Lennart Nacke

University of Waterloo | UWaterloo · Games Institute

The growing adoption of learning analytics (LA) approaches and data mining (DM) techniques using educational gamification data sets is reflected in increased publications on this topic. However, with different gamified contexts and a variety of LA methods available, no comprehensive review summarized the obtained findings. Therefore, this research...

Researchers reference realism in digital games without sufficient specificity. Without clarity about the dimensions of realism, we cannot assess how and when to aim for a higher degree of realism, when lower realism suffices, or when purposeful unrealism is ideal for a game and can benefit player experience (PX). To address this conceptual gap, we...

Sound effects (SFX) complement the visual feedback provided by gamification elements in gamified systems. However, the impact of SFX has not been systematically studied. To bridge this gap, we investigate the effects of SFX-supplementing points (as a gamification element)-on task performance and user experience in a gamified image classification ta...

Social connections shape our behaviour because of peer pressure and social contagion. This phenomenon is amplified in online networks by particularly influential individuals: influencers. Although this concept originated in social media, recent research shows how influencers can also exist in games and affect players' long-term retention. Prolonged...

Information system (IS) gamification has been successful in many contexts. Yet, research has shown gamification’s success to vary between individuals. In this paper, we compare personalized versus non-personalized gamification in a warehouse management setting. We devised a 26-participant within-subject experiment in which we programmed goal settin...

In multiplayer collaborative games, players need to coordinate their actions and synchronize their efforts effectively to succeed as a team, thus individual differences have the potential to impact teamwork and gameplay. This paper investigates the effects of cognitive styles on teams engaged in collaborative gaming activities. Fifty-four individua...

Increasingly, virtual reality (VR) design and research leverages gameplay asymmetries, flattening discrepancies of interface, abilities, information or other aspects between players. A common goal is to induce social interactions that draw players without head-mounted displays into a shared game world. Exploring these asymmetries resulted in many a...

In video games, identification with avatars—virtual entities or characters driven by human behavior—has been shown to serve many interpersonal and intraindividual functions (like social connection, self-expression, or identity exploration) but our understanding of the psychological variables that influence players' avatar choices remains incomplete...

With gamification flourishing in popularity in educational research, it is essential to synthesize the expanding literature on educational gamification. The current umbrella review aims to comprehensively canvas the disparate findings and conflicting conclusions by critically examining educational gamification reviews. We included 46 reviews of sta...

The gamification of information systems has seen success in a variety of contexts. However, research has shown that the degree to which gamification is successful varies between individuals. The current paper evaluates the effectiveness of personalized gamification in a warehouse management context. Additionally, this paper explores why personalize...

Personalization is essential for gameful systems. Past research showed that the Hexad user types model is particularly suitable for personalizing user experiences. The validated Hexad user types questionnaire is an effective tool for scientific purposes. However, it is less suitable in practice for personalizing gameful applications, because fillin...

Game atmosphere and game audio are critical factors linked to the commercial success of video games. However, game atmosphere has been neither operationalized nor clearly defined in games user research literature, making it difficult to study. We define game atmosphere as the emerging subjective experience of a player caused by the strong audiovisu...

How much music contributes to player experience (PX) in virtual reality (VR) games remains unclear in the games user research literature. A core factor of PX in VR games that has not been studied before (in relation to audio or otherwise) is time perception. Thus, we provide the first empirical exploration of how music affects time perception in a...

Gamification has enabled technology to facilitate behavior change through increasing the engagement and motivation of people in health and wellness domains. While research on physical activity (PA) and why older adults engage in PA exists, there are not many long-term studies on how gamification influences technology use and adherence to PA by olde...

BACKGROUND While in many contexts unsuccessful games targeting learning, social interaction, or behavioural change have few downsides, when covering a sensitive domain such as mental health, care must be taken to avoid harm and stigmatization of people who live with mental health conditions. As a result, evaluation of the game to identify benefits...

Personalized gamification is the tailoring of gameful design elements to user preferences to improve engagement. However, studies of user preferences have so far relied on self-reported data only and few studies investigated the effects of personalized gameful systems on task performance. This study shows that personalized gamification works in pra...

The purpose of video game tutorials is to help players easily understand new game mechanics and thereby facilitate chances of early engagement with the main contents of one’s game. The mobile game market (i.e., phones and tablets) faces important retention issues caused by a high number of players who abandon games permanently within 24 h of downlo...

While gamification strategy has been used in many areas such as marketing, education, health and wellness, only a few projects have investigated the relevance of longer study durations. There are limited number of long-term studies in the usage of gamification elements to facilitate motivation and engagement of users in a physical activity (PA) set...

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers more and more challenge the notion of technologies as objects and humans as subjects. This conceptualization has led to various approaches inquiring into object perspectives within HCI. Even though the development and analysis of games and players is filled with notions of intersubjectivity, games resear...

Purpose In a warehouse setting, where hourly workers performing manual tasks account for more than half of total warehouse expenditure, a lack of employee engagement has been directly linked to company performance. In this article, the authors present a laboratory experiment in which two gamification elements, goal setting and feedback, are impleme...

The Games User Research literature has advanced considerably on understanding why people play games and what different types of games or mechanics they prefer. However, what has been less studied is how models of player preferences explain their game choices. In this study, we address this question by combining and analyzing two datasets (N = 188 a...

Gameful digital applications have been adopted in higher education to help increase student engagement and improve learning. However, many studies have only evaluated educational applications that combine some common game design elements—such as points, leaderboards, or levels. Consequently, we still lack studies exploring different ways of designi...

We investigate and characterize a design space for in-car games based on a survey of previous work, and identify an opportunity for "cross-car" multiplayer games played among occupants in nearby cars. This is supported by innovations in automotive technology like autonomous driving, full-window heads-up displays, and ad hoc communication between ve...

With idle games, active withdrawal from the game comprises an essential part of gameplay as players wait for the game state to change over time. This mode of interaction is paradigmatic for the change of roles technologies have in our lives. However, the design elements of idle games are less well understood, particularly from the perspectives of d...

Children with Attention Deficit (Hyperactivity) Disorder or AD(H)D can require treatment for which they need to experience long-lasting neurofeedback sessions. Children might not adhere to at-home treatment activities because of the nature of these sessions; thus, not getting the benefits of the program. To increase adherence and effectiveness of t...

Player typology models classify different player motivations and behaviours. These models are necessary to design personalized games or to target specific audiences. However, many models lack validation and standard measurement instruments. Additionally, they rely on type theories, which split players into separate categories. Yet, personality rese...

Player typology models classify different player motivations and behaviours. These models are necessary to design personalized games or to target specific audiences. However, many models lack validation and standard measurement instruments. Additionally, they rely on type theories, which split players into separate categories. Yet, personality rese...

Gamification has become popular as a behavior change strategy to increase the motivation and engagement of users in a health and wellness applications. Motivational affordances or gamification elements can help to foster intrinsic or extrinsic motivation for an activity as mundane as achieving fitness and wellness goals. Research indicates that the...

Despite the emergence of many gameful design methodologies in the literature, there is a lack of methods to evaluate the resulting designs. Gameful design techniques aim to increase the user's motivation to interact with a software , but there are presently no accepted guidelines on how to find out if this goal was achieved during the design phase...

Gameful systems are often developed using "one size fits all" approaches. However, it would be better to tailor the experience according to each participant's personal preferences. On that regard, player types and game design elements are the main personalization dimensions that have been studied in the literature, even though such studies often la...

Gamification has become popular as a behavior change strategy to increase the motivation and engagement of clients in health and wellness applications. Motivational affordances or gamification elements can help to foster intrinsic or extrinsic motivation for an activity as mundane as achieving fitness and wellness goals. Research indicates that the...

We introduceCrushed It!, an interactive game on a sensor floor. This floor is combined with a multiple projector system to reduce occlusions from players' interactions with the floor. Individual displays, an HTC Vive to track player position, and smart watches were added to provide an extra layer of interactivity. We created this interactive experi...

We base everything that we do as researchers on what we write. Primarily for graduate students and young researchers, it is hard to turn a research project into a successful CHI publication. This struggle continues for postdocs and young professors trying to author excellent reviews for the CHI community that pinpoint flaws and improvements in rese...

This course will allow participants to understand the complexities of games user research methods for user experience research in games. For this, we have put together three-course sessions at CHI (80 minutes each) on applications of different user research methods in games evaluation and playtesting exercises to help participants turn player feedb...

Engagement, or rather lack thereof has become a major issue because of its negative impact on productivity. Recently, gamification has successfully been implemented into corporate technological interfaces to increase engagement of employees. This paper proposes a theory-driven experiment that examines the impact a gamified interface has on engageme...

In multiplayer games, players need to coordinate action to succeed. This paper investigates the effect of cognitive styles on performance of dyads engaged in collaborative gaming activities. 24 individuals took part in a mixed methods user-study; they were classified as field dependent (FD) or independent (FI) based on a cognitive style elicitation...

Non-player characters (NPCs) are important for immersion, but how their character design affects player experience has received little attention in previous games research. Related work suggests that NPCs support player identification, which in turn impacts player enjoyment and immersion, but this has not been explored empirically. In a between-sub...

This hybrid course will allow participants to understand the complexities of games user research methods. For this we have put together 4 sessions (2 hours each, 8 hours total) of content on applications on different user research methods in games evaluation to help participants turn player feedback into actionable design recommendations. The cours...

Gamification, the use of game elements in non-game systems, is now established as a relevant research field in human-computer interaction (HCI). Several empirical studies have shown that gameful interventions can increase engagement and generate desired behavioural outcomes in HCI applications. However, some inconclusive results indicate that we ne...

Background and Aim: Gamefulness is commonly cited as the primary goal of gamification, a family of approaches employed in education, business, healthcare, government, and elsewhere. However, gamefulness is defined imprecisely across the literature. To address this, we present a theory of gamefulness that splits gamefulness into more specific constr...

Workshops are used for academic social networking, but connections can be superficial and result in few enduring collaborations. This unworkshop offers a novel interactive format to create deep connections, peer- learning, and produces a technology-enhanced experience. Participants will generate interactive technological artifacts before the unwork...

Persuasive gameful systems are effective tools for motivating behaviour change. Research has shown that tailoring these systems to individuals can increase their efficacy; however, there is little knowledge on how to personalize them. We conducted a large-scale study of 543 participants to investigate how different gamification user types responded...

Sound and virtual reality (VR) are two important output modalities for creating an immersive player experience (PX). While prior research suggests that sounds might contribute to a more immersive experience in games played on screens and mobile displays, there is not yet evidence of these effects of sound on PX in VR. To address this, we conducted...

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...

In distributed multiplayer games, it can be difficult to communicate strategic information for planning game moves and player interactions. Often, players spend extra time communicating, reducing their engagement in the game. Visual annotations in game maps and in the gameworld can address this problem and result in more efficient player communicat...

Sex is a uniquely individual matter. Kinks and desires, pleasure and satisfaction are embodied and situated experiences. However, the design of commercial sex toys and the research about them has notoriously neglected the needs and desires of disabled people – and more so those with invisible disabilities. Neurodiverse people perceive the world dif...

Public participation in the decision-making processes that shape the urban environments we inhabit is an imperative aspect of a democratic society. Recent developments in the fields of Information Visualization, Gamification and Immersive Technologies (AR/VR/MR) offer novel opportunities for civic engagement in the planning process that remain larg...

Everything that we do as researchers is based on what we write. Especially for graduate students and young researchers, it is hard to turn a research project into a successful CHI publication. This struggle continues for postdocs and young professors trying to provide excellent reviews for the CHI community that pinpoint flaws and improvements in r...

This course introduces participants to concepts of gamification and practices some gamification evaluation with a set of heuristics used to evaluated gameful applications and gameful design. We will introduce participants to some of the common gameful intervention strategies to add game design elements that can be used to motivate users and then tr...

The Games-and-Play community has thrived at ACM SIGCHI with a consistent increase in games- and play-related submissions across research papers, workshops, posters, demos, and competitions. The community has attracted a significant number of academic researchers, students, and practitioners to CHI conferences in recent years. CHI 2018 is being held...

Many recent studies of gamification applied to higher education have demonstrated a wide range of positive results. However, most of them fail to consider any personalization factor for the student experience, despite recent studies having shown that gameful systems may be more engaging when they are personalized to each user. Therefore, the goal o...

Typologies for understanding players’ preferences toward different gameplay styles have gained popularity in research. However, attempts to model players’ preferences are based on type models instead of trait models, contrary to the latest personality research. One such model, BrainHex, was designed as an interim model to enable investigations towa...

Recently, several researchers have suggested that personalized gameful systems can be more effective than generic approaches. However, there is still scarce empirical evidence that the suggested factors for personalization, such as gender, age, user types, and personality traits, will be effective in improving user engagement and performance for pe...

Games User Research (GUR) methods and principles are evolving rapidly in keeping pace with the innovation rates in games. Every day brings new insights and practices, and new technologies keep expanding the boundaries of GUR. In this conclusion, we briefly outline some of the areas where innovations are being made or the front lines expanding in GU...

Exertion games, also referred to as exergames, have become popular because they combine physical activity (PA) with game mechanics, such as actions, challenges, and achievements. Exergames have been also used to encourage PA among older adults, as technological interventions to help achieve the latters’ health and wellness goals and as aids to reha...

Today, Games User Research forms an integral component of the development of any kind of interactive entertainment. User research stands as the primary source of business intelligence in the incredibly competitive game industry. This book aims to provide the foundational, accessible, go-to resource for people interested in GUR. It is a community-dr...

Goal-setting theory has been used for decades to explain how to motivate people to perform better in work-related tasks, but more recently gamification has also gained attention as an alternative method to increase engagement and performance in many contexts. However, despite goals and feedback being common elements of gameful implementations, ther...

Designing fitness programs to combat a sedentary lifestyle and foster older adults' motivation and goal-setting is not yet well-understood beyond point-based systems. To improve older adults' (over 50 years) health and wellness, we studied a gamified physical activity intervention over eight weeks in an experiment (N=30) with three conditions (gami...

During minimally-invasive interventions, physicians need to interact with medical image data, which cannot be done while the hands are occupied. To address this challenge, we propose two interaction techniques which use gaze and foot as input modalities for hands-free interaction. To investigate the feasibility of these techniques, we created a set...

Player preferences for different gaming styles or game elements has been a topic of interest in human-computer interaction for over a decade. However, current models suggested by the extant literature are generally based on classifying abstract gaming motivations or player archetypes. These concepts do not directly map onto the building blocks of g...