Across disciplines, games are being increasingly used as research environments for experimentation and empirical study. This includes enlisting the use of games to explore human behavior and decision making, validate algorithms, consistently improve AI, collect player data, inform game design and more. However, the cost, complexity and rigor needed to produce these types of games is high and not enough is known about how games could be fully utilized in service as rigorous research environments. This workshop aims to bring together the game design and research community who have used games as research environments or those interested in building or enlisting games for this purpose, for a discussion on this topic and to share lessons learned from their work.
The workshop will have two parts. The first part will be brainstorming and group discussion where participants will explore core topics and lay the groundwork for tracing the boundaries of games as research environments. The second part will be a hands-on session with the game research environment Mad Science, developed in the PLAIT lab at Northeastern University. The workshop will conclude with group discussion.
Participants will require a laptop for participation in the hands-on session.
Website:
https://gamesasresearchenvironments.wordpress.com/
