Julian Frommel

Utrecht University

The Dualistic Model of Passion (obsessive and harmonious passion) can explain motivations for videogame play along with associated outcomes, such as the development of social capital; however, existing research exploring passion and social capital in videogaming has been cross-sectional. In the current study we surveyed players of DotA 2 at three t...

There are various benefits of playing multiplayer games, such as enjoyment, satisfaction of basic psychological needs, facilitation of social relationships, and coping and recovery. However, these benefits to online game players are often undermined by the presence of in-game toxicity. Toxicity can be detrimental for game developers when players le...

Game economies (GEs) describe how resources in games are created, transformed, or exchanged: they underpin most games and exist in different complexities. Their complexity may directly impact player difficulty. Nevertheless, neither difficulty nor complexity adjustment has been explored for GEs. Moreover, there is a lack in knowledge about complexi...

Toxicity in online gaming is a problem that causes harm to players, developers, and gaming communities. Toxic behaviors persist in online multiplayer games for a number of reasons, and continue to go unchecked due in large part to a lack of reliable methods to accurately detect toxicity online, in real-time, and at scale. In this article, we presen...

Many games use engagement rewards as incentives for players to engage, e.g., daily login rewards, repeatable challenges, or seasonal rewards like holiday skins. These rewards may serve players by facilitating enjoyment or motivation; however, they may also be considered differently by skeptical players, e.g., as dark patterns that do not benefit pl...

Game developers, researchers, and players recognize the harm of toxic behaviour in online games-yet toxicity persists. Players' coping strategies are limited to tools that focus on punishing toxic players (e.g., muting, blocking, reporting), which are inadequate and often misused. To address the needs of players experiencing toxicity, we took inspi...

This work explores perceptions of performance enhancer usage in esports. Specifically, we explored the perception of: food and food supplements; non-medical use of prescription drugs; drugs with some social acceptance (e.g. alcohol, nicotine, cannabis); drugs with lower social acceptance (e.g., psychedelics, opioids); and non-invasive brain stimula...

Video games can satisfy people's basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. This may lead them to develop a passion for the activity, which can be harmonious or obsessive. These different types of passions are associated with different well-being outcomes: harmonious passion (HP) is associated with positive effects such as...

We describe the design and evaluation of a sub-clinical digital assessment tool that integrates digital biomarkers of depression. Based on three standard cognitive tasks (D2 Test of Attention, Delayed Matching to Sample Task, Spatial Working Memory Task) on which people with depression have been known to perform differently than a control group, we...

Social relationships are essential for humans; neglecting our social needs can reduce wellbeing or even lead to the development of more severe issues such as depression or substance dependency. Although essential, some individuals face major challenges in forming and maintaining social relationships due to the experience of social anxiety. The burd...

While evidence supports that some commercial off-the-shelf video games may promote mental wellbeing, it is an extensive time investment to experimentally identify games that benefit players. The time delay between commercial games research and commercial game development can render such research out-of-date. In this work, we explore player-written...

Players can get stuck in video games, which impedes their process to their goal and results in unfavorable outcomes like negative emotions, impediments of flow, and obstacles for learning. Currently, it is not easily possible to assess if a player is stuck, as no widely accepted definition of "being stuck" in games exists. We conducted 13 expert in...

Social anxiety is a prevalent problem that affects many people with varying severity; digital exposure therapy-which involves controlled exposure to simulations of feared social situations alongside cognitive restructuring-can help treat patients with anxieties. However, the need to personalize exposure scenarios and simulate audiences are barriers...

Experiencing the thrill of success is one of digital gaming's pleasures , but often also involves the crush of repeated failure. To explore success and failure in play, we conducted a mixed-methods study in which 182 participants described scenarios of success and failure and their experiences therein. Our results suggest that success and failure s...

Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) are the dominant form of enabling Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) for personal use. One of the biggest challenges of HMDs is the exclusion of people in the vicinity, such as friends or family. While recent research on asymmetric interaction for VR HMDs has contributed to solving this problem in the VR do...

Playing digital games can nurture wellbeing by helping players recover from daily stressors, cope with life's challenges, practice emotion regulation, and engage in meaningful social interaction; however, this same leisure activity can also result in problematic gaming (i.e., harmful play at the expense of healthy behaviors), and social isolation t...

Methods that detect user states such as emotions are useful for interactive systems. In this position paper, we argue for model-based approaches that are trained on user behaviour and self-reported user state as ground truths. In an application context, they record behaviour, extract relevant features, and use the models to predict user states. We...

Methods that detect user states such as emotions are useful for interactive systems. In this position paper, we argue for model-based approaches that are trained on user behaviour and self-reported user state as ground truths. In an application context, they record behaviour, extract relevant features, and use the models to predict user states. We...

Online social interactions in multiplayer games can be supportive and positive or toxic and harmful; however, few methods can easily assess interpersonal interaction quality in games. We use behavioural traces to predict affiliation between dyadic strangers, facilitated through their social interactions in an online gaming setting. We collected aud...

Many games use procedural content generation (PCG) to create varied game experiences without having to create all content manually. They allow varying degrees of player influence on generation, from retaining all control to giving full control to players over a number of parameters. Despite the prevalence of PCG in commercial games, little research...

Introduction Learning-centered emotions such as enjoyment, boredom and frustration are widely acknowledged to play a central role in classroom learning (Pekrun, 2006) and in learning with serious games (Anolli, Mantovani, Confalonieri, Ascolese, & Peveri, 2010). In particular, emotions are assumed to affect learning performance by modulating motiva...

High degrees of interaction fidelity (IF) in virtual reality (VR) are said to improve user experience and immersion, but there is also evidence of low IF providing comparable experiences. VR games are now increasingly prevalent, yet we still do not fully understand the trade-off between realism and abstraction in this context. We conducted a lab st...

Public transport can be a place where commuters feel rushed or stressed. Missing your train, a delayed bus or crowdedness at the station does not induce happiness among most people. As a consequence, prosocial behaviour like offering someone a seat is displayed less often. We discuss the design and design process of MirrorMe, a simple communal game...

Research has shown that dynamic difficulty adjustment (DDA) can benefit player experience in digital games. However, in some cases it can be difficult to assess when adjustments are necessary. In this paper, we propose an approach of emotion-based DDA that uses self-reported emotions to inform when an adaptation is necessary. In comparison to earli...

During game play a variety of undesired emotions can arise, impeding players' positive experiences. Adapting game features based on players' emotions can help to address this problem, but necessitates a way to detect the current emotional state. We investigate using input parameters on a graphics tablet in combination with in-game performance to un...

In this demonstration we introduce VRSpinning, a seated locomotion approach based around stimulating the user's vestibular system using a rotational impulse to induce the perception of linear self-motion. Currently, most approaches for locomotion in VR use either concepts like teleportation for traveling longer distances or present a virtual motion...

Current approaches for locomotion in virtual reality are either creating a visual-vestibular conflict, which is assumed to cause simulator sickness, or use metaphors such as teleportation to travel longer distances, lacking the perception of self motion. We propose VRSpinning, a seated locomotion approach based around stimulating the user's vestibu...

Including haptic feedback in current consumer VR applications is frequently challenging, since technical possibilities to create haptic feedback in consumer-grade VR are limited. While most systems include and make use of the possibility to create tactile feedback through vibration, kinesthetic feedback systems almost exclusively rely on external m...

When player skill levels are not matched, games provide an unsatisfying player experience. Player balancing is used across many digital game genres to address this, but has not been studied for co-located augmented reality (AR) tabletop games, where using boosts and handicaps can adjust for different player skill levels. In the setting of an AR tab...

Most current virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMD)create a highly immersive experience and are currently becomingpart of the living room entertainment (e.g. PSVR). However, currentVR systems focus mainly on increasing the immersion and enjoy-ment for the user wearing the HMD (HMDuser). This results in allthe bystanders (Non-HMDusers) in...

To incorporate culture into intelligent systems, there are two approaches that are commonly proposed. Theory-based approaches that build computational models based on cultural theories to predict culture-dependent behaviours, and data-driven approaches that rely on multimodal recordings of existing cultures. Based on our former work, we present a h...

Virtual reality (VR) devices have become popular in recent time due to the release of several consumer grade VR devices. Currently games are considered one of the primary use cases for VR. Game mechanics in VR games frequently work differently compared to non-VR games. However, there is no prevalent way how to teach game mechanics and game interact...

Entertainment and in particular gaming is currently considered one of the main application scenarios for virtual reality (VR). The majority of current games rely on any form of locomotion through the virtual environment while some techniques can lead to simulator sickness. Game developers are currently implementing a wide variety of locomotion tech...

The importance of emotions experienced by learners during their interaction with multimedia learning systems, such as serious games, underscores the need to identify sources of information that allow the recognition of learners' emotional experience without interrupting the learning process. Bodily expression is gaining in attention as one of these...

Smartphones have become ubiquitous and smartphone users have been called anti social because of the high amount of usage they frequently show. In this paper we want to examine if smartphones on the other hand might even be used to bring people. We present CanTouchThis, a smartphone game designed around two players physically sharing one smartphone...

Virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMD) allow for a highly immersive experience and are currently becoming part of the living room entertainment. Current VR systems focus mainly on increasing the immersion and enjoyment for the user wearing the HMD (HMD user), resulting in all the bystanders (Non-HMD users) being excluded from the experien...

The majority of HCI research in the field of automotive interfaces and driver-vehicle interaction is conducted utilizing driving simulators. High-fidelity simulators are expensive; in consequence, many researchers use consumer gaming hardware and flat screens as an alternative. In recent years VR devices have become affordable and are applied alrea...

In game-related research, it is often necessary to create different versions of a game prototype and gather information about players. To make this possible even for non-programmers, we present LiverDefense, an educational Tower Defense game about the basic functions of the human liver, which can be used as a customisable research tool. LiverDefens...

Serious games are steadily becoming a powerful tool for educational purposes as their challenging characteristics are suggested to make them particularly appealing to learn with. This challenging nature, however, comes at a price, namely, the need to maintain the optimal balance according to players’ emotional experiences. By focusing on players’ e...

This paper investigates a concept for highly ubiquitous game interactions in pervasive games. Pervasive gaming is increasingly popular, but steadily improving mobile and ubiquitous technologies (e.g. smartwatches) have yet to be utilised to their full potential in this area. For this purpose, we implemented 2084 – Safe New World; a pervasive game t...

Anthropomorphic user interfaces such as virtual agents or humanoid robots aim on simulating believable human behavior. As human behavior is influenced by diversifying factors such as cultural background, research in anthropomorphic user interfaces considers culture background for their behavioral models as well. This paper presents a hybrid approac...

Research in human-computer interaction often requires the acquisition of self-reported data. Particularly concerning serious games, the interaction between the game and the user still holds many unknown aspects, partly due to the user's double role as player and learner. An easy way of collecting data consists of questionnaires, mostly employed in...

This paper presents LiverDefense, an educational tower defense game illustrating the basic functions of the human liver. LiverDefense can be adapted with regard to its degree of difficulty via XML input files. Thus, researchers without programming skills can customize the game easily according to their needs. As such, it was tested in a user study...

Cultural background can crucially influence human behavior. For virtual characters, that are supposed to imitate human behavior in a natural manner, integrating cultural background came into focus the recent years. Unlike earlier approaches, this paper presents a hybrid approach of modeling a Bayesian network that generates culture-specific behavio...