Human-Computer Interaction and Simulation/Gaming

This issue contains two sections. The first one is a symposium on human-computer interaction and games, edited by Karin Slegers, Lizzy Bleumers, Bernhard Maurer, Alina Krischkowsky, and Mark Blythe (2019). The second part consists of three regular submissions to the journal, as well as an obituary. We chose this structure, in order to remind our regular readers, who are often interested in other aspects of simulation and gaming, to look also into this area – because it is in fact one of our field’s key connections to other crucially important communities. It includes the kinds of play that are extremely important to simulation/gaming studies.

Disciplines that research and experiment with the interactions between humans and computers, humans and technology, or even animals and computers, have been interested in games and play for a long time. The archives of the key Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (commonly known as CHI; established in 1982), its spin-off CHI PLAY (since 2014), or the proceedings of the HiCSS conference (established in 1968) span over a long period. The broad spectrum of topics over the last decade has become the key venue for gamification research, with numerous essential contributions to the study of instrumental gaming and gamification in its various forms. The presence of that tradition in this journal has nevertheless been rare, until now.

The three articles selected for this issue by the guest editors from a special CHI 2016 workshop represent varying aspects of how these two (or actually more) traditions interact and how they strengthen each other. The focus of all three is the application of games to do human-computer interaction (HCI) research. The first of them, “Using the SGDA framework to design and evaluate research games” by David Geerts et al. (2019), applies serious games to train passengers, hospital staff, and television viewers. The authors show that despite the varying contexts and projects, gaming simulation can provide very useful responses applicable for future development. Further, they argue for not just drawing from existing designs, but also for going for completely new ideas, in order to provide HCI with novel, original concepts invented and tested through play.

With “Validity threats in quantitative data collection with games: A narrative survey”, David Gundry and Sebastian Deterding (2019) discuss the ways in which results from a game can diverge from what is being researched. The central challenge is that even as games and simulations are simplified systems that may depict aspects of reality, that simplification in turn may lead the players to emphasize the wrong aspects of the simulation at hand. To assess the various types of data gathering validity risks, the authors use a narrative survey of elements and game types, and gauge associated variables that may affect results that many other authors in the field can have taken for granted.

In the third HCI Research contribution, “Tensions within the ministry of provenance: Reflections on co-creating a research game together with artists”, Richard Wetzel, Khaled Bachour, and Martin Flintham (2019) address tensions that arose during a game created together with artists. They conclude that three factors are especially significant: making research questions a functional part of the game play, the creation of content that is actually relevant to the research with the artists, and conflicts of vision for the work at hand. To solve the tensions, the authors provide vignettes that enable the readers to recognize such tensions, and potentially deal with them.

The other three articles include topics that represent the broad variety of this journal, even as they do not contain a direct contribution to our most rapidly growing fields, medical and health care simulations. Datu Buyung Agusdinata and Heide Lukosch (2019), in “Supporting interventions to reduce household greenhouse gas emissions: A transdisciplinary role-playing game development” tackle everyday life issues with potential contributions to global warming by deploying transdisciplinary role-playing to raise awareness and understanding of everyday decisions. As the work is not completely in line with the typical principles of role-playing research, it will certainly provide interesting reading to that community as well.

With “Taking a glimpse into the future by playing?” Robert Lohmann (2019) enters a classic territory that has been of interest to simulation and gaming studies even before the five decades of this journal: making predictions of the future, based on playing games. The work also ties closely to the roots of Simulation & Gaming in that it addresses policy simulations in a novel way. Using the example of a single game and its analyses, Lohmann demonstrates the value of gaming for policy decision-making, but also indirectly, the importance of Simulation & Gaming’s continuing practice of also publishing academically grounded examples of relevant, ready-to-run instrumental games.

Tim Rogmans and Wasseem Abaza’s (2019) article, “The impact of international business strategy simulation games on student engagement” likewise attends to one of the cornerstones of this journal, business strategy simulations. Delving into the very classics of literature in that sector, the authors challenge the claim that games are supposed to be almost always be motivating and interesting. They show that student reactions were polarized and that measuring actual engagement continues to be a difficult task.

Finally, this issue contains the obituary (Kriz, Clapper, & Harviainen, 2019) of one of the pioneers of our field and an ISAGA founder, Allan G. Feldt (1932-2019). Feldt was a moving force in the early design of urban development games, and his central contribution, CLUG, was used in the field by numerous scholars and educators for three decades. In the age of games that vanish from the market sometimes in moments, and when educational games are easily seen as “lesser cousins” of recreational games, such continuous relevance is all the more important to remember.

That continual relevance and broad scope is what drives us forward during this 50th anniversary year of Simulation & Gaming. Only with the continual deployment, study, and critique of more games, old and new, in contexts familiar and foreign, will we know more about how to use such games enjoyably, effectively, and efficiently.