game
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Game Design Guide Book for Middle-Aged and Older Adult Players Helps Rewrite Gaming Culture
The online book ‘Game Design Guide for Adults in Their 50s and Older’ helps to increase accessibility for adult gamers
A KAIST multi-disciplinary research team published a game guide to respond to the new demands of senior gamers and expand the gaming market. The guide will be helpful for designing interfaces fit for senior groups as a way to minimize the cognitive burdens related to aging. It also helps readers understand older users’ cognitive abilities and socioemotional characteristics.
“This guide analyzed the game experience of players in their 50s and older and converted it into a game design element that can be easily referred to by game developers and designers,” explained Professor Young Im Do from the Graduate School of Culture Technology who led the research.
The gaming industry is paying attention to the emerging trend of ‘active aging’ and senior gamers. According to the National Purchase Diary Panel Inc., game play time increased significantly in the 45-64 age group compared to other age groups during the pandemic. Despite the growing number of senior gamers, it is still difficult for older novice players to start video games because most commercial games focus on younger players. For example, older players can feel frustrated if the game requires fast reflexes and accurate timing. Font sizes and objects that are too small as well as interfaces that are too complicated can be challenging for senior gamers.
The research team presents how to handle these difficulties in game design considering the visual-motor coordination of people in age groups ranging from their 20s to 80s. It also proposes various game elements such as audio-visual elements, cognitive and motor elements, game rules, stories and characters, social aspects, in-app purchases, and advertisements for senior groups. The guide also proposes a game service model and introduces examples of game prototypes that apply supportive technology.
For this guide, the researchers operated the “International Game Living Lab”, which is an open space for creating novel and innovative solutions by converging IT technology into daily life. In the lab, ordinary citizens, research institutes, companies, and local communities formed a cooperative network and actively participated in experiments, education, and discussions for finding solutions over three years.
Researchers in multi-disciplinary fields, including computer science, psychology, game design, and gerontechnology, covered various methodologies to understand the game experience of adults in their 50s and older. In order to profile players of this age group, three different approaches were performed: visual-motor coordination experiments, an EEG (Electroencephalogram) test, and a gameplay workshop. Then, they converted the results into practical knowledge that can be used in the gaming industry.
Professor Kyung Myun Lee from the School of Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences at KAIST, Professor Byungjoo Shin from Yonsei University, CEO Junyoung Shin of CareU, and CEO Minseok Doh of Heartverse participated in this online book which is available to the public at https://wikidocs.net/book/7356.
2022.06.10 View 4779 -
Study Finds Player-Character Relationships Affected Game Satisfaction in the Last of Us Part II
Research analyzed player experiences with a polarizing game and found differences in how the players related to their characters
The action adventure game ‘The Last of Us’ was a big hit worldwide in 2014. However, its sequel, the Last of Us Part II divided opinions in the game community when it was released in 2020.
A research team from the Games and Life Lab in the Graduate School of Culture Technology at KAIST analyzed why the game players’ reviews were so polarized and found that player-character relationships influenced the game players’ satisfaction. This study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, will help developers of character-driven games foresee how different players will react to their games.
The team under Professor Young Yim Doh conducted in-depth interviews with 12 players from diverse nations, both those satisfied and dissatisfied with the game.
The team found that three elements affected the game players’ satisfaction. First, players’ satisfaction varied according to their tolerance of forced character switches. When a player is forced to switch their controlled figure in the game to another character that is introduced as the antagonist, most players initially had a negative reaction. The feeling of being forced to play in a way they didn’t want reduced their rights as a player. However, later on, some players viewed this character switch as an interesting transition and were more tolerant toward forced game play.
Second, the researchers found that the flexibility of character attachment is related to game satisfaction. Players who were unhappy about the game resisted building a relationship with the new antagonist character. Meanwhile, players who were happy about the game slowly formed an additional relationship with the new character. This led to the player feeling conflicting emotions, which satisfied players considered a meaningful experience of understanding a perspective of someone initially considered the enemy.
Lastly, the satisfaction of the play depended on how much the players could accept a changing character image in the game. Dissatisfied players found inconsistencies in the characters’ behavior and did not accept the new information about the characters. Meanwhile, satisfied players tried to understand and accept the new information and actions.
“Previous research on narrative games focused more on the game design than on the players’ experiences. To understand why reactions to the game were very different across players, we focused our research on differences in the players’ psychological experiences with the game.” said lead author and Master’s candidate Valérie Erb.
Co-author Dr. Seyeon Lee added, “This suggests that there is no one way to satisfy all players in a character-based narrative game. To satisfy a game’s players, it is important to understand the different players in the player base, target the right player group, and manage expectations accordingly.”
This research was supported by the Year 2020 Culture Technology R&D Program by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and the Korea Creative Content Agency.
-PublicationErb V, Lee S, and Doh YY (2021) “Player-Character Relationship and Game Satisfaction in Narrative Game: Focus on Player Experience of Character Switch in The Last of Us Part II”
Frontiers in Psychology. 12:709926. (https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.709926)
-ProfileProfessor Young Yim DohGames and Life LabGraduate School of Culture TechnologyKAIST
2021.11.15 View 4697 -
‘Game&Art: Auguries of Fantasy’ Features Future of the Metaverse
‘Game & Art: Auguries of Fantasy,’ a special exhibition combining art and technology will feature the new future of metaverse fantasy. The show will be hosted at the Daejeon Creative Center at the Daejeon Museum of Art through September 5.
This show exhibits a combination of science and technology with culture and arts, and introduces young artists whose creativity will lead to new opportunities in games and art. The Graduate School of Culture Technology was designated as a leading culture content academy in 2020 by the Ministry of Culture, Sports & Tourism and the Korea Creative Content Agency for fostering the R&D workforce in creative culture technology.
NCsoft sponsored the show and also participated as an artist. It combined its game-composing elements and technologies with other genres, including data for game construction, scenarios for forming a worldview, and game art and sound. All of the contents can be experienced online in a virtual space as well as offline, and can be easily accessed through personal devices.
Characterized by the themes ‘timeless’ and ‘spaceless’ which connect the past, present, and future, and space created in the digital world. The exhibition gives audience members an opportunity to experience freedom beyond the constraints of time and space under the theme of a fantasy reality created by games and art.
"Computer games, which began in the 1980s, have become cultural content that spans generations, and games are now the fusion field for leading-edge technologies including computer graphics, sound, human-computer interactions, big data, and AI. They are also the best platform for artistic creativity by adding human imagination to technology," said Professor Joo-Han Nam from the Graduate School of Culture Technology, who led the project.
"Our artists wanted to convey various messages to our society through works that connect the past, present, and future through games."
Ju-young Oh's "Unexpected Scenery V2" and "Hope for Rats V2" display game-type media work that raises issues surrounding technology, such as the lack of understanding behind various scientific achievements, the history of accidental achievements, and the side effects of new conveniences.
Tae-Wan Kim, in his work themed ‘healing’ combined the real-time movement of particles which follows the movements of people recorded as digital data. Metadata is collected by sensors in the exhibition space, and floating particle forms are evolved into abstract graphic designs according to audio-visual responses.
Meanwhile, ‘SOS’ is a collaboration work from six KAIST researchers (In-Hwa Yeom, Seung-Eon Lee, Seong-Jin Jeon, Jin-Seok Hong, Hyung-Seok Yoon, and Sang-Min Lee). SOS is based on diverse perspectives embracing phenomena surrounding contemporary natural resources. Audience members follow a gamified path between the various media-elements composing the art’s environment. Through this process, the audience can experience various emotions such as curiosity, suspicion, and recovery.
‘Diversity’ by Sung-Hyun Kim uses devices that recognize the movements of hands and fingers to provide experiences exploring the latent space of game play images learned by deep neural networks. Image volumes generated by neural networks are visualized through physics-based, three-dimensional, volume-rendering algorithms, and a series of processes were implemented based on the self-written code.
2021.06.21 View 7221 -
Image Analysis to Automatically Quantify Gender Bias in Movies
Many commercial films worldwide continue to express womanhood in a stereotypical manner, a recent study using image analysis showed. A KAIST research team developed a novel image analysis method for automatically quantifying the degree of gender bias in films.
The ‘Bechdel Test’ has been the most representative and general method of evaluating gender bias in films. This test indicates the degree of gender bias in a film by measuring how active the presence of women is in a film. A film passes the Bechdel Test if the film (1) has at least two female characters, (2) who talk to each other, and (3) their conversation is not related to the male characters.
However, the Bechdel Test has fundamental limitations regarding the accuracy and practicality of the evaluation. Firstly, the Bechdel Test requires considerable human resources, as it is performed subjectively by a person. More importantly, the Bechdel Test analyzes only a single aspect of the film, the dialogues between characters in the script, and provides only a dichotomous result of passing the test, neglecting the fact that a film is a visual art form reflecting multi-layered and complicated gender bias phenomena. It is also difficult to fully represent today’s various discourse on gender bias, which is much more diverse than in 1985 when the Bechdel Test was first presented.
Inspired by these limitations, a KAIST research team led by Professor Byungjoo Lee from the Graduate School of Culture Technology proposed an advanced system that uses computer vision technology to automatically analyzes the visual information of each frame of the film. This allows the system to more accurately and practically evaluate the degree to which female and male characters are discriminatingly depicted in a film in quantitative terms, and further enables the revealing of gender bias that conventional analysis methods could not yet detect.
Professor Lee and his researchers Ji Yoon Jang and Sangyoon Lee analyzed 40 films from Hollywood and South Korea released between 2017 and 2018. They downsampled the films from 24 to 3 frames per second, and used Microsoft’s Face API facial recognition technology and object detection technology YOLO9000 to verify the details of the characters and their surrounding objects in the scenes.
Using the new system, the team computed eight quantitative indices that describe the representation of a particular gender in the films. They are: emotional diversity, spatial staticity, spatial occupancy, temporal occupancy, mean age, intellectual image, emphasis on appearance, and type and frequency of surrounding objects.
Figure 1. System Diagram
Figure 2. 40 Hollywood and Korean Films Analyzed in the Study
According to the emotional diversity index, the depicted women were found to be more prone to expressing passive emotions, such as sadness, fear, and surprise. In contrast, male characters in the same films were more likely to demonstrate active emotions, such as anger and hatred.
Figure 3. Difference in Emotional Diversity between Female and Male Characters
The type and frequency of surrounding objects index revealed that female characters and automobiles were tracked together only 55.7 % as much as that of male characters, while they were more likely to appear with furniture and in a household, with 123.9% probability.
In cases of temporal occupancy and mean age, female characters appeared less frequently in films than males at the rate of 56%, and were on average younger in 79.1% of the cases. These two indices were especially conspicuous in Korean films.
Professor Lee said, “Our research confirmed that many commercial films depict women from a stereotypical perspective. I hope this result promotes public awareness of the importance of taking prudence when filmmakers create characters in films.”
This study was supported by KAIST College of Liberal Arts and Convergence Science as part of the Venture Research Program for Master’s and PhD Students, and will be presented at the 22nd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) on November 11 to be held in Austin, Texas.
Publication:
Ji Yoon Jang, Sangyoon Lee, and Byungjoo Lee. 2019. Quantification of Gender Representation Bias in Commercial Films based on Image Analysis. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 198, 29 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359300
Link to download the full-text paper:
https://files.cargocollective.com/611692/cscw198-jangA--1-.pdf
Profile: Prof. Byungjoo Lee, MD, PhD
byungjoo.lee@kaist.ac.kr
http://kiml.org/
Assistant Professor
Graduate School of Culture Technology (CT)
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
https://www.kaist.ac.kr Daejeon 34141, Korea
Profile: Ji Yoon Jang, M.S.
yoone3422@kaist.ac.kr
Interactive Media Lab
Graduate School of Culture Technology (CT)
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
https://www.kaist.ac.kr Daejeon 34141, Korea
Profile: Sangyoon Lee, M.S. Candidate
sl2820@kaist.ac.kr
Interactive Media Lab
Graduate School of Culture Technology (CT)
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
https://www.kaist.ac.kr Daejeon 34141, Korea
(END)
2019.10.17 View 22664 -
Play Games With No Latency
One of the most challenging issues for game players looks to be resolved soon with the introduction of a zero-latency gaming environment. A KAIST team developed a technology that helps game players maintain zero-latency performance. The new technology transforms the shapes of game design according to the amount of latency.
Latency in human-computer interactions is often caused by various factors related to the environment and performance of the devices, networks, and data processing. The term ‘lag’ is used to refer to any latency during gaming which impacts the user’s performance.
Professor Byungjoo Lee at the Graduate School of Culture Technology in collaboration with Aalto University in Finland presented a mathematical model for predicting players' behavior by understanding the effects of latency on players. This cognitive model is capable of predicting the success rate of a user when there is latency in a 'moving target selection' task which requires button input in a time constrained situation.
The model predicts the players’ task success rate when latency is added to the gaming environment. Using these predicted success rates, the design elements of the game are geometrically modified to help players maintain similar success rates as they would achieve in a zero-latency environment. In fact, this research succeeded in modifying the pillar heights of the Flappy Bird game, allowing the players to maintain their gaming performance regardless of the added latency.
Professor Lee said, "This technique is unique in the sense that it does not interfere with a player's gaming flow, unlike traditional methods which manipulate the game clock by the amount of latency. This study can be extended to various games such as reducing the size of obstacles in the latent computing environment.”
This research, in collaboration with Dr. Sunjun Kim from Aalto University and led by PhD candidate Injung Lee, was presented during the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems last month in Glasgow in the UK.
This research was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) (2017R1C1B2002101, 2018R1A5A7025409), and the Aalto University Seed Funding Granted to the GamerLab respectively.
Figure 1. Overview of Geometric Compensation
Publication:
Injung Lee, Sunjun Kim, and Byungjoo Lee. 2019. Geometrically Compensating Effect of End-to-End Latency in Moving-Target Selection Games. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’19) . ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 560, 12 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300790
Video Material:
https://youtu.be/TTi7dipAKJs
Profile: Prof. Byungjoo Lee, MD, PhD
byungjoo.lee@kaist.ac.kr
http://kiml.org/
Assistant Professor
Graduate School of Culture Technology (CT)
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
http://kaist.ac.kr Daejeon 34141, Korea
Profile: Injung Lee, PhD Candidate
edndn@kaist.ac.kr
PhD Candidate
Interactive Media Lab
Graduate School of Culture Technology (CT)
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)
http://kaist.ac.kr
Daejeon 34141, Korea
Profile: Postdoc. Sunjun Kim, MD, PhD
kuaa.net@gmail.com
Postdoctoral Researcher
User Interfaces Group
Aalto University
https://www.aalto.fi Espoo 02150, Finland
(END)
2019.06.11 View 44783 -
KAIST to Host the 2017 AI World Cup in November
KAIST, the birthplace of the Robot World Cup in 1996, now presents a new technology matchup, the AI World Cup this November, which will be held at KAIST. The event is being organized by the Machine Intelligence and Robotics Multi-Sponsored Research and Education Platform (MIR-MSREP) of KAIST. The online, simulated AI soccer game, based on rolling updates, will be a draw for avid online gamers and tech-savvy university students from around the nation.
The tournament is comprised of three events: ▲A 5 on 5 AI soccer match to be played after self-learning using AI technology in an online simulation environment ▲Commentary in which online soccer videos are analyzed and commented on, and ▲Game reporters who will write articles on online soccer event results.
The participants will undergo a month-long online practice period in October and compete in preliminary matches from November 1 through 24. The top teams that scored the highest accumulated points will compete in the finals on December 1. In the finals, each team’s AI technology implementation method will be evaluated to select the final winning team. To ensure a successful event, KAIST will host a briefing session for participants on July 28.
Technological prowess and early exposure to AI accumulated at KAIST led to the launching of this tournament. Professor Jong-Hwan Kim, the chair of the Organizing Committee of the AI World Cup, hosted the first ever Robot World Cup back in 1996. His concept has now evolved into the emerging technology of AI and the members of the Organizing Committee encompass the professors from the various departments of electrical engineering, computing, industrial and systems engineering, aerospace engineering, civil and environmental engineering, and the graduate schools of Green Transportation, Cultural Technology, and Science and Technology Policy.
In particular, ongoing convergence research initiatives incorporating AI into a wide arrays of disciplines such as bio, nano, and IT, played a crucial role for making this AI World Cup happen. Professor Kim said, “The winner of this year’s competition will be awarded a certificate and a small gift. In 2018, we aim to expand the event to an international scale by allowing international teams.”
Any undergraduate or graduate student in Korea can apply to participate in the ‘AI World Cup 2017’. KAIST will host a public trial event during the ‘Open KAIST’ event period to be held November 2-3 to help participating students understand the event better. ‘Open KAIST’ allows the general public to personally visit and experience what goes on in engineering departments and laboratories on the KAIST main campus. It is hosted by the College of Engineering every two years and is the largest event hosted by KAIST.
To participate in the ‘AI World Cup 2017,’ teams consisting of Korean undergraduates or graduate students can fill out application forms and submit them by September 30 on http://mir.kaist.ac.kr .
2017.07.14 View 9897 -
KAIST's graduate, the first Ph.D. holder in games, is appointed professor at Michigan State University in East Lansing
Dr. Tae-Woo Park
The academic community recognizes the study in games as a field for research
Dr. Tae-Woo Park, a graduate of KAIST, has been appointed a professor at Michigan State University (MSU) in East Lansing. He will start working in August at the Department of Telecommunications, Information Studies, and Media, the College of Communications Arts, MSU.
Dr. Park received a doctoral degree in games, the first of its kind in KAIST. His research focus is game design, research, and development.
Dr. Park has strived to enhance user experience by incorporating various aspects of everyday life into games and made efforts to introduce measures limiting or preventing game addiction, a major concern among young people in South Korea. Professor Joon-Hwa Song of Computer Science at KAIST, Dr. Park's advisor, commented that "KAIST graduates have been the main actors in the development of Korea's gaming industry. Our efforts to systemize the field of games into an academic discipline have been recognized through Dr. Park's appointment."
Dr. Park said that he plans "to apply mobile device and ubiquitous technology and develop games that will not only entertain users but also help them have a better life.”
2014.05.29 View 10312