Call for Participation

Across disciplines, games are being increasingly used as research environments for experimentation and empirical study. This includes enlisting the use of games to explore human behavior and decision making, validate algorithms, consistently improve AI, collect player data, inform game design and more. However, the cost, complexity and rigor needed to produce these types of games is high and not enough is known about how games could be fully utilized in service as rigorous research environments. This workshop aims to bring together the game design and research community who have used games as research environments or those interested in building or enlisting games for this purpose, for a discussion on this topic and to share lessons learned from their work. The focus of the workshop will be to advance the collective understanding of a) the types of phenomena, problems and questions games are being used to study, b) the implications of extrapolating data from simulated environments to the the real-world, c) the theoretical, computational and design hurdles researchers consistently face and d) the potential value and concerns in employing games as research environments.

We welcome 2-4 page position papers, written in extended abstract format, that either discuss experience using games for research environments and interesting problems faced or lessons learned, or cover a particular position on the following topics:

● What are games as research environments?

● Why would we use games to learn about the world?

● ‘Serious games’ for research.

● Reliability and validity of using games as research environments

● Game design approaches with specific research in mind

● Criteria for selecting existing games for specific purposes

● Games for psychology and behavioral research

● The design of stimuli that accounts for complex constructs such as social interaction and behaviors

● Studies of games used for a specific domain or discipline

● Games as research environments for the design of game components

● Games as a testbed to validate algorithms

● How do games impact your research environment?

● A priori problems: design, creating valid stimuli for independent variables, adaptation, hypotheses, decision to include or exclude fun elements for serious games

● A posteriori problems: data analysis, filtering, qualitative vs. quantitative, player telemetry, challenges with conclusions and takeaways

Call for Participation

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