“Playing to win?” @ multi.player conference

This Friday, Pejman Mirza-Babaei and myself will be presenting “Playing to Win? : The correlation between biometric responses and social interaction in co-located social gaming” at the multi.player conference at the university of Hohenheim.

This paper has been a collaboration between ourselves, Graham McAllister of Vertical Slice and Jonathan Napier of Relentless Software. It shares insights gained from our recent studies combing coding social interaction, biometric readings and self-assessment to understand how player’s react to different social and in-game situations.

We’ve found some really interesting results, implying that player behaviour is divided by their inherent motivations. For each player type, it is possible to measure and evaluate the specific forms of social interaction they display, and react to.

This research aims to be useful not only academically, but also of use to commercial games development, by allowing greater insight into targetting development to specific player types, or into maximising the interaction generated by a multiplayer game.

I hope to share the presentation, and the paper, afher the conference. However, if anyone has questions in the meantime, how about contacting me?

(what a link-heavy update!)

edit: A review of the conference can be found here
Full information on the research method and findings will be up on Gamasutra soon – stay tuned!