Dr. Jacques Carette

Believable Non-Player Characters (NPCs) are a crucial component of narrative-driven games. An important aspect of believable characters is their contextually-relevant reactions, which is often driven by emotion in humans. The plausibility of NPCs’ “emotions” partly depends on their psychological validity. A Computational Model of Emotion (CME), grounded in emotion theories and/or models from psychology, is an attractive solution. Play-testing believability...

Believable Non-Player Characters (NPCs) are a crucial component of narrativedriven games, which offer rich player experiences (PX). The quality of these NPCs’ interactions with players motivates continuous engagement with the game, and often re-engagement after players stop playing. An important aspect of believable characters is their contextually-relevant reactions to changing situations, including those caused by player actions. In humans, this...

Studying and developing systems that can recognize, express, and “have” emotions is called affective computing. To create a Computational Model of Emotion (CME), one must first identify what kind of system to build, then find emotion theories that match its requirements. The relevant literature is vast. This survey aims to help design CMEs that generate emotions—separated into emotion representation and...

Games are made up of different kinds of experience; game designers are experience designers for players. We are specifically interested in the mechanical experiences of players interacting with challenges.

How does one build a healthy gaming ecosystem? Recent evidence clearly demonstrates the existence of problematic gaming [1]. Predicting problematic gaming is still in its infancy. Here we focus on excessive gaming and model in-game behaviour as a means to continuously predict future play time. This can be used to help players maintain a healthy balance between the virtual and...

We look at players’ mechanical experience of gameplay challenges. We consider mechanical experience as fundamental design knowledge: designers need to analyze the challenges hey craft to understand the skills necessary from their players for success. One application of this study is to explain why some challenges may be inaccessible to certain players. There is currently no comprehensive framework for describing...

We explore the relationship between a player’s cognitive and motor abilities, and the abilities necessary for completing specific challenges. Existing engineering-focused work does not treat the player on the same footing as the game. We view (the mechanical part of) games as a system of systems composed of the game mechanics (including challenges), and the player via their cognitive and...

We are interested in a systematic understanding the effect of visual scaling — changing the size of the screen, while holding other factors constants — on gameplay. Through examples, we illustrate the effects that arise. We investigate scaling up as well as down, and find that the effects are quite different. We give a first classification of the underlying causes...

Recent Computer Role Playing Games such as Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, have entranced us with their expansive, complex worlds. However, the Non-Player Characters (NPCs) in these games remain stale and lackluster outside of scripted events. This is, in part, because game engines generally do not simulate emotions in...

We present four experiments comparing player performance between several information displays used in first-person shooter (FPS) games. Broadly, these information displays included heads-up displays (HUDs), and alternatives such as spatial representations, and diegetic (in-game) indicators. Each experiment isolated a specific task common to FPS games: (1) monitoring ammunition, (2) monitoring health, (3) matching the weapon to the situation, and (4)...

We propose a workshop that will solicit contributions from the game user research and human-computer interaction communities. The workshop will provide a format for discussion of issues in best practices in user research and experiment methodology, as well as technical contributions in novel game user interfaces.

We present a study comparing player performance in a shooter game using two different types of scaling across four display sizes. The first scaling type used uniform scaling where increasing the display size also increased the size of all in-game elements by the same factor. The second employed non-uniform scaling where all in-game elements remained fixed in size, but the...

We present an experiment comparing five ammunition display methods in first-person shooter (FPS) games. These included both diegetic (in-game) and heads-up display (HUD) options. HUD displays included a bar, icons, and a counter. Diegetic displays were displayed in-game beside the player’s weapon. Two diegetic displays were evaluated: a number and bullets. We compared the performance offered by each ammunition display...

We present two experiments on large tiled displays used for fast-action gaming. Using a simulated tiled display, we assess the effects of interior bezel size, and configuration in a top-down arcade style space shooter game with many moving objects. Our experiments also investigate the effect of bezel compensation. The first experiment examines bezel size independent of configuration, using simulated bezel...

Many spatial UI systems (e.g., VR) rely on large displays. One method of building large high-resolution displays is to use multiple HD monitors as tiles in a single large display. The downside is the presence of monitor borders – bezels – between each tile in such a display. We present a study looking at the impact of bezel width on...

We experimentally evaluate display size in arcade style “bullet hell” shooter games. Two scaling methods were compared: uniform, and non-uniform. Results indicate a strongly linear increase of performance with display diagonal size. This was more pronounced with non-uniform scaling.

The method used to display game information, either overlay or in-game, in first-person shooters, likely has a measurable impact on player performance. Quantitative research is needed in this area, as game designers are pushing for heads-up displays to be as minimal as possible. This is especially important for the smaller screens (such as tablets and even cellular devices), which are...

Video game development is currently a very labour-intensive endeavour. Furthermore it involves multi-disciplinary teams of artistic content creators and programmers, whose typical working patterns are not easily meshed. SAGA is our first effort at augmenting the productivity of such teams.