Lightweight Games User Research for Indies and Non-Profit Organizations
at the ACM CHI 2015 Conference May 7th or 8th, 2016 in San Jose, CA, USA
1st Submission Round: December 18th, 2015
Early Acceptance Round: December 21st, 2015
2nd Submission Round: January 13th, 2016
Final Acceptance Round: January 20th, 2016
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This one-day workshop will take place at ACM CHI 2016 and wants to bring together professionals, researchers, practitioners and anyone else interested in the domain of Game User Research, across companies, organizations, and research institutions.
*** TOPIC ***
Small independent developers, non-profit organizations, and academics that create games on a budget are currently underrepresented in the CHI Game User Research (CHI) community. The GUR community has thrived at CHI with four workshops and a course since CHI 2012; all of these were well attended. However, in line with the #chi4good spirit, the GUR field must advance towards demographics that will benefit from GUR but are currently less well represented. This includes small, independent developers, non-profit organizations, and academics that create mobile games, games for health or change, and educational games. This workshop will be a think tank focused on developing methodological and practical solutions for anyone who creates games with minimal resources. The think tank event invites everyone to participate and construct collective knowledge, share and discuss among GUR professionals, non-profits, indie developers, and the interdisciplinary academics interested in the field.
This GUR workshop is the first of its kind in that it focuses on lightweight methods for GUR, for example, quick and dirty user experience setups and methods, low-expertise requirement approaches or low-cost adaptations of eye-tracking methods to evaluate games user interfaces. Ultimately, the workshop serves as a springboard towards building a community of user researchers around the common issues and approaches when dealing with low budgeted projects.
*** PARTICIPATION ***
Our goal is to understand, investigate, promote and provide the value of GUR for small companies and -initiatives and any other situation where resources are minimal. We are interested to find out how developers and academics can benefit from existing GUR strategies, tools, and techniques in the particular context of small-scale development; or how these need to be modified, adapted, or re-thought to meet actual needs. This is notable regarding resource cost, zero training need, high value-to-cost ratio, as well as automation and remote testing capacities. The outcome of this workshop will be a collection of DIY (Do-It-Yourself) best practices, guidelines, tools, and techniques for this target group that is simple, lightweight, and cheap to apply.
*** SUBMISSION ***
Participants are invited to submit a 4-page position paper (CHI extended abstracts format https://chi2016.acm.org/wp/guide-to-submission-formats/) or an abstract and slides/video. Content should highlight practical challenges relating to applying GUR in non-profit organizations, indie and other small-scale and low-resource environments.
Participants are asked to submit their proposals via the EasyChair submission system (https://easychair.org/account/signin.cgi?key=31282663.6b0jEx0wZJIeM0Ra). A short biography of each author attending the workshop needs to be included (100-150 words). Submissions will be juried by the organizing committee, who will also select up to 20 participants according to relevance, quality of results, practical value and diversity. If accepted, at least one author must register for the workshop and for one or more days of the CHI conference. Papers will also be compiled on the workshop website (http://gur.hcigames.com/chi2016/).
*** IMPORTANT DATES ***
Submissions deadline round 1: December 18th, 2015
Early acceptance round for participants: December 21st, 2015.
Submissions deadline round 2: January 13th, 2016
Final acceptance round: January 20th, 2016
Participants’ final submissions: February 12th, 2016.
Workshop: May 7th or 8th, 2015
*** ORGANIZERS ***
Lennart Nacke (HCI Games Group, University of Waterloo, Canada)
Andrea Abney (Scopely, CA, USA)
Zhu (Cole) Zhenyu (Tencent Games, China)
Pejman Mirza-Babaei (User Research Director, Execution Labs, Canada)
Christiane Moser (Center for HCI, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Salzburg, Austria)
Anders Drachen (Aalborg University, Denmark)
*** CONTACT ***
More details to be found on the workshop website: http://gur.hcigames.com/chi2016/
For any further information on the workshop please contact: chigur2016@easychair.org
Twitter: @CHI_GUR
