is growing exponentially. Interacting with this huge amount of information has been a challenge for the field of HCI for years. The goal is to assist users in making sense of this information by producing usable designs. Information Visualization (InfoVis) augments users' cognition when interacting with complex data structures. Although the use of InfoVis as a tool for representing literature data is not new, we have found that most of the existing Literature Knowledge Domain Visualizations (LKDViz) target specialists known as domain analysts who study publication patterns. Our goal is to design a LKDViz tool for academic users. Due to the diversity of academic literature users we captured their experiences and used it as the main source for our design. Interestingly, this method generated design criteria that have not been applied in most of the academic literature visualizations.

As researchers we are constantly working with our literature domains. Making sense and familiarizing ourselves with such domains is a cumbersome but necessary task that is part of every researcher's career, especially novices. Literature knowledge domain visualizations exist which assist users in extracting and interpreting interesting patterns. However, these visualizations tend to be developed without reference to the particular needs of researchers or without addressing the specific challenges of the literature knowledge domain. This paper therefore targets the needs of researchers as they work with their literature. We conducted a qualitative study to understand how researchers make sense of their literature domains. Such information assisted us in coming up with a set of design considerations and guidelines which we believe will assist in building visualizations that are useful for the general research population

The field of information visualization offers little methodological guidance to practitioners who seek to design novel systems. Though many sources describe the foundations of the domain, few discuss practical methods for solving visualization problems. One frequently cited guideline to design is the "Visual information-seeking mantra", proposed by Shneiderman in 1996. Although often used to inform the design of information visualization systems, it is unclear what use this has been for visualization designers. We reviewed the current literature that references the mantra, noting what authors have found useful about it and why they cite it. The results indicate a need for empirical validation of the mantra and for a method, such as design patterns, to inform a holistic approach to visualisation design.

Computer viruses are a worrying real-world problem, and a challenge to theoretical modelling. In this issue of the Computer Journal, Erkki Mäkinen proposes universal Turing machines in a critique of an earlier paper, ‘A framework for modelling Trojans and computer virus infection’ (Thimbleby, H., Anderson, S. O. and Cairns, P. (1998) Comp. J., 41, 444–458). This short paper is a reply by those authors.

How hard to users to find interactive devices to use to achieve their goals, and how can we get this information early enough to influence design? We show that Markov modeling can obtain suitable measures, and we provide formulas that can be used for a large class of systems. We analyze and consider alternative designs for various real examples. We introduce a “knowledege/usability graph,” which shows the impact of even a smaller amount of knowledge for the user, and the extent to which designers' knowledge may bias their views of usability. Markov models can be built into design tools, and can therefore be made very convenient for designers to utilize. One would hope that in the future, design tools would include such mathematical analysis, and no new design skills would be required to evaluate devices. A particular concern of this paper is to make the approach accessible. Complete program code and all the underlying mathematics are provided in appendices to enable others to replicate and test all results shown.

Java does not contain enumerated types. This paper demonstrates how to produce classes that behave like enumerated types with secure, strong typing. Additional Pascal-like operations are easily incorporated into the enumerated types without repeating code. Full listings of the classes are given. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

It is not possible to view a computer operating in the real world, including the possibility of Trojan horse programs and computer viruses, as simply a finite realisation of a Turing machine. We consider the actions of Trojan horses and viruses in real computer systems and suggest a minimal framework for an adequate formal understanding of the phenomena. Some conventional approaches, including biological metaphors, are shown to be inadequate; some suggestions are made towards constructing virally-resistant systems.