Casper Harteveld

Northeastern University | NEU · Department of Art and Design

Computational thinking (CT) has become an important skill for the new generation, and CT teaching games have been introduced to lower the barriers that novices face in learning programming. However, despite the prevalence of and demand for these games, little is known about the effectiveness of their design or about the principles that are conduciv...

Studying mental models has recently received more attention, aiming to understand the cognitive aspects of human-computer interaction. However, there is not enough research on the elicitation of mental models in complex dynamic systems. We present Thought Bubbles as an approach for eliciting mental models and an avenue for understanding players' me...

Questionnaires are vital in games user research (GUR) to assess player experience (PX). However, having too many questions in surveys prevents wider uptake among GUR professionals because of games' rapid production cycles. To address this issue, we present the miniPXI---an eleven-item measure of the popular Player Experience Inventory (PXI)---provi...

Queerness can help redefine interactive technologies and re-conceptualize their design beyond cisheteronormativity. Recently, games have emerged as promising avenues for exploring queerness. In this research-through-design (RtD) effort, we advance queer explorations in games by leveraging queer temporality to evoke and explore feelings of alienatio...

Understanding players' mental models are crucial for game designers who wish to successfully integrate player-AI interactions into their game. However, game designers face the difficult challenge of anticipating how players model these AI agents during gameplay and how they may change their mental models with experience. In this work, we conduct a...

The abrupt shift to a primarily remote environment for higher education learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic left many academic institutions unprepared to provide students with the quality of education traditionally expected in an in-person modality. Students were deprived of the hands-on activities and shared experiences of in-person learning tha...

This study evaluated a pair of video games called the RePresent games that taught users how to represent themselves in civil court. A quasi-experimental study was conducted that compared 69 RePresent game users and 78 non-game users with civil legal issues across four U.S. states on legal, mental health and psychosocial outcomes over 3 months. The...

Understanding decision-making in dynamic and complex settings is a challenge yet essential for preventing, mitigating, and responding to adverse events (e.g., disasters, financial crises). Simulation games have shown promise to advance our understanding of decision-making in such settings. However, an open question remains on how we extract useful...

Youth are among the most impacted by social issues, and yet have the least agency to act on them. We explored how youth used participatory storytelling—a genre of interactive fiction that logs players’ choices as data to be analyzed—to advocate for social change. In a 4-day workshop held across 4 weeks, we guided 22 high-school-aged youth in creati...

The concept of flow is used extensively in HCI, video games, and many other fields, but its prevalent definition is conceptually vague and alternative interpretations have contributed to ambiguity in the literature. To address this, we use cognitive science theory to expose inconsistencies in flow's prevalent definition, and introduce fuse, a conce...

Is it possible to detect toxicity in games just by observing in-game behavior? If so, what are the behavioral factors that will help machine learning to discover the unknown relationship between gameplay and toxic behavior? In this initial study, we examine whether it is possible to predict toxicity in the MOBA gameFor Honor by observing in-game be...

The concept of flow is used extensively in HCI, video games, and many other fields, but its prevalent definition is conceptually vague and alternative interpretations have contributed to ambiguity in the literature. To address this, we use cognitive science theory to expose inconsistencies in flow's prevalent definition, and introduce fuse, a conce...

While work in fields of CSCW (Computer Supported Collaborative Work), Psychology and Social Sciences have progressed our understanding of team processes and their effect performance and effectiveness, current methods rely on observations or self-report, with little work directed towards studying team processes with quantifiable measures based on be...

Searching for relative mobile user interface (UI) design examples can aid interface designers in gaining inspiration and comparing design alternatives. However, finding such design examples is challenging, especially as current search systems rely on only text-based queries and do not consider the UI structure and content into account. This paper i...

The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) bring human-AI interaction to the forefront of HCI research. This paper argues that games are an ideal domain for studying and experimenting with how humans interact with AI. Through a systematic survey of neural network games (n = 38), we identified the dominant interaction metap...

In this paper, we explore the next generation of analog game (i.e., board and card games) experiences by combining a traditional analog game with mixed reality technology. First, we transfer an existing analog game into a virtual reality (VR) environment that enhanced the gameplay with an animated model, visual effects, and sound effects. Second, w...

To master the functions and tasks of a game, players must learn how to play the game. When conceptual learning outcomes are expected, additional skills are required to master those concepts. Methods, such as the Wizard of Oz technique, which require users to interact with a computer support tool, have been used to help improve usability and learnab...

Research design is challenging to learn, and students have few hands-on experiences to practice it. We explore how StudyCrafter, a platform for creating and running research studies in the form of interactive fiction games, promotes students’ perceived and measured abilities in certain key research skills. Fourteen graduate students in a game desig...

Many successful games rely heavily on data analytics to understand players and inform design. Popular methodologies focus on machine learning and statistical analysis of aggregated data. While effective in extracting information regarding player action, much of the context regarding when and how those actions occurred is lost. Qualitative methods a...

Many successful games rely heavily on data analytics to understand players and inform design. Popular methodologies focus on machine learning and statistical analysis of aggregated data. While effective in extracting information regarding player action, much of the context regarding when and how those actions occurred is lost. Qualitative methods a...

The RePresent games are online video games that are publicly available and designed to educate people about legal self-representation in civil court. This study was part of a project to examine use of the RePresent games in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire from January 2018 to May 2018. Data on game use across the four states we...

Gamettes are playful tools for agent-based participatory simulation and have shown to be valid for collecting rich behavioral data from human decision-makers. However, there is still a question that how such data can be used to create or update agent-based and behavioral models. In this paper, we evaluate and compare the performance of different me...

Game design is increasingly used in modern education to foster Computational Thinking (CT). Yet, it is unclear how and if the game genre of student-designed games impact CT and programming. We explore how game genre impacts CT development and programming routines in Scratch games designed by 8th-grade students using a metrics-based approach (i.e.,...

Agent-based simulations are widely used for modeling human behavior in various contexts. However, such simulations may oversimplify human decision-making. We propose the use of Gamettes to extract rich data on human decision-making and help in improving the human behavioral aspects of models underlying agent-based simulations. We show how Gamettes...

Game environments are being used in multiple fields to study human behavior. Just as experimental studies of human behavior are affected by their methods, games are affected by the authoring platforms and tools used to make them. We examine how the diversity of a cast of characters made available to students of game design and psychology may have i...

The GeoExplorer project is an ongoing effort aimed at addressing educational gaps related to field testing and practical experience in geotechnical engineering education. A computer game-based module was developed to supplement traditional lecture techniques and take advantage of technology familiar to today’s students. To date, three different ver...

Background There have been increasing calls for integrating computational thinking and computing into school science, mathematics, and engineering classrooms. The learning goals of the curriculum in this study included learning about both computational thinking and climate science. Including computer science in science classrooms also means a shift...

Automated feedback has the potential to provide significant assistance to student game creators. Here, we present a system for generating automated, critique-like feedback for students creating games in the Study-Crafter platform. We implemented a system that builds a personalized feedback report for students based on a templated format. This criti...

Teamwork is becoming an important element of gameplay. Many games nowadays incorporate teamwork in one form or another. As a result, many game researchers have investigated aspects of teamwork. However, we have yet to develop effective surveys to gauge how people strategize or problem solve together within different games, and how such games enable...

Games have been designed to foster children's computational thinking (CT) skills, which is widely recognized as a key ability that should be mastered in this computing-driven era. Because learning coding skills is cognitively difficult and uninvolving for novices and it is recommended to learn CT concepts first, many educational games have been dev...

This paper presents steps towards a generalized player model built around an external personalization and design framework. The external framework, the Player, Environment, Agents, System (PEAS) framework, resulted from a broad scope review of the personalization, player modeling, and game design literature. Leveraging this framework allows us to d...

Gamification and serious games have the capacity to increase engagement in often non-engaging contexts such as a test. In this study, we gamified a psychological test, the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), with the player motivation concepts of achievement, exploration, and social interactions. We used the platform Study-Crafter to implement our ga...

Personalization has been explored in the context of games in many forms (e.g., dynamic difficulty adjustment, affective video games, adaptive systems, experience-driven PCG, etc.). The majority of techniques used in these fields have relied on data-driven or manual methods for identifying game components to modify for personalization. We propose a...

Interactivity and player experience are inextricably entwined with the creation of compelling narratives for interactive digital media. Narrative shapes and buttresses many such experiences, and therefore designers must construct compelling narrative arcs while carefully considering the effects of interaction on both the story and the player. As th...

Computational thinking (CT) is key to digital literacy and helps develop problem-solving skills, which are fundamental in modern school. As game design shows potential for teaching CT, metrics like Dr. Scratch emerge that help scholars systematically assess the CT of student-designed games, particularly with Scratch. Compared to other CT metrics, D...

In a wide range of social networks, people's behavior is influenced by social contagion: we do what our network does. Networks often feature particularly influential individuals, commonly called "influencers." Existing work suggests that in-game social networks in online games are similar to real-life social networks in many respects. However, we d...

One way to prepare research-literate citizens is to engage them in designing research studies. However, this feat is challenging and has many practical barriers. We present StudyCrafter, a new platform that makes human behavior research more accessible by using game design and gameplay as a framework for research design and participation. In a qual...