Gamification Research Network

CFP: Gamification Summit @ GDC Online 2012

Gamification Research Network — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 10:06:43 +0000

This year’s Game Developers Conference Online, held October 9-11, 2012 in Austin, TX, has added a one-day Gamification Summit. Submissions are due by Wednesday, May 2, 2012. Granted, the GDC is industry-focused, but take a look at the Game IT Summit at this year’s main GDC in San Francisco, and you’ll see it likewise had a strong academic column. Anyhow, here’s the CFP:

The new Gamification Summit at GDC Online will discuss the debatable and sometimes problematic process of building game-like incentives into non-game applications, to address issues like productivity, health, marketing, and customer engagement. The day long program will include lectures and panels for game developers and other tech creators to exchange ideas, introduce best design practices and learn how to best serve the player to meet your organization’s needs. This summit will bring fresh discussions about the integration points between games and technology and highlight inspired, successful case studies from today’s forward-thinking businesses.

Here are the submission form and further submission details.

From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness: Defining Gamification

Sebastian Deterding — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 23:45:54 +0000

The proceedings of the 2011 MindTrek conference are finally online in the ACM Digital Library, and with it, the paper I co-wrote with Rilla Khaled, Dan Dixon, and Lennart E. Nacke on “defining the damn thing” – that thing being “gamification,” of course. Here’s the abstract:

Recent years have seen a rapid proliferation of mass-market consumer software that takes inspiration from video games. Usually summarized as “gamification”, this trend connects to a sizeable body of existing concepts and research in human-computer interaction and game studies, such as serious games, pervasive games, alternate reality games, or playful design. However, it is not clear how “gamification” relates to these, whether it denotes a novel phenomenon, and how to define it. Thus, in this paper we investigate “gamification” and the historical origins of the term in relation to precursors and similar concepts. It is suggested that “gamified” applications provide insight into novel, gameful phenomena complementary to playful phenomena. Based on our research, we propose a definition of “gamification” as the use of game design elements in non-game contexts.

Here’s the link to the ACM digital library download: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2181037.2181040

Here’s a download.

And here’s the presentation:

From Game Design Elements to Gamefulness: Defining “Gamification”

It’s been a while since we wrote this paper (almost a year, actually), and my own thinking has changed a bit since – if anything, I have become even more sceptical of what on earth a “game design element” could be, let alone how to determine whether X “is” or “isn’t” one. So just between me and myself, I’m ruminating whether just saying “using game design in non-game contexts” might be enough and even less problematic. Other than that, I think the paper holds up quite well. So enjoy .

Reference

Sebastian Deterding, Dan Dixon, Rilla Khaled, and Lennart Nacke. 2011. From game design elements to gamefulness: defining “gamification”. In Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments (MindTrek ’11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9-15. DOI=10.1145/2181037.2181040 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2181037.2181040

Games and Software Engineering Workshop 2012: Program Online

Gamification Research Network — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 09:38:37 +0000

Apparently, it’s workshop week: The 2nd International Workshop on Games and Software Engineering, “Realizing User Engagement with Game Engineering Techniques”, organised as part of the ICSE 2012 in Zurich on June 9, 2012 has posted its preliminary program.

Here’s the description from their website: “GAS 2012 explores issues that crosscut the software engineering and the game engineering communities. Advances in game engineering techniques can be adopted by the software engineering community to develop more engaging applications across diverse domains: education; healthcare; fitness; sustainable activities (e.g., recycling awareness); and so on. Successful computer games feature a property that is not always found in traditional software: they are highly engaging and intrinsically motivating. Games enthrall players and result in users willing to spend increasing amounts of time and money playing them. In addition, GAS 2012 provides a forum for advances in software engineering for developing more sustainable (“greener”) software, which can be applied to game applications. For example, approaches that support adapting software to trade-off power consumption and video quality would benefit the game community. Software engineering techniques spanning patterns (requirements, design), middleware, testing techniques, development environments and processes for building sustainable software are of great interest. Last year’s GAS workshop brought together people from various fields and investigated the possibilities of this exciting research area – we aim to continue building these relationships and advancing the state of the art.”

The preliminary program looks likewise promising, with a keynote by Walt Scacchi of UC Irvine and several interesting papers.

CFP: Harnessing Collective Intelligence With Games

Gamification Research Network — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 12:54:07 +0000

In conjunction with the ICEC 2012, in Bremen, Germany this September, there’ll be a one-day workshop on “Systems with Homo Ludens in the Loop“. Papers are due ~~April 13~~ May 1, 2012. full CFP below.

Harnessing Collective Intelligence With Games

1st International Workshop on Systems with Homo Ludens in the Loop

Update: Deadline for submissions has been extended to May 1, 2012.

About

With recent advances in harnessing the knowledge and skill of large groups of (unknown) network-connected humans, researchers and practitioners have been designing systems that make contributions of users entertaining and more engaging. Game mechanics are being applied to the traditional human computation tasks, such as transcription, classification and labeling. Seminal examples of such applications include ESP game and FoldIt. At the same time, companies seek strategies to include elements of gaming into business processes to increase productivity and engagement of employees. Framing a business goal in the form of a game is also a promising method for motivating newer generations in the workforce.

To enable effective deployments of the game-based systems, there is a need for a structured analysis of “homo ludens in the loop” aspect, both from technical and social perspective, to derive best practices. The objective of this workshop is to bring together multidisciplinary researchers and practitioners who are embedding game elements to the human computation systems in academic, industry and public sector settings.

The Workshop is collocated with the International Conference on Entertainment Computing ICEC 2012. The call for paper is available here.

Areas of Interest

The objective of the workshop is to foster the thinking process about how to effectively involve the users in the loop of a production system or crowdsoucing initiative. The topics include but are not limited to:

Games for Collective Intelligence
Human Computation Games (Games with a Purpose)
Applications of games in science, industry and public sector
Games for data collection, verification and classification
Game-based surveys
Task decomposition and gamification
Quality management in collective play
Cost-benefit analysis for collective play
Games and new business models
Commodification of play (uses and abuses of free time)
Collective play as socialization (using social networks platforms)
Game propagation in the social networks
Game architectures and technology
Incentives and adoption of games in enterprise environments

Submission Types

Full Technical Papers (max 10 pages)
Short Technical Papers (max 6 pages)
Position Papers (max. 4 pages)

Submissions must be in Springer LNCS format and submitted as PDF. Please submit your paper via Easychair. All submissions will be peer reviewed by at least two independent reviewers. Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop and included in the workshop proceedings. The GCI 2012 papers submission and review process supports anonymous submission and blind reviewing. Accepted papers will be published as technical papers or position papers via Springer and archived in the Springer Link digital library.

Authors might be asked by the program committee to resubmit their paper in a different category. Extended versions of selected papers may be invited for a special issue of the “Entertainment Computing” journal or to also be part of the main conference track.

Important Dates

May 1 ~~April 13th~~, 2012 Paper submission
May 11th, 2012 Notification of Acceptance
June 15th, 2012 Camera ready submission (all submission types)
Sep. 26th-29th, 2012 Workshop at University of Bremen, Germany

Venue

The workshop is colocated with the ICEC 2012

Organizing Committee

Roberta Cuel, University of Trento, Italy
Maja Vukovic, IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, USA
Markus Krause, University of Bremen, Germany

Program Committee

Denny Vrandecic, Wikimedia Foundation, Germany
Yaniv Corem, IBM Haifa Research Lab, Israel
Jon Chamberlain, University of Essex, United Kingdom
Robert Kern, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
Jan Smeddinck, University of Bremen, Germany
Alexander Sorokin, Crowdflower.com, USA
Massimo Poesio, University of Trento, Italy
Christian Rozsenich, Clickworker.com, CEO, Germany
Otto Chrons, Microtask.com, CTO, Finnland
Simon Caton, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany
Francesco Schiavone, Parthenope University of Naples, Italy
Francesco Bolici, University of Cassino, Rome, Italy
Paolo Massa, Bruno Kessler Foundation, Trento, Italy
Tindara Abbate, University of Messina, Italy
Carl Goodman, Peppers Ghost Productions, United Kingdom
Claudio Bartolini, HP Labs, USA

CFP: Workshop “Game IT” @ Informatik 2012 (German)

Gamification Research Network — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 21:53:23 +0000

There will be a half-day workshop on gamification and serious games at the 42th annual conference of the German Informatics Association in Braunschweig on September 16-21, 2012. Deadline for submissions is April 30, 2012. Full (German) CFP after the break.

Game IT: Der Einsatz von IT-basierten Spielen und Spielmechaniken im organisationalen Kontext

UPDATE: Submission deadline has been extended to May 15, 2012.

Halbtägiger Workshop auf der 42. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI), 16. – 21. September 2012, Braunschweig

Allgemeine Thematik

Wie können zielgerichtete Online-Spiele („Serious Games“) beziehungsweise Elemente aus Online-Spielen („Gamification“) in einen organisationalen Kontext eingebunden werden, um die Motivation von Nutzern zu erhöhen und Verhaltensweisen zu beeinflussen? Diese Frage wird in den vergangenen zwei Jahren in der medialen Öffentlichkeit und Wirtschaft mit wachsendem Interesse diskutiert.

Spielerische Verhaltensweisen und Gestaltungsansätze haben sich im organisationalen Kontext bereits als hilfreich erwiesen: Es ist nachgewiesen, dass Spielen die Produktivität am Arbeitsplatz verbessert, sich positiv auf Entscheidungsprozesse auswirkt und Lernen ermöglichen kann. Obwohl seit einigen Jahren im Bereich der Human-Computer-Interaction hedonistische Elemente in der User Experience und die Begriffe „Playfulness“ sowie „Ludic Design“ diskutiert werden, fehlt eine ganzheitliche Diskussion in der Wissenschaft zu dem Einsatz und der Wirkung von zielgerichteten Spielen und Spielmechaniken im organisationalen Kontext.

Für die Informatik eröffnet sich daher mit den Themen Serious Games und Gamification eine Vielzahl von Forschungsfragen. In dem geplanten Workshop sollen dabei zwei Bereiche fokussiert werden.

Zum ersten soll die Nutzung und Wirkung von Serious Games im Unternehmenskontext untersucht werden. In diesem Zusammenhang sind die Potenziale für Anwendungen zu erforschen, entsprechende Referenzmodelle zu entwickeln, Anforderungen an die technische Infrastruktur zu spezifizieren und die organisatorischen und institutionellen Rahmenbedingungen zu bestimmen, unter denen Serious Games eingesetzt werden können.
Zum zweiten ist Gamification an sich näher zu untersuchen. Dabei sind ebenfalls die Anwendungsmöglichkeiten zu erforschen, Anforderungen an die Ausgestaltung zu ergründen und die Wirkungsweise von Spielmechaniken auf den Anwender empirisch zu analysieren.

Spezifische Themenfelder

Der vorgeschlagene Workshop auf der Informatik 2012 soll der Konsolidierung der bisherigen Forschung dienen und einen Ausgangspunkt für die weitere systematische Bearbeitung dieses Themenfeldes markieren. Beiträge können sowohl theoretisch als auch empirisch ausgerichtet und auf Englisch oder Deutsch verfasst sein. Sie können die folgenden Aspekte thematisieren, sind aber nicht auf diese eingeschränkt:

Hedonic Attributes, Funology, Ludic Design und Playfulness, Gamification: Wie unterscheiden sich die Ansätze?
Gamification und Reputationssysteme: Wie stehen sie zueinander?
Einsatz von Spielmechaniken in verschiedenen organisationalen Kontexten (z.B. Wissensmanagement, Innovationsmanagement, Aus- und Weiterbildung)
Einsatz von Spielmechaniken in verschiedenen Industrien (z.B. Automobilindustrie)
Praxisbeispiele, insbesondere Prototypen und Show Cases von Gamification und Serious Games
Design, Entwicklung und Betrieb von Gamification-Anwendungen und Serious Games
Wirkung von Spielmechaniken und Serious Games
Adoption und Benutzerakzeptanz von Gamification und Serious Games
Bewertung von Gamification und Serious Games: In welchen Anwendungsfeldern ist ihr Einsatz relevant? Gibt es Limitationen?
Die Bedeutung des Narrativen und des Perspektivwechsels

Autorenhinweise

Die Beiträge sollen maximal 14 Seiten lang sein und in Deutsch oder Englisch bisher noch nicht veröffentlichte Forschungsergebnisse darstellen.
Die akzeptierten Beiträge werden als Vollversion digital und referenzierbar im Rahmen der Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI) bereitgestellt.
Für alle Dokumente müssen die LNI-Formatvorlagen der GI (Word oder LaTeX) verwendet werden.
Die Einreichung setzt sich aus dem Beitrag sowie einem separaten Dokument mit Titel, Autoren und Abstract zusammen.
Eine Kurzversion wird in einem gedruckten Proceedings-Band der GI Jahrestagung erscheinen. Erfahrungsberichte mit Neuigkeits- und Alleinstellungsmerkmalen sowie interdisziplinäre Beiträge sind willkommen. Ziel ist eine Mischung theoretischer und praktischer Arbeiten.
Alle Beiträge werden in anonymisierter Form von zwei Mitgliedern des Programmkomitees begutachtet.
Einreichungen aus dem Programmkomitee sind zulässig.
Einreichungen sind in elektronischer Form (.doc, .docx, .pdf) an Maximilian Witt (m.witt@tu-bs.de) oder Dr. Christian Scheiner (scheiner@industrial-management.org) per Mail zu senden.

Kontakt / inhaltlich und Organisation: Dr. Christian Scheiner scheiner@industrial-management.org und Maximilian Witt m.witt@tu-bs.de

Anmeldung: http://www.informatik2012.de/637.html

Fristen: Einreichung von Beiträgen: ~~30.04.2011~~ 15.5.2012

Leitung: Prof. Dr. Susanne Robra-Bissantz (TU Braunschweig, Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik), Prof. Dr. Kai-Ingo Voigt (Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Lehrstuhl für Industriebetriebslehre), Dr. Christian Scheiner (Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Lehrstuhl für Industriebetriebslehre), Dipl.-Kfm. Maximilian Witt (TU Braunschweig, Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik)

Programmkomitee

Prof. Dr. Christoph Lattemann (Jacobs University Bremen)

Prof. Dr. Rüdiger Zarnekow (TU Berlin)

Prof. Dr. Kathrin M. Möslein (Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg & Handelshochschule Leipzig)

Prof. Dr. Thomas Kohler (Hawaii Pacific University)

Prof. Dr. Thomas Knieper (Universität Passau)

Sebastian Deterding, M. A. (Universität Hamburg)

Prof. Dr. Rolf Nohr (Hochschule für bildende Künste Braunschweig)

Prof. Dr. Stefan Stieglitz (Universität Münster)

Prof. Eku Wand (Hochschule für bildende Künste Braunschweig)

Weiterführende Links

CFP: Gamification of Production Environments Workshop @ COOP’12

Gamification Research Network — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 08:20:25 +0000

As part of the 10th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems (COOP 2012), there’s a one-day workshop on Gamification of Production Environments on May 29, 2012 in beautiful Marseille. Abstract deadline is March 30. See the full CFP below.

Gamification of Production Environments

Work environments with a strong focus on repetitive productive tasks, such as call centres, can be stressful for employers and employees alike and suffer from high attrition rates, lack of motivation, and unclear career perspectives. An emerging trend for increasing the motivation and the involvement of people in the workplace is the introduction of game elements or full-fledged (social) games in training and development activities (“Serious Games”, “Game-Based Learning”) or their integration in the environment supporting the work tasks (“Gamification”). In the latter case, the integration can take very different forms.

However, much remains to be done to understand the effectiveness in a work environment of game elements which, to date, have been for the most part limited to training and education applications. More in general, we are interested in learning about work and experiences with the introduction of game elements in a variety of collective learning and work contexts, which we call production environments, where the activities that the people carry on have the objectives of producing a tangible result, e.g. a document or the provision of a service. Examples of production environments are call centres, bureaucratic offices, but also a university course, and other knowledge workplaces.

We would be especially interested in contributions that consider the following topics:

How can game elements (for example the use of a credit system, levels, etc.) improve motivation and/or performance? Could they have an impact on quality and professionalism?
Can game elements be used to encourage collaboration between co-workers who are generally involved in individual tasks?
How do you evaluate the gain of the introduction of a game element in a work environment or in a work process?
How do you identify where to introduce a game element in a work process?
How could generic game elements/mechanisms be adapted to the particular needs of gamification in production environments?

We welcome submissions related to studies, design of systems, implementation and deployment of prototypes, around (but not limited to) these topics.

The ultimate goal of the workshop is to contribute to characterise which learning and work environments can/should be enhanced by the use of which game mechanisms, according to several dimensions including collaboration, performance, and user experience. A possible outcome of the workshop could be an attempt to list commonalities among those contexts/experiences that could help/inform the design of a generic methodology for the gamification of workplaces.

Keywords: Serious Games, Gamification, Game Mechanics, Game-based Learning, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), Activity Traces / Indicators.

Find more details at: http://www.xrce.xerox.com/Research-Development/Services-Innovation-Laboratory/Work-Practice-Technology/COOP-2012-workshop

Workshop activities and paper submission

This one-day workshop will consist in oral presentations of the selected contributions, that could be papers and/or posters, followed by a discussion on the theme of the workshop, informed by the contributions of the participants.

Workshop participants should submit an extended abstract (maximum 500 words for posters and 1000 words for papers). 2-3 researchers will review each submission assessing the significance of the contribution and its relevance to the workshop theme.

Authors of accepted submissions will be asked to submit a paper (between 1000 and 2000 words for posters and between 2000 and 4000 words for papers) before the workshop takes place.

Paper submission

Papers must be sent in PDF format to the organizers: stefania.castellani@xrce.xerox.com, tommaso.colombino@xrce.xerox.com, jean-charles.marty@liris.cnrs.fr, thibault.carron@lip6.fr, sebastien.george@insa-lyon.fr

Please use the template of the conference available at: http://coop-2012.grenoble-inp.fr/callforpaper.html

Outcome

This workshop aims at collecting a number of significant contributions around the proposed theme and potentially prepare a special issue of an international review (computers in industry, JCSCW, etc.) on the proposed theme.

Important dates

30 March, 2012 : Deadline for extended abstract submission
12 April, 2012: Notification of acceptance
7 May, 2012: Deadline for final paper submission
29 May, 2012: Workshop (1^st day of the COOP conference)

Organisers

Stefania Castellani and Tommaso Colombino, Xerox Research Centre Europe (XRCE)
Jean-Charles Marty, LIRIS, CNRS
Thibault Carron, LIP6, CNRS
Sebastien George, INSA Lyon, LIRIS, CNRS

Call For Participants: The Gameful Classroom @ GLSES 2012

Gamification Research Network — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 08:52:16 +0000

Do you have experience “gamifying” your classroom? Have you designed learning contexts, spaces, curricula, programs, institutions that incorporate elements, principles, and inspiration from game design? Then “The Gameful Classroom” is for you – a one-day workshop facilitated as part of the fourth annual GLS Educators Symposium (GLSES) on Tuesday, June 12, 2012 at the University of Madison-Wisconsin’s Memorial Union.

The GLS Educators Symposium

The GLSES celebrates and deepens educators’ use of games in various educational settings; fosters collaboration among teachers, designers, researchers and others throughout the elementary to higher education continuum; sets an exciting tone for the annual Games+Learning+Society conference; and provides a forum for educators to network and participate in professional development.

Each year, the GLSES features presentations from noted digital media and games scholars, hands-on workshops, and panel discussions featuring diverse perspectives about how games, digital media, and technology enhance learning, culture, and education – this year including “The Gameful Classroom”.

The Gameful Classroom

Going beyond games purpose-built as a means to learn content, “The Gameful Classroom” wants to convene educators, researchers, and others who have experience transforming teaching and learning within classrooms and learning spaces into game-like experiences. The workshop wants to create a space where you can exchange your questions and stories, challenges and best practices with peers that share your experience – and tell researchers what questions you need answered. To make the workshop as productive as possible for you, the organizers will collect and distribute experiences “gamifying” learning among participants in advance, while the event will be facilitated in an open space fashion.

“The Gameful Classroom” invites approximately 20 classroom educators, across grade levels and content areas to partake. While the workshop is intended primarily for classroom educators, administrators, higher education faculty, and others with similar design experience are also encouraged to apply. The workshop is being organized by Sebastian Deterding, affiliated researcher/Hans Bredow Institute for Media Research at Hamburg University, and Remi Holden, GLSES Chair/University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Practical Notes

Accepted participants will be required to register for GLSES at glsconference.org/2012/registration.html and are invited to participate in all GLSES activities outside the
workshop.
Accommodation will be organized through GLSES.
Participants will be invited asked to participate in a research study on gameful classrooms. Additional information will be provided to participants in advance.

Important Dates

Applications: due: March 15th, 2012
Notification of acceptance: April 2nd, 2012
Workshop: 8 AM to 5:30 PM, Tuesday, June 12, 2012. A detailed schedule will be provided in advance.

How to apply and contact details

To apply, please fill out the application form here: j.mp/gamefulclassroom.
For further information, mail s.deterding /at/ hans-bredow-institut (dot) de or check the GLSES website at glsconference.org/2012/glses.html.

Call for Papers: DiGRA Nordic 2012

Gamification Research Network — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 10:04:51 +0000

The DiGRA Nordic 2012, “Local and Global: Games in Culture and Society”, running 6-8 June 2012 in Tampere, Finland has a gamification/gameful design stream. See the CFP below.

Updates (28 Nov. 2011)

We can now announce the conference keynote names, plus names of the paper theme chairs (below):

Nick Montfort is associate professor of digital media at MIT and president of the Electronic Literature Organization. He develops text generators and interactive fiction and has participated in dozens of literary and academic collaborations. Montfort co-edited The New Media Reader and The Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 and wrote Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction, Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (with Ian Bogost), and Riddle & Bind. His next book, 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, is a collaboration with nine other authors about a one-line Commodore 64 BASIC program.
Kristine Jørgensen is associate professor in media studies at the University of Bergen. She has published articles on game sound, the user interface in games, the player role, games research methods, the Norwegian game industry, and game narratives. She is the author of A Comprehensive Study of Sound in Computer Games, and is currently writing a book on game user interfaces.
Espen Aarseth is principal researcher at the Center for Computer Games Research, IT University of Copenhagen, and adjunct professor at the Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo. He is also co-founding Editor-in-Chief of the journal Game Studies, founder of the Digital Arts and Culture conference series, and co-founder of the Philosophy of Computer Games conference series, and author of Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Johns Hopkins UP 1997), a comparative media theory of games and other aesthetic forms.

Overview

The study of games, players and related phenomena has expanded strongly both in its academic as well as in geographical range during the last decade. The DiGRA Nordic 2012 conference aims bring together Nordic and non-Nordic games researchers to discuss the cultural and social context of games and play from multiple perspectives, including reflections of local and global in game cultures. Year 2012 is the tenth anniversary of the Tampere Computer Games and Digital Cultures (CGDC 2002) conference, providing also an opportunity to reflect on the last decade of developments in Nordic game studies, as well as its wider international scope. The conference will be open to themes related to non-digital, as well as digital games and their different forms of play.

Suggested themes and theme chairs

The conference has dedicated Theme Chairs who head the selection submissions as the meta-reviewers for the key themes in the conference:

local/global in game cultures (Chair: Thorsten Quandt)
historical perspectives into digital gaming (Chair: Melanie Swalwell)
social player studies (Chair: Torill Mortensen)
games industry (Chair: Mirva Peltoniemi)
design of games (Chair: Annika Waern)
gamification and gameful design (Chair: Sebastian Deterling)
gambling vs. gaming studies (Chair: Pauliina Raento) – Note: there will be also special program on this theme, with a separate call of its own!
games as art (Chair: Simon Niedenthal)
critical approaches to game studies (Chair: Jonas Linderoth)
games as media and communication (Chair: Marko Siitonen)
other (the conference submissions are not limited to the above themes)

Submission format and review process

The conference accepts full paper submissions, which will be handled in anonymous peer review. There are Theme Chairs who oversee the reviews in specific paper categories. There will be online publication of accepted papers in the DiGRA Digital Library. The conference submission format will be same as in DiGRA 2011 – you can download the paper template from here: http://gamesconference.hku.nl/howtosubmit.php. The maximum length is 7000 words, including references, notes etc.

Organisers

The conference will be hosted jointly by the Finnish DiGRA chapter, coordinated by Dr Olli Sotamaa and the Creation of Game Cultures research project, coordinated by professor Frans Mäyrä. Assisted by the review board and local organising team, the main organisers are:

Review Chair: professor Raine Koskimaa
Program Chair: professor Jaakko Suominen
Local Chair: professor Frans Mäyrä

Venue

The conference will take place in Tampere, Finland, and will be jointly hosted by Universities of Tampere, Jyväskylä and Turku. The modern facilities of the new Technopolis building and the University of Tampere campus provide the venue for plenary keynote sessions and paper sessions in parallel rooms. There will be also social and other program available during the event.

Dates

deadline for full papers, panels and alternative forms: 13 February 2012
authors are informed of review: 2 April 2012
final paper submission deadline: 7 May 2012
conference dates: 6-8 June 2012

Contact details

You can find more, up-to-date information in later in this website. The email contact address for the organising team is: digranordic2012 [at] gmail.com. For more information about other Nordic DiGRA activities, go to: http://www.nordic-digra.org/

Welcome to Tampere!

Bath Gamification Talks

Dan Dixon — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 09:42:46 +0000

No, not points for plumbing and badges for bidets, but a series of 10 talks in the very english town of Bath. They’re ostensibly on gamification, but the remit is really the impact of games on a wide variety of fields. I’m presenting session four and so far we’ve already had talks on serious games, ARGs for education and tomorrow (Fri 21st) there will be a talk on Gamification, Innovation, Transformation by the organiser, and innovation specialist, Anja-Karina Pahl.

Next week I’m presenting (28th October) on Gamification, Design and Beyond. I’ll be using some of the definition work that has already been carried out via our CHI and Mindtrek papers, as well as discussing the general trend in the ludification of culture; the ludic turn. Some colleagues from the Play Research Group at UWE will be presenting over the next few weeks.

The event is free, but they would like you to register for it if you’re coming along. Drinks during and dinner afterwards.

When Perspectives Collide: Bringing Together Game Studies and HCI

Rilla Khaled — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 19:48:00 +0000

At the recent DiGRA conference in Hilversum, a few of us organised a session on gamification, titled Gamification: A roundtable on game studies and HCI perspectives. Our intention was to bring together perspectives we had gleaned from the CHI workshop on gamification in May with perspectives from the game studies community. Below are the slides of our introductory presentation.

We then entered the roundtable discussion with the audience and three respondents (Brian Winn, Helen Kennedy, and Alessandro Canossa), where we asked the following questions:

What is new and valuable in the HCI perspective? What is missing?

Various audience members indicated that they were both appreciative of the depth and breadth of gamification-related research taking place within an HCI context, but also surprised that this work was being conducted, which implicitly indicated a lack of strong connection between the communities. This inevitably led to discussions of disciplinary divides, but some participants also pointed out that game studies and HCI have a history of “raiding” one another, for example, in terms of methodologies, frameworks, and so on. There was general consensus around the idea that it was important to bring together diverse perspectives in researching gamification.

In terms of “what is missing”, various audience members suggested that gamification was being adopted as a turnkey solution for producing manipulation. Some participants called for more explicit investigation of gamification from a behaviour change perspective, and thought that “deep” behaviour change was not being achieved with current trends in gamification design.

Others asked whether we should be focusing on designing artifacts or on designing experiences. In particular, they called for more use of sociological lenses in researching gamification, in which people’s lives, social practices, values, and ethics could be taken into account. These participants proposed that gamification is currently being examined at an application layer, even though it operates at a larger social layer, and that we would benefit from exploring gamification from the context of the larger social layer.

In a different vein, one participant suggested that a focus on aesthetics was missing.

How have these phenomena appeared and been approached in past game studies?

The conversation quickly turned towards the notion of bridging the disciplinary divide, and whether the definition we proposed should be used to draw together connections between the fields. Some noted that it was nice to have a unified way and language for discussing these concepts, while others suggested that having fuzzy borders between the disciplines was a benefit.

One participant then stated that there was something bigger at stake than simply turf wars, and that understanding gamification would be fruitful for game studies, HCI, and other disciplines. He proposed that gamification was at risk of becoming a pure form of consumer-led behaviourism. The mention of the term “behaviourism” led some to bring up one of the more latent concerns within game studies, namely, that game designers (and game studies researchers) are generally opposed to being perceived as behaviourists, yet games for change and serious games are often focused specifically on behaviour change. So in excluding a view of gamification that could be perceived as behaviourism there was a risk of excluding certain branches of serious games.

One response from the audience was that if gamification as behaviourism was problematic for ethical reasons, we could still stand to learn something from it – just as there is value in learning about games deemed as unethical.

Another participant suggested that perhaps we could draw differences between applications that focused on intrinsic or extrinsic motivations, as current applications seem to focus more heavily on the latter.

The discussion was lively enough that our session ended up running over time. But this wasn’t for the reasons that we had originally anticipated, i.e. that DiGRA folks would find gamification problematic as a concept. Instead, we encountered an audience who were interested in how CHI community members were investigating gamification, who seemed open to situating it within game studies, and who had ideas about how to usefully explore it further.