GambientFication

A few weeks after my last post about designing a use case using ambient displays, I'm back to report about the experiment I carried out (started last Tuesday). I have developed several artefacts to show in the ambient display (an iPad at the end) as a digital frame (like it was part of the furniture): a couple of charts using highcharts, a couple of games and an activity stream (really linked to it, not developed it), all of them integrated in a single app. As I told you before, the data I use comes form tinyarm, that tool for researchers to report read/skimmed papers, suggest to each other and create a list of papers to read. Therefore, my research this time fits better in CSCW (computer supported collaborative work) than in the e-learning topic, but I hope I could extrapolate some of the results (and the created artefacts) to that field too.

As I described, my intention is to provide awareness to the users (in this case researchers) about their activity (read papers), and engage them in the process of reading and suggesting papers each other. We'll see if the results of the evaluation of this research point into that direction.

In this post, I'm going to focus on the games as the title denotes. The idea is that the ambient displays could be used to enrich the ambient of the user with digital data, and I'm mixing this concept with gamification (the usage of game dynamics and mechanics to increase the engagement of the users). That's why I coined the term of GambientFication, or the use of ambient displays to show the users some parts of a game, that is itself the result of gamifying another process (in my case, the activity of reading/suggesting papers by researchers).

Regarding my own experiment, I ended up developing a couple of games: "The Hangman" and "Risk" (both of them modifications of popular games). Almost everybody know The Hangman. Its core mechanics consist of representing the failures you make trying to guess letters in a word by means of a man hanged: the most letters you fail, the more parts of the hangman are drawn. If you succeed to guess the word without being hanged, you're dead. Annotating the number of failures in another ways (just with numbers or little sticks) would not be the same: you don't want to be hanged, man! Why did I choose to link the hangman mechanics to research activities? I thought quite a bite about it, and I ended up finding a solution: as a researcher, if you don't read at least 2-3 papers per month, you got disengage from the state-of-the-art, you got dead, you got hanged! That's it! So, let's use the metaphor of the hangman to say that to researchers.

On the other hand, I wanted to make another game for several reasons: do something a bit more complex, visually attractive, and to compare the hangman with. So I looked for another metaphor and, although my colleagues didn't like it at the beginning, I ended up implementing that too: a modified version of Risk. Risk is a board game which objective is, in turns, to conquer the world accumulating army and expanding your troops abroad your domains. But I didn't want to foster competition among researchers for "who reads more papers in the group", so I modified the mechanics. The participants cannot conquer other participant's country, so the objective is not only individual (conquer as much countries as possible) but also made up a collective/collaborative one: the group members should conquer a complete continent in a given time period. Therefore, the individual work turns also into a work for the team, expecting that collaboration flourish and out of it the group itself appears strengthened. Anyway, certain level of competition is not bad also, so there's a case when 2 participants want to conquer the same country and only one will succeed.

That goes without saying that I took advantage of the HCI principles and techniques that I learnt here in Leuven (my first idea of the darts game seems so far in time), to develop the games and the other components. And hopefully the results of the experiment could led to a nice publication, as a result of the collaboration with the HCI group in KUL.