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Investigating Game Mechanics that Target Players' Self-Control While Maintaining Engagement

Authors:

Vanessa K. BohnsAuthors Info & Claims

CHI PLAY '18: Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play

Pages 489 - 502

https://doi.org/10.1145/3242671.3242698

Published: 23 October 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Whenever someone chooses to study instead of going to a party, or forgo dessert after dinner, that person is exercising self-control. Self-control is essential for achieving long-term goals, but isn't easy. Games present a compelling opportunity to engage in tasks that allow a player to exercise and improve self-control, and consequently provide data about a person's cognitive capacity to exert self-control. However, exercising self-control can be effortful and depleting, which makes incorporating it into a game design that maintains engagement and quality of experience a challenge. We present the design of game mechanics for exercising and improving self-control, and an initial study that effectively demonstrates that games can be designed to engage a broad level of self-control processes without negatively affecting player engagement and experience. Our results also show that player performance is connected to trait-level self-control. We discuss how (for example) players with low trait self-control can therefore be identified, and games intended to improve or exercise self-control can dynamically adapt to this information.

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Cited By

Tyack AMekler E(2024)Self-Determination Theory and HCI Games Research: Unfulfilled Promises and Unquestioned ParadigmsACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/367323031:3(1-74)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3673230
Tyack AMekler EBernhaupt RMueller FVerweij DAndres JMcGrenere JCockburn AAvellino IGoguey ABjørn PZhao SSamson BKocielnik R(2020)Self-Determination Theory in HCI Games Research: Current Uses and Open QuestionsProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376723(1-22)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3313831.3376723

Index Terms

Investigating Game Mechanics that Target Players' Self-Control While Maintaining Engagement
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. Empirical studies in HCI

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cover image ACM Conferences

CHI PLAY '18: Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play

October 2018

563 pages

ISBN:9781450356244

DOI:10.1145/3242671

General Chairs:
Florian 'Floyd' Mueller
Exertion Games Lab, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
,
Daniel Johnson
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
,
Ben Schouten
Eindhoven University of Technology and Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, the Netherlands
,
Program Chairs:
Phoebe O. Toups Dugas
Play & Interactive Experiences for Learning Lab, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA
,
Peta Wyeth
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 23 October 2018

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CHI PLAY '18

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CHI PLAY '18: The annual symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play

October 28 - 31, 2018

VIC, Melbourne, Australia

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CHI PLAY '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 43 of 123 submissions, 35%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 421 of 1,386 submissions, 30%

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Cited By

Tyack AMekler E(2024)Self-Determination Theory and HCI Games Research: Unfulfilled Promises and Unquestioned ParadigmsACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/367323031:3(1-74)Online publication date: 15-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3673230
Tyack AMekler EBernhaupt RMueller FVerweij DAndres JMcGrenere JCockburn AAvellino IGoguey ABjørn PZhao SSamson BKocielnik R(2020)Self-Determination Theory in HCI Games Research: Current Uses and Open QuestionsProceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3313831.3376723(1-22)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3313831.3376723

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