Category: Conferences

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.

This year’s edition of SIGCHI’s Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY) is quickly approaching, and with the acceptance of a range of submissions, it’s been a great success for us. What makes this even sweeter (besides the conference being hosted at our doorstep in London) is the fact that our papers are the result of great collaborations and excellent student work, for example, Kieran Hicks’ full paper on Hashtag Dungeon, his undergraduate project at the University of Lincoln and also a fully developed indie game soon to go live for sale on Steam.

Paper: Exploring Twitter as a Game Platform; Strategies and Opportunities for Microblogging-based Games

Kieran Hicks – University of Lincoln, United Kingdom
Kathrin Gerling – University of Lincoln, United Kingdom
Ben Kirman – University of Lincoln, United Kingdom
Conor Linehan – University College Cork, Ireland
Patrick Dickinson – University of Lincoln, United Kingdom

Note: “After All the Time I Put Into This”: Co-Creation and the End-of-life of Social Network Games

Alexandra Samper-Martinez – University Rovira i Virgili, Spain
Kathrin Gerling – University of Lincoln, United Kingdom
Ercilia Garcia-Alvarez – University Rovira i Virgili, Spain
Ben Kirman – University of Lincoln, United Kingdom
Shaun Lawson – University of Lincoln, United Kingdom

Paper: How Self-Esteem Shapes our Interactions with Play Technologies

Max Birk – University of Saskatchewan, Canada
Regan Mandryk – University of Saskatchewan, Canada
Kathrin Gerling – University of Lincoln, United Kingdom
Matthew Miller – University of Saskatchewan, Canada

Workshop: Ageing Playfully: Advancing Research on Games for Older Adults Beyond Accessibility and Health Benefits – http://chiplay15.gerontoludic.com/

Kathrin Gerling – University of Lincoln, United Kingdom
Bob De Schutter – Miami University, United States
Julie Brown – Ohio University, United States
Jason Allaire – North Carolina State University, United States

Work-in-Progress: Dendrogram Visualization as a Game Design Tool

Tom Feltwell – University of Lincoln, United Kingdom
Grzegorz Cielniak – University of Lincoln, United Kingdom
Patrick Dickinson – University of Lincoln, United Kingdom
Ben Kirman – University of Lincoln, United Kingdom
Shaun Lawson – University of Lincoln, United Kingdom

Work-in-Progress: Dead Fun: Uncomfortable Interactions in a Virtual Reality Game for Coffins

James Brown – University of Lincoln, United Kingdom
Kathrin Gerling – University of Lincoln, United Kingdom
Patrick Dickinson – University of Lincoln, United Kingdom
Ben Kirman – University of Lincoln, United Kingdom

Work-in-Progress: Exploring Casual Exergames With Kids Using Wheelchairs

Kieran Hicks – University of Lincoln, United Kingdom
Kathrin Gerling – University of Lincoln, United Kingdom

Preprints of most of our papers are available via the University of Lincoln ePrints site. We’re looking forward to seeing everyone in London!