There will be an HCI seminar on 5th April, starring Paul Cairns, Reader at University of York​. This seminar will take place on Wednesday​ 05 April, room 1WN 3.11,  from 13:15 to 14:05.

Exploring engagement through games

ABSTRACT

Engagement is considered an important experience for users to have with all sorts of interactive systems. However, it is also very complex and contingent on many factors. Digital games make a good context in which to isolate some aspects of engagement and explore the concept and its effects. Drawing on the work of my research students, I show how various features of the context of playing games influences engagement, sometimes in quite unexpected ways. I then turn to showing how engaging experiences (ie playing games) do not necessarily lead to learning, at least not in the way proposed by leading models. These results show that engagement really is complex and there are challenges to researching this topic robustly.

BIO

Paul Cairns is a Reader in HCI at the University of York. He is the training coordinator for the EPSRC CDT in Intelligent Games and Games Intelligence. Paul has been researching player experiences for over 15 years and has used that as an excellent excuse to play a lot of games. He also has interests in HCI more generally including errors and models of interactions. He has a strong interest in research methods for HCI and experiments and statistics in particular. His current favourite game is Fez and his current favourite statistical method is bifactor modelling.​