Games User Research

Game User Research is an emerg­ing field that inves­ti­gates the inter­ac­tion between play­ers and games and the sur­round­ing con­text of play.

Game User Researchers have explored dif­fer­ent method­olo­gies from human com­puter inter­ac­tion, psy­chol­ogy, inter­ac­tion design, media stud­ies, and the social sci­ences. They extend and mod­ify exist­ing method­olo­gies to the envi­ron­ments that com­pose dig­i­tal games with their many vari­eties, includ­ing social games, casual games, and seri­ous games.

The group inves­ti­gates emo­tions and games, psy­chol­ogy of play, psy­cho­graph­ics, as well as method­olog­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions for study­ing human behav­ior and psy­chol­ogy for the pur­pose of design­ing bet­ter games.

Faculty: Alessandro Canossa, Anders Drachen, and Magy Seif El-Nasr

Students: Bardia Aghabeigi, PhD Student, College of Computer and Information Science

Selected Publications:

• Seif El-Nasr, M., Milam, D., and May­goli, T. Expe­ri­enc­ing Inter­ac­tive Nar­ra­tive: A qual­i­ta­tive analy­sis of Façade. Jour­nal of Enter­tain­ment Com­put­ing, Else­vier, 2012
• Moura, D., Seif El-Nasr, M., and Shaw, C. Visualizing and Understanding Players’ Behavior in Video Games: Discovering Patterns and Supporting Aggregation and Comparison. SIGGRAPH 2011, 2011
• Canossa, A., Drachen, A., and Sorensen, J. (2011) Arrrgghh!!!: blending quantitative and qualitative methods to detect player frustration. Foundations of Digital Games.