Riot! a location-sensitive digital narrative

I am still struggling to find this paper, I cannot get an online version: Interdisciplinary criticism: analysing the experience of riot! a location-sensitive digital narrative by M. Blythe A, J. Reid A, P. Wright A, E. Geelhoed A, Behaviour & Information Technology, Volume 25, Number 2 / March-April 2006, pp. 127 - 139

Abstract: This paper reports the findings from quantitative and qualitative studies of Riot! – a location-sensitive interactive play for voices. The paper begins by introducing Riot!; it then explores the growing literature on theories of experience and goes on to report the findings from three empirical studies of the event: a questionnaire-based survey of 563 participants; 30 semi-structured interviews with groups and individuals; and in-depth ethnographic case studies of four participants. It was clear from the survey that most people had enjoyed Riot! However, the interview data demonstrated that they had also experienced frustration even where overall enjoyment ratings were high. This is explored in relation to perception of the system and goal definition. The ethnographic case studies identify barriers to engagement in terms of individual identity and orientation. A critical theory-based analysis of Riot! further explicates the user experience in terms of literary devices such as characterisation and the development of narrative expectation.

The studies identify a number of usability problems such as inconsistency of interaction and non-reversibility that caused frustration. The critical analysis also identifies problems with the script such as the presentation of linear narrative in a non-linear medium. It accounts for widely differing accounts of the experience with reference to the participant's individual orientations or habitus. The paper demonstrates the value of an interdisciplinary approach for exploring the commonality and particularity of user experience.

Myths of multimodal interaction

In Ten myths of multimodal interaction (Communications of the ACM, Vol. 42 , No. 11, pp. 74 - 81, 1999), Sharon Oviatt describes common myths about multimodal interaction (i.e. interacting with a computer using more different input/outputs, like mouse/voice/keyboards or more recent technologies). The myths she is describing are quite relevant to lots of HCI research:

• Myth #1: If you build a multimodal system, users will interact multimodally.
• Myth#2: Speech and pointing is the dominant multimodal integration pattern.
• Myth #3: Multimodal input involves simultaneous signals.
• Myth #4: Speech is the primary input mode in any multimodal system that includes it.
• Myth #5: Multimodal language does not differ linguistically from unimodal language.
• Myth #6: Multimodal integration involves redundancy of content between modes.
• Myth #7: Individual error-prone recognition technologies combine multimodally to produce even greater unreliability.
• Myth #8: All users’ multimodal commands are integrated in a uniform way
• Myth #9: Different input modes are capable of transmitting comparable content.during periods of blank staring.
• Myth #10: Enhanced efficiency is the main advantage of multimodal systems

The article is full of interesting examples that explains how each of these myths can be deconsctructed.

Paper accepted to the COOP Conference

Our paper "The Underwhelming Effects of Automatic Location-Awareness on Collaboration in a Pervasive Game" (by Nicolas NOVA, Fabien GIRARDIN, Gaëlle MOLINARI and Pierre DILLENBOURG) has been accpeted to the International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems (May 9-12, 2006, Carry-le-Rouet, Provence, France).

Abstract. In this paper we seek to empirically study the use of location-awareness of others in the context of mobile collaboration. We report on a field experiment carried out using a pervasive game we developed called CatchBob!. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, we show the underwhelming effects of automating location-awareness. Our results indeed shows that automating this process does not necessarily improve the task performance and that it can be detrimental to socio-cognitive processes involved in collaboration such as communication or the modeling of partners’ intents. The paper concludes with some potential impacts for location-based application practitioners.

Keywords: location-awareness, socio-cognitive processes, pervasive game, cscw, field experiment.

LBS, flexibility of information, semantics and transparency

Matching User's Semantics with Data Semantics in Location-Based Services by Shijun Yu, Lina Al-Jadir, Stefano Spaccapietra, Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Semantics in mobile Environments (SME 2005), Ayia Napa, 9 May 2005.

One of the major issues for flexible information services is how to be able to correctly understand what is being requested by users, and how to find information that is relevant to the request. This paper focuses on such semantic issues, aiming at outlining the general problem as well as the specificity attached to location-based services, one of the major trends in mobile information systems. (...) From a semantic viewpoint, the major characteristic of, and challenge for, LBS is the fact that they serve as mediator between a possibly unknown user and possibly a priori unknown data sources. Moreover, the mediation has to be run on-the-fly, i.e., it cannot be prepared in advance as the partners in the mediation are not necessarily known. To overcome the difficulty, contributions from most advanced techniques are welcome. They include: ontology assistance (to understand what it is all about), peer-to-peer information search (to increase chances of finding relevant information), incomplete information handling (to cope with missing data), and approximation techniques (to determine what could be a reasonable answer when a perfect matching is not possible). (...) In this paper we showed how using semantics can help in finding information that is relevant to the mobile user, and thus improve the quality of location-based services. The context, user profile, user history, and data profile are dynamic semantic components that should be used in the matching process in order to give a tailored and useful information to the user.

Why do I blog this? even thought the LBS scenarios proposed in this paper are quite common, it deals with very pertinent issues with regard to what the users need, which information might be relevant for them and in what context. Besides, I like the idea adressed in the conclusion (I'm not a great fan of the example but...):

Nowadays, a user can use his mobile phone in Paris or London, without having to know that s(he) is using the telecommunication services of this or that local operator. Location-based services should offer the same flexibility. A tourist, whether s(he) is in Paris or London, should have tourist assistance by local LBS providers, and get relevant information according to his/her profile.

Of course, the idea of 'profile' might be expanded but I think the service 'transparency' to the users is important.

Location awareness and World of Warcraft

While walking is swiss snowy mountains, Mirweis pointed me on this World of Warcraft add-on called The Gatherer:

Gatherer is a WoW addon for herbalists, miners and treasure hunters. It's main purpose is to track the closest plants, deposits and treasure locations on you minimap. The addon does not track like a tracking ability does, rather it "remembers" where you have found various items in the past. It does this whenever you gather (perform herbalism, mining or opening) on an item, and records the specific map location in it's history. From then on, whenever the item comes into range of being one of the closest 1-25 (configurable) items to your present location, it will pop up on you minimap. (...) The usage of Gatherer is fairly straightforward. You simply use the game as normal, and the tracked items will appear in you minimap as soon as you gather them. On the minimap you see green circles to indicate if you're close by to a node (if there is data for the node - created from a previous harvest). On the zone maps you will start to see icons indicating an overall picture of the resource layout of a zone.

One of the use ask another requirement... a spatial annotation feature: "May I humbly request: the ability to toggle World Map notes on and off (ideally with a button provided on the world map itself)", others wants location awareness of others: "I would be really cool if it could track more stuff like NPC's. I often use much time on trying to remember where the Quest NPC is when I need to claim my reward.".

Why do I blog this? I am interested in location awareness and video games... This kind of thing is utterly crazy and might be interested for my research. There are tons of questions that could be relevant like why and how people keep track of things/people; how this help them achieving their goals (collaborating, working on a specific task...), ...

Research discussion at the lab

This afternoon, at the lab, we had a discussion about methodologies. The goal was not to agree on a common methology for all our projects, but rather to have a discussion of what we can use and in which context. One of the issue that lead to this was the fact that we know what we're not using (pure experimental research paradigm for instance) but it's harder to define what we should use. Especially given that our research projects have different purposes ranging from studying people's behavior when collaborating too designing applications or services that meet specfific needs. Jean-Baptiste presented what is called "Design-Based research" in educational science because he thought this might be of interest in terms of mixing qualitative and quantitative methods in an 'interventionist' way. Hence we had a discussion about it and commonly agreed that some project can use it (design-oriented projects) and some cannot (when we study behavior rather than designing artefacts). Pierre was still wondering about referring to this theory in our research.

Then Pierre (lab director) summarized the main characteristics of what our lab should put the emphasis on:

• intervention or design-based approach.
• variation: studying variation, to compare things (but not necessarily having controlled group, it's rather a matter of comparing different interfaces than comparing a group with an artefact to a group without it).
• investigating the PROCESSES rather than the outcomes. By processes meant the interaction with the artefacts/application/service but also the group processes when they collaborate using it. The outcome or the performance is often less intersting than the processes that occured.
• we collect data (be it quantitative or qualitative) to analyze what happened.
• granularity of our research: emphasis on small tests/experiment/investigation (which - in addition - are not pre-experiment to fix bugs or tune settings)
• generalization: how to augment the external validity of our results? by having larger scale investigations or doing them across contexts (task/people/settings)? or do we neeed generalizations.

The discussion was quite messy but it was really relevant for us to talk about this. Of course, it's still in process. Sometimes, in the discussion, I was not so comfortable by all of this (we need to set boundaries between research goals and the corresponding methodologies); but anyway, that's what happened when people with different perspectives talk with each other. Actually, even though we want to mix methods, it's clear that the main paradigm at CRAFT is positivist and bound to quantitative methods. Then, it's more a matter of discussing how to integrate other methods (qualitative) in a proper way.

Virtual ethnography

Issues in Virtual Ethnography by Bruce Mason (2001). In Ethnographic Studies in Real and Virtual Environments: Inhabited Information Spaces and Connected Communities. Ed. K. Buckner. Proceedings of Esprit i3 Workshop on Ethnographic Studies. Edinburgh: Queen Margaret College, January 1999. Pp. 61-69. The paper is a good discussion about the very concept of "virtual ethnography". I was intrigued, among other things by the following issue:

A virtual ethnography is one that fully immerses the ethnographer into the consensual reality experienced by groups of people who use computer-mediated communication as their primary, and often only, means of communication. As such, the online or virtual persona of the participants are the main focus of the ethnographer. Generally, researchers have wanted to focus on the person at the keyboard, a virtual ethnography reverses this and works instead with the persona that has been projected into cyberspace by the typist. This is not the only way to do fieldwork via the Internet but it is useful and it helps to realise that when we do participant-observation we usually do it in the same medium in which the culture we study is communicated.

Also he adresses some relevant questions:

A virtual ethnography is then, simply, an ethnography that treats cyberspace as the ethnographic reality. In many ways this is a controversial step. As a personal anecdote , it has been noteworthy that at every conference I have attended every time Internet-based fieldwork turned up in a paper that the same question is asked, “How do you know that your informants are telling the truth?” (...) A virtual ethnography takes exactly the opposite view: rather than verifying informants’ veracity in other media one fully immerses oneself within the virtual community being studied. As with any ethnography it is the detailed, systematic, and exhaustive participation within the group and building of relationships over time that allow the ethnographer to build with the help of the participants an account of the culture created within that group.(...) The virtual ethnographer then should conduct detailed, systematic and principled research within the community. Starting with simple questions such as how many people belong to this community? how long has it been here? how does it define itself? what is its focus? who belongs here? The virtual ethnographer should then immerse herself within this community with as much effort and energy as she would a “real world” ethnography.

Why do I blog this? I have to work on MMORPG communities, maybe using virtual ethnography. Though the article is 6 years old, it still raises some interesting issues, and some of the anecdotes are worthwile.

Workshop about mobile devices use

A relevant workshop at Pervasive Computing 2006: PERMID 2006: Pervasive Mobile Interaction Devices - Mobile Devices as Pervasive User Interfaces and Interaction Devices -:

The main goal of the workshop is to develop an understanding of how mobile devices (particularly mobile phones, smartphones and PDAs) can be used as interaction devices. We will provide a forum to share information, results, and ideas on current research in this area. Furthermore we aim to develop new ideas on how mobile phones can be exploited for new forms of interaction with the environment. We will bring together researchers and practitioners who are concerned with design, development, and implementation of new applications and services using personal mobile devices as user interfaces.

Possible topics for the workshop include (but are not limited to): Interactions between mobile devices and the real world Interactive context-aware services on mobile devices Augmented, virtual and mixed reality on mobile phones and PDAs (tracking, markers, visualisation) Using mobile devices as user interfaces for terminals and vending machines Portable music players (e.g. iPod Video) and personal servers as mobile interaction devices Multimodal interaction taking mobile devices into account Usage of sensors in mobile devices (camera, microphone, GPS, etc.) for pervasive applications Interaction metaphors for pervasive applications and services Gathering, management and usage of context information User experience, user studies Applications and scenarios

February 18, 2006: Deadline for submissions of workshop papers

One of the most interesting issue the organizers want to address is the following question: "Why are pervasive interactions using mobile phones still only a research topic and what is preventing them from being realized outside of the lab? ". This statement is obviously true and should definitely be of interest. When I read things like future perfect, I cannot help feeling that some relevant innnovation are around (i.e. about how people use technologies in new way) and people should have to pay attention to what's happening!

CatchBob replay tool

Fabrice is moving forward in the development of the new CatchBob! replay tool. Here are some snapshots of the prototype:

The project consists in developing a tool to replay sessions of interactions with a mobile game called CatchBob!. This game is an experimental platform in the form of a collaborative mobile application for running psychological experiments. In our lab, we are indeed interested in studying how people use mobile devices to carry out collaborative activities.

In this context, a replay tool is a piece of software that displays all the actions undertaken by the players. Such a tool is intended to rebuild and enrich our comprehension of how users performed the activity and to elicit their social and spatial behavior. This visual information might be used both by the researchers (to better understand what happen and compute statistics about it) and the players (to offer a visual support in order to explain the researchers what happened).

Space, cognition and collaborative work

As an echo to Renzo Piano's quotes I blogged this morning, I read an insightful paper entitled "Understanding complex cognitive systems: the role of space in the organisation of collaborative work. " by Spinelli, G., Perry, M., O'Hara, K. in Cognition Technology and Work, Volume 7, Number 2, pp. 111 - 118. The paper aims to provide some insights about the role of space as computational resource in collaborative practices. In line with this objectiv, it focuses on collaborative design activity within a consulting firm in the UK using ethnographically inspired methods to investigate collaborative work. Here are some interesting parts I found relevant with regard to my work:

physical space, augmented through the use of external resources, embeds the constraints and the operators through which decision-making is performed. The progressive arrangements of the physical space and of the external artefacts at ID-Co embodied at least a part of the knowledge necessary for the team to perform their collaborative activity. The transitions between the group’s shared cognitive stages are externalised in artefacts that, augmented by the role of space as an ordering and interpretative structure, provide a shared cognitive support for collaborative design and also reflect the status of past and upcoming group decisions. (...) Physical space adds an informational dimension to the artefacts collected within it, since it frames their use in a larger context of use. The very feature that space has to structure artefacts also results in a configuration that is an artefact in itself that is able to cue behaviour by its inhabitants. Actors orient themselves in the space, point at resources, reduce or increase their proximity to the informational artefacts to support their cognitive tasks and move to prominent areas of the space to mark the importance of their actions. This lexicon of physical gestures, generated and supported by the use of external resources and enhanced by the physical space, can facilitate communication and coordination among participants.

Why do I blog this? This approach is important and leads to results close to what we found when doing research about collaborative behavior in virtual environment or in mobile settings. Some other references about it: in Nova, N. (2005). A Review of How Space Affords Socio-Cognitive Processes during Collaboration. Psychnology 3(2)

Mobile games and psychology

This talk proposed at ETech 2006 seems to be very appealing to my interest: Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Design to Mobile Services by Amy Jo Kim:

obile games are becoming a big business. But on the horizon, there's an even more exciting opportunity to develop compelling mobile services that help people get things done--services like restaurant reviews, weather reports, stock quotes, diet support, and meal planners. Developers who are interested in building these services can learn a lot from game design.

In this session, we'll review the psychology and system thinking behind game design, and learn how to use game mechanics to create a mobile experience that's fun, compelling, and addictive. We'll conclude by showcasing some cutting-edge mobile services from Europe and Asia that incorporate these ideas and show us what future mobile applications will look like.

Why do I blog this? This is the approach we have at the lab and the one that I try to promote when working with video game companies. I am looking forward to see what she says about it when it comes to mobile games.

Paper about user's expectations when using LBS

Lately I am more and more returning to my earlier reading about location-awareness from 2 years back, maybe it's because I am writing journal papers and I need some connections with my work. This morning I re-read this paper from Journal of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing: User needs for location-aware mobile services by Eija Kaasinen (Pers Ubiquit Comput (2003) 7: 70–79). A paper I blogged about in 2004 I guess. The paper is interesting with regard to the user's expectations and usage of location-based services. Here some excerpts I found relevant. First about the goal:

We have carried out several empirical studies to study user attitudes, needs and preferences for location-aware services. We started with scenario evaluations in group interviews. The aim of this evaluation was to study broadly the attitudes of the potential users towards different personal navigation services (...)We have also evaluated with users different commercial location-aware services in Finland: Benefon Esc! used together with a Yellow Pages short message service (SMS), the user can get information on nearby services as well as their location, which the Benefon Esc! can display on the map screen. (...) Sonera Pointer services that utilised cell-based positioning. Pointer Bensa (Gasoline) gave information on the cheapest gasoline stations in the vicinity of the user. Pointer Opas (Guide) offered information about the district around the user...

Then some of the results:

criticism of new technology was brought up in many group interviews. A predestined and over-controlled environment was seen as dubious, and the interviewees did not accept the rational and purpose-oriented attitude to life that they identified in the scenarios. In addition, some of the scenarios, for instance proactive shopping and exhibition guides, were seen as going too far beyond the real needs of people. (...) Our interviews with potential users and the user evaluations of some of the first location-aware services point out that user expectations are high and that the users in Finland at the time of the evaluations trusted current service providers and policy-makers for issues related to privacy protection. This constitutes a good starting point for location-aware services. It did not occur to most users that they could be located when using location-aware services. This puts additional responsibility on the service providers and policy makers. (...) The users need seamless service chains that serve them throughout their mobile activity, e.g. planning, searching services, finding the route as well as visiting and storing information.

Why do I blog this? The article raises important concerns, especially about users' expectations and how they feel being tracked (or not feeling it!). However, I am quit skeptical about the last thing: I don't really think a seamless service is really possible and it's maybe better to design applications that take advantage of seams (Ã la Chalmers) or to educate users.

Tags: lbs, location based services, location-awareness

Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Research Methodologies

Lately I've been very interested in having a global framework that will combine both qualitative and quantitative methodologies. The following paper is interesting for that matter:On Becoming a Pragmatic Researcher: The Importance of Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Research Methodologies by Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie and Nancy L. Leech. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, Volume 8, Number 5 / December 2005, pp. 375 - 387.

Abstract: The last 100 years have witnessed a fervent debate in the USA about quantitative and qualitative research paradigms. Unfortunately, this has led to a great divide between quantitative and qualitative researchers, who often view themselves as in competition with each other. Clearly, this polarization has promoted purists, namely, researchers who restrict themselves exclusively either to quantitative or to qualitative research methods. Mono‐method research is the biggest threat to the advancement of the social sciences. Indeed, as long as we stay polarized in research, how can we expect stakeholders who rely on our research findings to take our work seriously? Thus, the purpose of this paper is to explore how the debate between quantitative and qualitative is divisive and, hence, counterproductive for advancing the social and behavioural science field. This paper advocates that all graduate students learn to utilize and to appreciate both quantitative and qualitative research. In so doing, students will develop into what we term as pragmatic researchers.

Web of Science, Scopus and Google scholar

Quick pointer: As we may search – Comparison of major features of the Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar citation-based and citation-enhanced databases by Peter Jacso in the last issue of Current Issue Vol. 89 No. 10 (November 2005) is a great article about science databases. It compares Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar.

Mobile gaming research at the University of Zurich

Last week, at the Wireless and Mobile Technology Conference in Japan, I met Christoph Goeth. He is working at the University of Zurich on location-based game development and analysis.

My research focus lies on the design, implementation and evaluation of mobile applications, especially in mobile learning games. This includes the interface design, the usage of positioning systems and other context awareness systems for mobile devices but also the evaluation of usage and user adoption of such systems. I’m as much interested in the technical application and its architecture as in the social aspect of mobile systems. Currently I’m focusing on the question how to design a mobile game to improve learning effects for people who are visiting unknown and potentially complex locations such as a university campus, a museum or a whole city.

My research focus lies on the design, implementation and evaluation of mobile applications. This comprises: Designing and implementing mobile learning games / Usage of positioning and other context awareness systems / Evaluation in field experiments

This is really close to what we do here; it's good to know what they're doing up there in Zurich. A good resoruce about their work is certainly: Schwabe, G., Göth, C. (2005): "Mobile Learning with a Mobile Game: Design and Motivational Effects", Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, Vol. 21, 2005, 204-216. Fabien's note about it are relevant.

Location-Based Services failures

Even though the LBS concept is still trying to finds its way, some already dropped it, as attested by this account from the CTIA Wireless IT and Entertainment tradeshow in San Francisco:

While location-based services are finding some applications with enterprises, they have failed in the consumer market.

"Finding a friend is fine maybe once," said J H Kah, global vice president at South Korea Telecom. "We do make a good revenue from it, but it's still a small portion [of our overall business]." Mahesh Prasad, president of Indian mobile operator Reliance, added: "There are no compelling applications for consumers. Find a friend is not what I call a compelling application for people to pay for." (...) The services are a typical example of businesses getting over excited about a technology while failing to look at the usage case for consumers, argued Graeme Ferguson, director of global content development at Vodafone.

Why do I blog this? yes the Vodafone's guy is so right: there used to be a technological frenziness; for that matter, the claim that " services are finding some applications with enterprises, they have failed in the consumer market" is utterly crazy: what's the need of having applications if there is no consumer market!??? This means that they implement services first and then they think about the market. How weird! And what is pitiful is putting LBS in the closet... Well like Timo's comment in my yesterday's post, I am still positive of LBS but they might be different from what we/they expected. Besides I like SK telecom statements about the "Where are the Other Mobile Buddies Around Town" thing: "Finding a friend is fine maybe once". Come on, let's keep exploring user scenarios and LBS usage!

WOMBAT: Where are the Other Mobile Buddies Around Town

A new acronym I was not aware of: WOMBAT = Where are the Other Mobile Buddies Around Town?. It's actually taken from a recent EURESCOM study which "explored the communication needs of teenagers, how they could be met by location-based services, and which location technology is best suited:

In the EURESCOM study WOMBAT (Where are the Other Mobile Buddies Around Town?) researchers from major European telecoms companies developed real-life user scenarios for teenagers to see how well the different location-based technologies could serve young people’s needs. (...) The researchers identified among others, three major communication needs: to know where their peers are, to let their peers or their parents know where they are and to arrange and rearrange schedules for social events at short notice.

I am a bit doubtful concerning the 'needs' they collected. In the EURESCOM final paper, here is how they 'extracted those needs':

The study took an innovative approach to this question by using a solid social science basis from which to derive the needs, culminating in a series of user scenarios. (...) As the first step in this work we concentrated on the investigation of youth cultures and their mobile service needs. Existing data and material on young people were sourced from academic journal articles and books on youth culture, market research data, press articles, and data from various ongoing research projects. These sources were pulled together to form an understanding of young peoples’ lifestyles, culture and use of current mobile technology.

Here is scenario they envisioned:

"Imagine a group of teenagers who arranged to meet in town before going to a concert. One is already there and wants to know if he has enough time to do some shopping before his friends arrive. He checks his mobile device to see where they are and realises that one is passing a nearby shop. So he decides to wait for the close-by friend before going to the shop.“

Why do I blog this? mmh I am a bit skeptical with their 'solid science basis' and also about the needs they figure out. I think that "knowing where my buddies are" is very different from "automatically knowing where my buddies are". The main difference lies in the fact that giving one's location is both conveying an information (one's location) and an intention (that my buddies may need this information). Of course, it might be better to get my friend's position since he may not be able to give to me but he or she may be uncomfortable to disclose it on a regular basis... That's really a tricky issue. Though, there are some interesting ideas anyway (like strengthening the problem of technology acceptance by the users).

Last issue of Vodafone's Receiver

I just saw the last issue of Vodafone's Receiver which seems to be a great wine. There are papers by Mark Pesce, Jonathan Donner, Marc Prensky, James Katz,Mark Lowenstein,Nathan Eagle and Alex (Sandy) Pentland, Lars Erik Holmquist, Sara Price and Yvonne Rogers and Jeff Pierce.

Sara Price and Yvonne Rogers's Designing new learning experiences with pervasive technologies, Lars Erik Holmquist's The mobile user experience - how boundaries between devices are starting to disappear are of particular interest with regard to my work. More and comments about those later on here.

From direct physical interaction to hardware-based input devices

A very good resource about game controllers in Gamasutra: "Controller Mediation in Human-Computer Play". It's actually a thesis from Stanford University by Tony Thulatimutte.

In the mid-to-late-20th century, the advent of the computer game signaled the beginning of a new mode of play interaction. Whereas previously playing a game would typically involve direct physical interaction with its elements (soccer balls, billiards, chess pieces), computer games introduced the notion of using hardware input devices to produce game action, with the consequence that any arbitrary quantifiable physical input might be transduced to produce any arbitrary game output. Computer input devices are therefore novel intermediaries in games and the act of play, and the psychological and qualitative impacts of their design and usage on players, as well as their symbolic role in an increasingly mediated society, are the topics of this paper.

Why do I blog this? it's a good discussion of game controller practices, design and evolution, which fits very well into some projects with what I do for video game companies.

Mobile HCI 2006

Good to know:

CALL FOR PAPERS - MOBILEHCI 2006 The 8th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services

Dates: 12-15 September, 2006 Location: Espoo, Finland Website: www.mobilehci.org

Deadlines: * Papers, Workshops and Tutorials: 1 March 2006 * Short Papers, Posters, Demos, Panels, Industry Cases: 7 May 2006

Why do I blog this? Perhaps we could write a short paper with the results of catchbob second exeriment.