Research Question:

• How does challenge in games relate to reflective affective/social-emotional learning?

Methods:

• Structured survey (open-ended questions)
• Survey (Likert-scale)

The definition of "challenge" in games has expanded from performative challenges (i.e. hand-eye coordination, timing-based) to include emotional and decision-making challenges. This opens up the floor in games research to explore the effect of such challenges on player experience and learning through meaningful gaming interactions. To further understand and explore games for learning, I am exploring how challenge relates to affective learning in games. My goal is to identify design implications for emotional and decision-making challenge towards social-emotional learning.

Research Questions:

• How is failure -- death and rebirth/respawning -- structured and expressed in platformer games?
• How is failure structured and expressed in platformer games?
• Can the Fail & Retry taxonomy be generalized to other game genres and platforms, such as embodied games in VR?
• Are there other aspects of challenge and/or failure in terms of design patterns to consider for VR?
• How do fail & retry mechanics relate to respective player experience constructs, such as mastery, challenge, autonomy, curiosity, and immersion?
• How do player orientation goal- and challenge- traits relate to the experience of failure in games?

Methods:

• 1. Observations
• 2. Qualitative Coding: Open, Axial, and Selective
• 3. Surveys, Quantitative Analysis
• 4. Game Design and Development

Publications

Marjorie Ann Cuerdo, Anika Mahajan, and Edward Melcer. (2021). “Die-r Consequences: Player Experience and the Design of Failure through Respawning Mechanics". In 2021 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG). IEEE.

Marjorie Ann Cuerdo and Edward Melcer. (2020). “’I’ll Be Back’: A Taxonomy of Death and Rebirth in Platformer Video Games”. In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI '20, Honolulu, HI, USA. ACM.

Edward F. Melcer and Marjorie Ann M. Cuerdo. (2020). “Death & Rebirth in Platformer Games”. In Game User Experience and Player-Centered Design. Springer.

Description

Failure is a central aspect of almost every game, driving player perceptions of difficulty and impacting core aspects of game user experience. At the heart of failure in many game genres is player death, and platformer games in particular rely heavily on the use of death within their design. This work addresses the rich, underexplored space of in-game death/failure (and respawning) through the creation of a generalized taxonomy of failure in platformer games. The taxonomy consists of five notable dimensions of a cyclical nature: (1) obstacles, (2) failure/death conditions, (3) aesthetics, (4) player progress, and (5) reset/respawn locations. These different dimensions have a number of potential implications for key aspects of player experience and design. The taxonomy could also be used to help improve the effectiveness of related engagement techniques such as dynamic difficulty adjustment.

In addition to the original taxonomy, we developed the "Taxonomy of Challenge and Failure" to be extensible to other game genres and platforms. We observed various game genres in VR to find that there are three main components of challenge and failure: (1) player challenges, (2) mini failures, and (3) critical failures.

As for an experimental study, we explored how altering the consequences of death on player progress affected aspects of the player experience. Specifically, our research investigated the relationship of failure mechanics – the location of reset/respawn points – to player experience (PX) constructs, such as mastery, challenge, autonomy, curiosity, and immersion. We developed a simple 2D platformer game that only differed in reset point locations: the start of the game (permadeath), the start of a level, the last reached checkpoint, and the last manually saved point.

Research Question:

• How does object placement in a tangible play space influence players’ collaborative interaction strategies?

Publications

Katelyn Grasse, Marjorie Ann Cuerdo, and Edward Melcer. (2021). “Mad Mixologist: Exploring How Object Placement in Tangible Play Spaces Affects Collaborative Interaction Strategies”. In Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE Conference on Games (CoG). IEEE.

Abstract

Tangible games afford an engaging and often unique form of hybrid play (i.e., physical-digital elements), but there is currently limited work explicitly exploring how these games can be designed to provide spatial affordances that implicitly encourage collaboration. In this paper, we present a novel collaborative tangible game, titled Mad Mixologist, and investigate how making a simple change in the location of game objects within the tangible play space can lead to significantly different collaborative interaction strategies. The results from our group comparison study indicate that 1) players with exclusively direct access to multiple relevant resources (i.e., a digital instruction and a physical object) were more likely to assume responsibility for completing tasks in a shared play space and 2) distributing these same task-relevant resources across multiple players created ambiguity over whether the player with the digital or physical resource should engage with the shared play space. This study demonstrates one possible way in which the physical design of a tangible game can be arranged to implicitly encourage players to develop more collaborative interaction strategies, specifically by distributing exclusive resources across players. Overall, this study highlights and reinforces the connection between spatial affordances and social interactions via embodied facilitation within the context of collaborative tangible games.