Inferring Player Engagement in a Pervasive Experience (CHI 2009 – Round 1)

Inferring Player Engagement in a Pervasive Experience (CHI 2009 – Round 1)

By: Joel E. Fischer, Steve Benford

Summary:
This paper was about a game called Day of the Figurines which required users to send and receive messages every day so that they could explore a town, chat and help other players and receive missions from the game. The players of the game were usually unhappy when game notifications interrupted normal life, or sad when they were not notified soon enough to act on something when they did want notifications. The gaming experience would be greatly improved if the game could notify users more or less depending on their level of engagement with the game. It was discovered that this could be done to a certain degree by using the elapsed time (et) between two player turns or activities. This could also by determined by using response time (rt) which is the time that it took for a player to respond to a notification. The results of this experiment based off of elapsed and response time showed that a players level of engagement can be determined and that systems can adapt to the user after detecting it. Some advantages of this are that not only can the user receive more or less messages as wanted, but other players can be notified of their disengagement. Another potential benefit could be a summary of what happened while the user was not engaged. Any system that used this would however need to have a mechanism for the user to override the adaptation if desired or improperly interpreted.

Discussion:
I think that this was an interesting paper because it could be applied to more than just games. I think that a similar response and elapsed time concept could be put into effect on websites and other user applications. It would be useful for websites to limit or increase the number of email notifications received, and could be used in other applications to conserve computer power. There are many other ways this could be applied.