Special Issue on Hybrid Games and Interaction Design

Board games gained significant momentum throughout the past two decades, with some of the best creations earning millions of dollars in funding platforms during 2021, in spite of the Covid-19 pandemic. Additionally, digital games have surpassed all other media, from film to music, in investments and returns. Board and digital games are two forms of play which use the same base of design (the game design) so it was without surprise that a new hybrid approach, that mixed both media, would appear.

In this special issue, we want not only to present the current state-of-the-art of the hybrid games, as the possibilities beyond current days, making use of speculative approaches to design, as design fiction, but we want to dig deeper through the lenses of interaction design, to understand the new needs in the realm of technologies. Furthermore, we want to understand the full impacts and effects of this move on human interaction with game artifacts and consequently find out what should we expect from the discipline of interaction design while using ludic approaches in the next decade.

 More information:

http://ixdea.uniroma2.it/inevent/events/idea2010/index.php?s=102&link=call56

Special Issue on User Evaluation for VR Games

The rapid development of motion tracking, miniature displays, communication technologies, and the unique characteristics (immersion, realism, engagement) of immersive virtual reality (VR) technologies have changed the nature of gaming and, to a large extent, helped shape its future. The way players interact, and experience VR games is very different from traditional platforms. For instance, VR players are moving from (1) 2D screen-based gaming to 360° gaming, (2) playing the character to being the character, and (3) limited sensory feedback to complete feedback (e.g., touch, taste, smell). Despite these changes, current research on VR games still relies primarily on user evaluation methods and approaches designed for traditional 2D screen-based games. As VR becomes more pervasive, more attention needs to be paid to designing, reconfiguring, or validating methods and approaches for evaluating gameplay and experiences in VR games.

VR provides a golden opportunity for using real-time measures of human responses essential to the players' experience. Traditional physiological or biometrics such as eye-tracking and heart rate, electroencephalography and electromyography, emotions/expressions could be considered and adapted for assessing VR gameplay experience, but they need to be validated. In addition, these physiological data have the potential to be used in real-time to improve the user and gameplay experience. Real-time use of such data remains largely underexplored. This special issue focuses on exploring novel and state-of-the-art user evaluation methods for VR games. We are looking for model papers with high standard, rigorously tested user evaluation methods that other researchers can follow and build on. The special issue aims to bring together researchers from various backgrounds to report their novel methods, approaches, and designs to assess VR gameplay and experience.

More information:

https://transactions.games/submit/special-issues

Special Issue Technologies and Applications for Ubiquitous Interactive Media

Modern interactive media are reactive, context-aware, ambient, and ubiquitous - and embedded in everyday life. The challenge of developing interactive media that are engaging and effective is necessarily an interdisciplinary one, involving a blend of human and technological, applied and theoretical research, technology and application design.

This special issue aims to explore the connections and synergies between disciplines, and new interdisciplinary connections between them, in the creation of new forms of interactive media. The issue will bring together contributions from diverse domains including artificial intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, ubiquitous computing and human computer interaction.

More information:

https://www.springer.com/journal/779/updates/20120914