Author: jholopainen

We’re happy to announce that the Lincoln Games Lab is co-organizing a workshop at the first joint conference of DiGRA and FDG focusing on digital games for older adults. The workshop will address issues around game development for older audiences:

Previous assessments of digital games for the older adult market have focused on their use as a tool to promote aspects of well-being – e.g., fostering social interaction and providing cognitive and physical stimulation. This perspective suggests that the primary means of these games are to encourage older adults to better themselves, which introduces an overly functionalist perspective on play.

In this workshop, we aim to shift this perspectives on games for older adults by highlighting the hedonic and eudaimonic value that they offer. To do so, we will explore challenges and opportunities in the design and development of market-specific games to create empowering and engaging experiences.

The conference takes place in Dundee, Scotland; the workshop will run on Monday, August 1st 2016. For more information including submission details, please visit the workshop website.

We’re happy to share that we’ve had two full papers conditionally accepted to CHI 2016!

Gerling, K., Hicks, K., Kalyn, M., Evans, A., and Linehan, C. Designing Movement-based Play With Young People Using Powered Wheelchairs. Conditionally accepted to CHI 2016, full paper.

Smeddinck, J., Mandryk, R., Birk, M., Gerling, K., Barsilowski, D., and Malaka, R. How to Present Game Difficulty Choices? Exploring the Impact on Player Experience. Conditionally accepted to CHI 2016, full paper.

The first paper is the result of a year-long research project funded by the University of Lincoln Research Investment Fund that was carried out together with St. Francis School in Lincoln, and looked into making movement-based play accessible for young people who use powered wheelchairs. The second paper was co-authored with collaborators at the University of Bremen, Germany, and University of Saskatchewan, Canada, and it explores how player perceive different options to adjust game difficulty.

We look forward to seeing you in San Jose!

We’ve just returned from CHI PLAY 2015 in London, which was a more than worthy successor to last year’s inaugural event in Toronto. The conference was a whirlwind of presentations, demos, inspiring conversations, restaurants and pubs, and we’ve come home excited about new collaborations and interesting ideas.

If you’re interested in what other people thought about the conference, Gustavo Fortes Tondello of the HCI Games Group at the University of Waterloo wrote up a very nice blog post for the ACM’s Crossroads magazine.

And last but not least, we would like to thank Kieran Hicks, Alexandra Samper Martinez (Universitat Rovira i Virgili), and Max Birk (University of Saskatchewan) for joining us for post-conference talks at the University of Lincoln – our students very much appreciated the guest lectures and insights into the games research community.