Primary supervisor
Phoebe Toups DugasAs games have increased in complexity, so have the worlds in which players find themselves. The automap has become a staple feature of many video games; in some, the players is allowed to edit the map itself during play (e.g., to mark important locations or lay out a course). We know about what games offer players in terms of game maps, but not how players *actually use* those features. This project will collect data on players' cartography activities in games.
The project will develop students' experiences with game design, visual analysis, questionnaire development, and reflexive thematic analysis.
Note that Supervisor Toups Dugas does not employ any form of generative AI in her research; supervised students should expect that such tools will *not* be allowed for work on this project.
Student cohort
Aim/outline
1.) Collect a sample of maps that players have produced from video games with insights into what those players did and why.
2.) Visually analyse the maps and thematically analyse participants' responses to better understand what players are doing with maps in play.
3.) Develop insights into how game designers can support player needs.
URLs/references
Phoebe O. Toups Dugas, Nicolas LaLone, Katta Spiel, and Bill Hamilton. 2020. Paper to Pixels: A Chronicle of Map Interfaces in Games. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1433–1451. https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395502
Phoebe O. Toups Dugas, Nicolas Lalone, Sultan A. Alharthi, Hitesh Nidhi Sharma, and Andrew M. Webb. 2019. Making Maps Available for Play: Analyzing the Design of Game Cartography Interfaces. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 26, 5, Article 30 (October 2019), 43 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3336144
Required knowledge
Experience as a video gamer a plus.