1,721,000 research outputs found
Cookie Clicker: Gamification
Full text linkIncremental games like Cookie Clicker are a perfect exemplar of gamification, using progress mechanics and other game features to make the rote act of clicking compelling. Hence, this chapter reads the game Cookie Clicker for its motivating features to illustrate the logic and limits of gamification
Alibis for Adult Play:A Goffmanian Account of Escaping Embarrassment in Adult Play
Full text linkThe social meanings of play sit at odds with norms of responsible and productive adult conduct. To be ‘caught’ playing as an adult therefore risks embarrassment. Still, many designers want to create enjoyable, non-embarrassing play experiences for adults. To address this need, this article reads instances of spontaneous adult play through the lens of Erving Goffman’s theory of the interaction order to unpack conditions and strategies for non-embarrassing adult play. It identifies established frames, segregated audiences, scripts supporting smooth performance, managing audience awareness, role distancing, and particularly, alibis for play: Adults routinely provide alternative, adult-appropriate motives to account for their play, like childcare, professional duties, creative expression, or health. Once legitimized, the norms and rules of play themselves then provide an alibi for behavior that would risk being embarrassingly inappropriate or exposing outside of play
How to Embarrass Yourself in Public Unashamedly
Full text linkPlay can open adults to novel experiences and behaviors, yet fear of embarrassment often keeps them from engaging in play, particularly when observed by others. This makes embarrassment a crucial design consideration for pervasive play
Motivated Agents:Toward the Computational Modeling of Motivational Affordances
Full text linkVideo games routinely use procedural content generation, player modelling, and other forms of computational interaction that provide a good starting point for engaging computational interfaces. However, across these practices, games model environment (game content) and actor (player type) separately, which is out of tune with both basic and applied research. The ecological construct of motivational affordances, formalized as actor-environment system ratios, provides a promising alternative that could also prove fruitful for computational interaction in general
Gameplay:Map or Frame?
Full text linkFrom the social sciences to biology and physics, gamified systems and games are increasingly being used as “petri dishes” for observing human behavior in presumably perfectly controlled (digital) environments. This practice rests on the assumption that in-game behavior maps onto out-of-game behavior. This paper argues that methodological research is needed to establish when and why game behavior maps (and when not), and that such research in addition provides insight into a crucial aspect of interacting with computers: the impact of usage frames and modes
The Joys of Absence:Emotion, Emotion Display, and Interaction Tension in Video Game Play
Full text linkFew theories of gaming enjoyment have focused what is absent in gameplay. One exception is Erving Goffman’s sociological theory of “euphoric ease”. Because spontaneous and socially demanded emotional involvement often align in gameplay, Goffman holds, it lacks the effortful self-monitoring and self-regulation of conduct and emotion typical for everyday life. This paper presents an empirical grounding of Goffman’s theory, drawing on a qualitative interview study on social norms of emotion regulation in video game play. Data suggests that the absence of emotional selfcontrol may indeed be a hygiene factor of game enjoyment most strongly found in solitary gameplay, afforded by a socio-material setting that licenses gaming-typical emotions and shields from potentially disapproving onlookers
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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