Attempts to improve our understanding and application of game design principles has seen a rise in the creation of "frameworks" for use in industry and academic study over time. A number of frameworks have come into popular practice and while there exists a "common sense" understanding of what a framework in game design might be, there are limited attempts to formally add to their definition through discourse. This paper seeks to address problems that may have led to this gap in our knowledge about frameworks. We also outline a selection of frameworks that we believe to be of use for developers, and present the questions that arose from early attempts to define and compare these frameworks. To the best of our knowledge, there are no other papers that attempt to address these basic concerns regarding frameworks in game design, and only two other surveys of some of the various frameworks available. Through our discussion and conclusion, we propose that further research should be done in the interests of finding an appropriate measure for comparing frameworks, as well as suggest potential methodologies to use. We stress the value of a process of discussion regarding frameworks, over the output of a strict definition. It is our hope that readers will find this paper a thought-provoking and useful resource for their own research and practice.

The use of implicit relevance feedback from neurophysiology could deliver effortless information retrieval. However, both computing neurophysiologic responses and retrieving documents are characterized by uncertainty because of noisy signals and incomplete or inconsistent representations of the data. We present the first-of-its-kind, fully integrated information retrieval system that makes use of online implicit relevance feedback generated from brain activity as measured through electroencephalography (EEG), and eye movements. The findings of the evaluation experiment (N = 16) show that we are able to compute online neurophysiology-based relevance feedback with performance significantly better than chance in complex data domains and realistic search tasks. We contribute by demonstrating how to integrate in interactive intent modeling this inherently noisy implicit relevance feedback combined with scarce explicit feedback. Although experimental measures of task performance did not allow us to demonstrate how the classification outcomes translated into search task performance, the experiment proved that our approach is able to generate relevance feedback from brain signals and eye movements in a realistic scenario, thus providing promising implications for future work in neuroadaptive information retrieval (IR).

Advanced interactive visualization such as in virtual environments and ubiquitous interaction paradigms pose new challenges and opportunities in considering real-time responses to subliminal cues. In this paper, we propose a synthetic reality platform that, combined with psychophysiological recordings, enables us to study in realtime the effects of various subliminal cues. We endeavor to integrate various aspects known to be relevant to implicit perception. The context is of consumer experience and choice of an artifact where the generation of subliminal perception through an intelligent 3D interface controls the spatio-temporal aspects of the information displayed and of the emergent narrative. One novel contribution of this work is the programmable nature of the interface that exploits known perceptive phenomena (e.g. masking, crowding and change blindness) to generate subliminal perception.

Previous attempts at developing immersive versions of game engines have faced difficulties in achieving both overall high performance and preserving reusability of software developments. In this paper, we present a high-level VR middleware based on one of the most successful commercial game engines: the Unreal® Engine 3.0 (UE3). We describe a VR framework implemented as an extension to the Unreal® Development Kit (UDK) supporting CAVE"-like installations. Our approach relies on a distributed architecture reinforced by specific replication patterns to synchronize the user's point of view and interactions within a multi-screen installation. Our performance benchmarks indicated that our immersive port does not affect the game engine performance, even with complex real-time applications, such as fast-paced multiplayer First Person Shooter (FPS) games or high-resolution graphical environments with 2M+ polygons. A user study also demonstrated the capacity of our VR middleware to elicit high spatial presence while maintaining low cybersickness effects. With free distribution, we believe such a platform can support future Entertainment and VR research.

This paper describes an experiment comparinng immersive and non-immersive gaming using a state-of-the-art first person shooter game (FPS) in which we analyse user experience and performance through a combination of in-game metrics, questionaires and subjective reports. Our results show an overwhelming subjective preference for the immersive version despite a decrease in performance attributed to a more realistic aimming mechanism. Interaction metrics suggest that users took full advantage of the immmersive context rather than simply transposing their desktop gaming skills.

Theory and research presented in a special issue of Interacting with Computers (Vol. 14) on affective-computing is concerned with the way in which computer interfaces could be better designed to meet emotional needs. This commentary on the special issue suggests that traditional media, such as film and television, may also meet some emotional needs and further proposes that the concept of presence (the subjective sense of ‘being there’ in a mediated environment) has some explanatory power when considering emotional responses to media. In particular, it is argued that advanced broadcast systems (e.g. interactive and immersive television) may provide increased opportunities for affective-computing and experiences of presence in the home. Applications of research in both fields could be used to improve and extend the use of advanced broadcast systems and other media in that techniques used to enhance presence and improve human–computer interactions may be used to address emotional needs in novel ways using familiar media.