2023

If at First You Don’t Succeed

Colby Johanson, Brandon Piller, Carl Gutwin, and Regan L. Mandryk. 2023. If at First You Don’t Succeed: Helping Players Make Progress in Games with Breaks and Checkpoints. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 7, CHI PLAY, Article 387 (November 2023), 27 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3611033

Developing skill and overcoming in-game challenges is of great interest to both players and game designers. Players can improve through repetition, but sometimes practice does not lead to improvement and progress stalls. It would be useful if designers could help players make progress without compromising their long-term skill development. We carried out a study to investigate how two techniques—checkpoints and breaks—affect in-game progress and player skill. Checkpoints allow multiple attempts at a challenge without having to repeat earlier sections; this aids progress, but could potentially hinder skill development. Second, breaks in gameplay have been shown to accelerate skill development, but their effectiveness is unknown when the breaks are integrated into the game's design.

2021

Prediciting NPC Dialogue

J. T. Bowey, J. Frommel, B. Piller and R. L. Mandryk, "Predicting Beliefs from NPC Dialogues," 2021 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG), 2021, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.1109/CoG52621.2021.9619099.

Game designers and developers benefit from gathering data from players; however, interrupting play with questionnaires can harm experience. Previous work has suggested that embedding questionnaires into games, such as through dialogue choices when interacting with non-player characters (NPCs) can help, but there is no evidence that dialogue choices can model the real-world beliefs of players. In this study we demonstrate two methods of successfully predicting responses to validated scales of sexist beliefs from NPC dialogues that do not differ in their resulting narrative engagement. Our findings open opportunities for better tailoring games and game experiences by modeling players through their in-game interactions. Index Terms—questionnaires, survey

2020

Is A Change as good as a rest?

Brandon Piller, Colby Johanson, Cody Phillips, Carl Gutwin, and Regan L. Mandryk. 2020. Is a Change as Goods as a Rest? Comparing BreakTypes for Spaced Practice in a Platformer Game. In Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 294–305. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3410404.3414225

The development of skill in games is of interest to players and designers. Spaced practice in games, i.e., adding breaks to core gameplay, has been shown to improve performance over playing continuously; however, it is unclear if the benefits of spaced practice apply in complex games that combine several skills and elements. Further, many break-like activities are already present in games (e.g., cutscenes, mini-games, leaderboards, loading screens) and we do not know whether engaging with these as breaks reduces the benefits of spaced practice. We built a custom 2D platform game in which players wall-jump, swing, via a grapple hook and double-jump through an obstacle course and used it as the core gameplay activity in two experiments---one to test if spaced practice improves performance in a complex game, and another to determine how spaced practice is affected by the choice of in-game break activity. We show that spaced practice significantly improves skill development in a complex platformer game; that spaced practice is effective across several types of ecologically-valid break activities; and that the use of short breaks does not subvert flow states during play.