Videogame Engagement as a Process of Seeking Cultural Value

Videogame Engagement as a Process of Seeking Cultural Value

Empirical investigations of videogame play and videogame engagement are often delimited along demographic or genre lines. This paper summarizes an attempt to generate a theory of videogame play and engagement which is not restricted to arbitrary factors of types of players or types of games. In order to achieve this theory a version of Classic Grounded Theory (Glaser 1978) was employed.

The result reveals a highly generalized theory: that players engage with games if they can find a sense of net personal cultural value as they select, play and reflect on their play experiences. The theory is presented and explained and the contributing hypotheses are also presented and explained.

In conclusion it is felt that the methodology has produced a theory with reasonable fit and relevance, suggesting some utility to the fields of Game Design and Videogame Research. Further work is suggested which will clarify and possibly modify the theory to increase the perceived fit, relevance, and utility.

Categories and Subject Descriptors: K.8.0 [Personal Computing]: General

General Terms: Games

Additional Key Words and Phrases: engagement, qualitative analysis, flow, fun, videogames, identity, culture, Pragmatism, Grounded Theory Methodology

1. INTRODUCTION

This paper summarises the findings of a research programme that set out to empirically create a theory relating to individuals’ experiences of videogame playing.

John Long Comment 1

With the perspective that many contemporary empirical theories are too narrow in focus (e.g. Malone 1981 studied only elementary school children) , methodologically inappropriate (e.g. Sweetser and Johnson 2004 report having based part of their work on a “Grounded Theory” analysis of a 4 participant focus group), or place undue weight on folk developed assumptions (e.g. Brown and Cairns 2004 seem to take as their starting point that “immersion” is the ultimate objective of videogame players) and that a data driven approach with minimal a priori assumptions relating to types of games, types of players, or proposed engagements and objectives might have a chance of arriving at a useful theory with broad applicability, a data-driven methodology was selected, interpreted and employed.

Comment 2

The methodology employed was an interpretation of Glaser’s (1978) Classic Grounded Theory Methodology (CGT), as Glaser positions CGT as a methodology that, if applied correctly, should produce a global dependant variable or central hypothesis supported by contributing variables and sub-hypotheses in a data-driven or empirical manner, that should account for most of the variation found in data related to the domain of study. As this methodology was employed then the resulting theory is a highly generalised concept accounting for players’ reported experiences of engaging with videogames, but with a systematic connection to sub-hypotheses and ultimately data related to the domain. It is hoped that in ‘grounding’ the hypotheses in information about our chosen domain that the theory developed can clearly account for the domain rather than account for arbitrary or ‘grand’ theory.

Comment 3

Sections later in this paper summarise the resulting global hypothesis and the sub-hypotheses that contribute to it, and in order that the reader is clear about how this theory was derived the following section explains the particular interpretation of Classic Grounded Theory (CGT) employed. The concluding sections of this paper explore if the utility of the theory with respect to the fields of videogame design and player research, and if such a general theory or the supporting hypotheses can be further modified or reformulated to be of greater utility to interested audiences and if so how. These concluding sections also attempt to place the theory in a broader theoretical context.

Ultimately, the contribution of this work is felt to sit in 2 areas. The first is in applying CGT in a domain quite different from those it might normally be applied to.

Comment 4

The other main contribution is to forcefully express the general hypothesis that players are seeking culturally expressed value though cycles of positive and negative identification with videogame play experiences, and that this value sum drives engagement.

Comment 5

2. INTERPRETATION OF CGT METHODOLOGY AS EMPLOYED

2.1 Overview of Grounded Theory

For various reasons the term Grounded Theory (GT) is applied to multiple research perspectives, including a form of analysis applied to qualitative data (e.g. Sweetser and Johnson 2004) or a means of analysing the behavior of individuals relative to a specific hypothesis (Brown and Cairns 2004; Fabricatore, Nussbaum, and Rosas 2002), delimiting the domain according to a priori hypotheses about what is important. Early in the programme of research which forms the basis of this paper the decision was made to understand the methodology in the broadest sense, and hopefully to develop a theory inductively (though perhaps more accurately abductively) derived from the domain of people playing videogames. This ‘inductive’ approach is most forcefully expressed by one of the co-originators of the term ‘Grounded Theory’, Barney Glaser (BG Glaser and Strauss 1967; BG Glaser 1978; B Glaser 1992).

Comment 6

In this version of GT no a priori hypotheses are formed, as the objective of the methodology is to form hypotheses based on available data rather than to validate existing theory. In order to achieve hypotheses about the domain a methodology encompassing data collection, data analysis, and theory formulation is proposed.

Comment 7

There are several methods within the methodology, and the understanding of those methods as they have been applied in this research are summarized here in order that the reader can both understand where the theoretical concepts came from and how this research might be differentiated from other similarly labeled work.

There are 5 methods or activities which make up the CGT methodology:

• Data collection

• Comparative coding

• Theoretical ‘memoing’

• Sorting

• Writing

Each method is intended to move the research from information about a domain to a coherent theory about what is going on in that domain.

Comment 8

These methods are not linear, sequential activities but methods which apply in different proportion at different times. The following subsections will describe how and when they are used while also describing how these methods were employed in the research described in this paper.

For reasons of brevity no attempt will be made in the following text to explore the merits of the methodology from an epistemological basis, rather the following subsections are provided to allow the reader a means of evaluating how the theory was derived in order to differentiate this research from other similar attempts. For a critique of the Grounded Theory methodology see Bryant (2007).

Comment 9

2.2 Data Collection Method

Any information which is directly collected from the domain of study or is unequivocally concerned with that domain is useful and should be included. So where the thoughts and actions of people are concerned we might include formal interviews, informal conversations, focus groups, overheard conversations, diaries, and possibly observations, or applicable statistics, while other less textual sources might also provide useful insights. Deciding what to collect and when to use it is determined by the shape and direction of the current theory and progress of coding and memoing (see below). This ‘theoretical sampling’ approach helps to provide a degree of parsimony in the amount of data collected, as in linking data collection to data analysis and theory formation helps to ensure that only as much data will be collected as required. Relative to the process of coding (below) there are essentially two types of targets for sampling: ‘new’ kinds of case (by which we hope to generate new codes) and ‘similar’ kinds of case (by which we hope to flesh out the properties of existing codes).

The research reported in this research started by interviewing by opportunity (friends, relatives and colleagues), attempted to explore diary and observation data, further interviewed specific individuals (non-players, more ‘casual’ or more ‘hardcore’ players, and an increasing number of strangers with disparate tastes ), and included a few field noted observations about overheard and informal conversations. The total number of individuals who contributed either distinct codes or an illustration for a particular memo (post coding) was in the order of the mid 30s. The data was in the form of transcribed interviews, recorded but un-transcribed interviews, recorded observations, and field notes (the diaries proved unproductive).

Comment 10

2.3 Comparative Coding Method

The GT methodology grew out of research by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss (1967) which utilized a process they knew as ‘Constant Comparison’. This process is advocated as the coding method for CGT by Glaser (1978). The codes generated in CGT then are initially derived from comparing data to data. If an apparent part of the data appears to have a relationship with some other part then the nature of this relationship is noted as a code. Most simply then, codes are categories of data or properties of already identified categories. At a more complex level codes can be compared themselves producing meta or ‘theoretical’ codes. Coding is an attempt to reframe raw data, making the theory fit multiple cases rather than single interesting occurrences.

Codes were created in two ways in the research reported here, early in the programme transcriptions of the data were marked with subjective observations, which further into the programme (once the constant comparative emphasis was more clearly understood) were clustered into categories and properties which were subsequently added to in further iterations in the constant comparative manner described above. Few theoretical codes were created, but rather theoretical memos were created which accounted for the comparisons between existing codes. This way of coding with memos rather than specific theoretical codes was due in part to the software employed (Atlas.ti Anon. 1993), which made comparative codes or properties, and especially theoretical codes of codes, a little tricky, but in using memos to create theoretical codes rather than a specific ‘theoretical code’ facility of the supporting software, the result is assumed to be the same.

2.4 Theoretical Memoing Method

In the jargon of GT ‘memoing’ is the activity of interest, the main material of the methodology if you will. As the researcher iteratively collects data and codes it, and as they sort and write their outputs they should be constantly capturing each hypothesis they have about what it all means and how it all fits together. This central act of memoing drives every other activity. The researcher finds what to sample for next based on their theoretical observations about the codes they have generated, when to stop collecting and coding data based on how their memos are filling out, and it is the memos which are arranged (and further complemented) in the sorting process, which then yields a structured collection of memoed theoretical ideas to be written.

Memos are critical to two milestones found in the methodology. At some point the researcher will come to believe that their data collection and coding seem to be about a particular code. As the memos coalesce about this code the researcher will come to conclude that they may have identified what the domain may be about (in the jargon of the methodology they have identified the ‘core category’). Once this milestone is met the research moves from collecting data and coding openly for all possibilities and starts collecting data and coding specifically to selectively generate theoretical ideas about this code. The stopping rule for these selective iterations of coding is that once the researcher is no longer generating any new theoretical ideas they might be said to have theoretically saturated the core code. That is not to say that new codes might not be being generated by further iterations, but that as the researcher continues to sample, in accordance with their emerging theory new codes are interchangeable with old. Thus listing out all possible types of subject, perspective, context, tool, strategy, or whatever is not the point and developing categories of only those things that contribute to the emerging theory in terms of new theoretical ideas are important features in ensuring that the theory is developed parsimoniously. We might also say that in recognizing that not every case can be included we are leaving opportunity for any resulting hypothesis to be logically falsifiable.

This research recorded theoretical memos in the appropriate function of the software employed. Generally these memos consisted of short notes about what the codes might represent, as well as relationships between codes and possible targets for data collection. The core category selected for saturation by selective coding related to players’ felt identities and how these identities manifested as roles through which the player ascribed value to different game features. Memos were also raised relating these ideas to general theories drawn primarily from Social Psychology where appropriate, especially during selective coding and sorting. As explained below, the sorting process showed this concept of valorization of game features according to a player’s self sense to be somewhat inadequate in accounting for all the theoretical ideas raised, and as such was duly extended.

Comment 11

2.5 Memo Sorting Method

Once the core category is felt to be suitably saturated, the collection of memos is not expected to be in a state that would allow for immediate publication, rather while most of the memos are expected to implicitly relate to the core category or how the core category explicitly relates to others, these relations are likely to lack a structure suitable for writing up into a clear publication. There are likely to be gaps and inconsistencies which will need to be dealt with before writing can happen, if one intends to present a coherent theory rather than an incoherent collection of observations. Sorting then is the process of creating a framework for the intended dissemination of the research findings and is performed in order to make as many of the theoretical ideas work towards explaining the derivation of the core hypothesis as possible.

It is likely that new comparisons will be noticed in the act of sorting and as such the process of memoing continues throughout. It is also possible that gaps exist that require some further rounds of data collection and selective coding. It is also possible that the core hypothesis may well need modifying in order to account for more of the theoretical ideas and codes than previously realised. In this sense sorting is critical and is not entirely equivalent to the process of expounding generalised observations which often occurs in ethnographic work (e.g. Carr 2005).

In this research the pre-sort core category which related to a players sense of identity and assumed socio-cultural role relative to game features was felt to be somewhat inadequate, in that that concept failed to account for the mass of data, codes and thus theoretical ideas relating to the cyclical process of engagement. As such the sort revealed that it was more reasonable to talk of players’ cycles of identifying with games at a feature level, which is the theory presented here. The sort was physically accomplished by printing out the electronically captured memos, complimented by hand written memos which were raised during the sort, which were repeatedly placed into piles until almost every memo was included and a writable structure of chapters and subdivisions was visible.

2.6 Theory Writing Method

After sorting, writing then is not the process of structuring an argument as much as it is the process of laying out the sorted theoretical memos in a text, ensuring that the connections and derivations are made clear for the reader. Also in this process other theories are related to the presented theory (which is also possible in the sort, where general theoretical ideas might help to contextualise the saturated theory).

As such the reader can assume that the sections of this paper that set out the theory are in fact directly representative of the sorted memos expanded upon and linked; this paper being a summary of a much more comprehensive thesis which literally contains all the expounded memos.

Comment 12 Comment 13

3. The Developed theory

Comment 14

As proposed above, the following subsections represent the theoretical memos as an integrated text, with reference to specific data where necessary (and as space allows). Starting with the contributing hypotheses and leading to the composite or core hypothesis will hopefully allow the reader a means to evaluate the theory clearly that a top down presentation might obscure.

3.1 Process of Engagement

A major observation to make about player engagement is that it apparently does not happen as a singular event. The following subsection expands on the interim report published XXXXXX in which an early understanding of the methodology and early findings was published. The following differs from that published work in that the phases or stages were slightly different in the XXXX publication. What is common is that there is a phase of engagement that occurs before play, and the difference between the two presentations is due to greater saturation and borne out of a formal sorting process.

Essentially this sub-hypothesis is that there are 3 indistinct phases of engagement: Selection (before hands-on interaction); Play (actual hands-on interaction); and Reflection.

3.1.1 Selection

The mechanisms employed to select games are complex and depend on the particular individual and their sense of identifications. Tying the cycle of engagements to the sense of identity will be explored later in this report, in the section dealing with the core hypothesis. This sub-section and the sub-sections relating to playing and reflecting will focus on generalized patterns and procedures employed by individuals as they engage with a proposition.

Selection itself can be broken down into broad strategies, situated within contexts:

3.1.1.1 Selection of the singular activity of ‘videogame play’

Firstly we can talk of prospective players selecting videogame play, in current forms, as a potentially agreeable activity. This global point of selection can be best seen in the attitudes of those who reject videogame playing outright. Such individuals expressed attitudes suggesting that for some videogaming represents a male, juvenile, sedentary and solitary activity which is not for them, seeing themselves as variously adult, active, social and not male individuals. While some interest was expressed in novel developments in the products which militate the existing perceptions of gaming (primarily Nintendo’s attempts at introducing motion control and marketing which focused on social settings and players who were not necessarily male or juvenile), the non-gamer subjects had not made the investment of time, money, or effort in exploring these possibilities.

For those individual who had not rejected videogame play outright the data reveals a number of strategies employed and perspectives on what videogame activities they might actively seek. These selection criteria reach into a huge range of potentials for play, and are not simply the user finding an agreeable narrative or representation which is might be an easy assumption to make (Juul 2010). The following subsections explore some of the ‘whats’ or pre-play engagements made based on activities sought and some of the ‘hows’ or strategies employed in ascertaining these potentials. These factors will be revisited when discussing the derivation of the core hypothesis, later in this paper.

3.1.1.2 Selecting for an explicit context

Games are not played in a laboratory environment; they are played in a real-world context. Potential players often account for potential contexts of play and select games based upon those contexts. The data relating to the ways players recognize possible contexts of play before actual play occurs seem to be driven by primarily social factors.

That isn’t to say that prospective players are always seeking experiences which they can share with others, though this is not uncommon. Prospective players also recognize that there may be occasions when they might want an involving experience requiring an extensive commitment in terms of time and concentration possibly during unavoidable periods of solitude. In this sense a player might be looking to become ‘immersed’ in a game (though the term ‘immersion’ was only used by a single individual in this research) as a means of passing the time or avoiding boredom. These ‘anti-social’ sentiments are not shared by all; other subjects suggested that recognizing the potential commitment necessary in order to play certain types of games is the reason that they reject many videogaming activities, preferring to invest these resources in more ‘productive’ pursuits; a sentiment which will also be covered in more depth in later sections.

More social contexts are selected for when a player can imagine playing a game in the presence of or along with other players. As such a prospective player might select a game with performance or multi-player features. While a player might never actually get chance to play the game as a performance, or collaborate or compete with their peers, that a game provides the possibility is often a positive factor. Recognizing the possible tastes of witnesses or co-players is important in helping the prospective player determine the value of the game for social play, which will also be explored in the section of this paper which deals with ‘kinds of players’.

3.1.1.3 Selecting Specific Features

In selecting for a specific context we might expect a prospective player to be investigating the purported features of a game. Features which have a bearing on suitable contexts are not the only ones noticed. Prospective players explicitly or implicitly consider a great many design features. While ‘surface’ features are commonly attended to as suggested by Juul’s suggestion that a prospective player is first drawn to the ‘fiction’ of a game (2010), respondents also discussed ‘deeper’ features such as the type of challenge offered. One specific subject explicitly stated that he would eschew any game which might test his dexterity, preferring to engage in intellectual puzzles instead. Interviewees expressed such targets as graphical style and quality, game mechanics, activities including any overarching story or narrative, and challenge type. In fact it seems that any designed feature may be noted by a prospective player and used as a means of differentiation between possible offerings.

3.1.1.4 Selecting the Familiar

Selecting games according to familiarities seems to operate in two ways, selecting familiar game related features and selecting according to features not immediately related to games.

When a prospective player is selecting features based on their past experience of playing other games they are clearly drawing on their reflections about past experiences of play. This construction of predispositions is also noted by Carr (2005), and might be said to have been predicted by Pragmatist theories of engaging with pleasurable artifacts such as those of Dewey (1934). This act of selecting a game which promises experiences similar to those enjoyed in the past might account for the success of sequels, though obviously not all reflections are positive and can thus turn a prospective player off a certain set of features as well as on to them.

Another interesting facet of selecting according to the player’s past experiences is where a prospective player selects a videogame based on factors external to their videogaming experience. This is usually in the prospective player identifying with the subject matter (or fiction) offered by the game and may account for the successes of sports related properties and games based on films and television series. That is if a player feels that they are a fan of Football or Batman say, then they are more likely engage with games which include such themes. This principle can also act in the opposite direction, with familiar themes that the individual does not identify with acting to drive down the degree of engagement a prospective player has with the concept. For example, one interviewee expressed a dislike of Boxing as a justification for not liking beat-em-up style games. In fact he expressed that he was not someone who enjoys watching Boxing and so wouldn’t be someone who would like fighting games, which seems to be a sophisticated expression of identity, which will be covered later in this paper.

3.1.1.5 Selection Based on Trusted Opinion

The previous sub-sections dealt with what kinds of things prospective players might be evaluating as they select games to play. The following subsections deal with how prospective players get their impressions of games they haven’t yet played.

A clear source of information about what a game is like to play is to consult the opinions of those that have already played it. These opinions could be obtained from peers, reviews in the media, or other ‘expert’ opinion. In social groups where games and game play was seen as a valid topic of conversation information gleaned from the opinions of peers was most valued. However several subjects suggested that gaming was not often a valid topic of conversation, and so one of these subjects had formed a relationship with a clerk in his local game shop where the clerk had learned his tastes to such a degree that he trusted the clerk’s recommendations. Where media reviews were concerned, among the subjects that suggested that they did read such things there was a general impression that they were not as well trusted as peer recommendation, but were never the less used as a source of information about the features and overall quality of a game.

3.1.1.6 Selections Based on Marketing

Information sourced directly from the producers or publishers of videogames is another means by which potential players find out if a game might offer a suitable play experience. This could be information from the company websites of the game producing or publishing companies, media advertisements, media preview editorials, or even the game packaging. The amount of information sources consulted seems to loosely correlate with how much the prospective player identifies themselves as a game player. ‘Hardcore’ players may be aware of release dates and proposed features at a fairly fine grained level, while data from players at the other end of the hobby/commitment spectrum suggests that these players might only consult the game packaging as they browse games in a retail outlet.

The extent to which the player has investigated the promised features of a game may well influence their commitment at later phases of the engagement process. For example a player who might describe themselves as ‘hardcore’ who has tracked the development of a game from announcement through to sale, and who may well have engaged in the online fan community concerned with that specific offering, discussing hopes and fears for the final product, is less likely to give the game 2 minutes of their time before permanently deleting it from their hard disk (as the subject who downloaded games based on their title alone suggested he would).

That some less hobbyist players select games based on packaging, more often than not, suggests that they have very little understanding of the features of a game other than a theme and the positive description of the features commonly summarized on the packaging. The subjects who suggested that packaging information was their primary source of information seemed to select games by their theme (or ‘fiction’) more than any other features, even though this had in the past lead to disappointing play experiences.

3.1.1.7 Selection by Provenance

Where a game comes from can provide important information to a prospective player in helping them determine if it might be engaging. That is information about who made or published the game or who owns a copy of the game or gaming product can push up or pull down the engagement a player has with a game before they play it. If the game was developed by a team responsible for games that the prospective player is fond of, or the game is found in the collection of a friend the prospective player considers to have good taste, then the player is more likely to be engaged by the prospect of the game. Conversely if the game is developed or published by a company the prospective player considers to be producers of bad games or the game is found in the collection of someone considered to have a poor taste in games, then this provenance might act to drive down the individual’s engagement with the prospect of playing the game. Those prospective players who might describe themselves as gamers are more likely to know who produced a game and judge it on this knowledge, but such knowledge is also held, to some degree, by those who play more casually. For example one ‘casual’ subject suggested that Nintendo are more likely to produce games which are more aligned to what they are personally seeking than other publishers. Less hobbyist or ‘hardcore’ players are likely to trade games amongst their peers as a means of determining quality, essentially pooling agreeable games.

3.1.1.8 Selection by Availability

Often players might make no conscious decision to obtain a game; it is simply there. In this case the only decision the prospective player must make is whether to ‘have a go’ or not. In these cases many of the material costs are removed (such as time, effort or money spent to obtain the game) and the decision then only rests on whether the user feels that there might be other costs involved (embarrassment at playing a performance game in public say) relative to the benefits of playing (using our performance game example they might feel that in playing they become more socially connected to the other players). Where the context is less social (for example where the game is obtained cheaply, maybe as a bundled software product with a new device), the low cost of entry might have the player ‘give it a go’ where otherwise they might not. Judgment and engagement then rests on the later phases of engagement.

3.1.1.9 Selection by Trying

All other selection methods and criteria considered, there will be a point where the player starts playing the game. At this point engagement seems to go through a period of evaluation. Does the game meet up to expectations?

There is no clear cut off between a player’s initial evaluation and when they might be said to be playing ‘properly’, but there is enough evidence in the data to suggest that on occasion players have tried a game, decided that it wasn’t for them and stopped playing forever. Sometimes this is because they have encountered a game in a context that is not conducive to them seeing the benefits of continued play (such as one subject feeling that a game was far too hard to bother with having encountered it with players who were far more skilled than themselves and thus he became frustrated with his lack of skill), but more often it is simply that a game didn’t deliver what the prospective player imagined it might before they actually sat down to play it. Sometimes a player has minimal expectations and finds pleasure in their initial encounters. Sometimes though this pleasure is context dependant (such as individuals who wouldn’t normally play games, joining in with a group playing a game conducive to multi-player, party like activities), and once that context doesn’t exist anymore nor will they play anymore.

Occasionally though the player will find enough of what they thought they might get from the experience to remain engaged and to continue playing.

3.1.2 Play

While researchers such as Aarseth (Aarseth 2003) have argued that play must be the central object of study for games research, this project has essentially settled on a study of the conditions supporting engagement in play. That is the actual act of playing is bound into a social psychological praxis which informs the conditions of engagement; the actual engagement itself being a successful realization of the supporting factors of identification, expectation, context and so on. This is due in part to the differences in methodology, where the methodology used here deals with the heterophenomenology of reported player experiences Aarseth has traditionally focused on the artifact and their imputed meanings explored via personal play. That is much games research deals with the game and how it facilitates play while this research has developed a theory of how and why players make the choices they do; what experiences do games provide vs what kinds of experiences are players seeking to engage in. These are two sides of the same question.

As part of the process of selection, play and then reflection, the actual playing of the game is most simply stated as the period where a player considers them self to be an active player of the game. What factors hold them there for a session, or has the individual return for another session of play, are dealt with more completely in other sections of this paper. In terms of the phased process of engagement similar factors to those involved in game selection are constantly evaluated against the specific variable context during play, and if the weight of those factors becomes insufficiently positive then the player will stop playing. For example if the social situation changes to one that is insufficiently agreeable then the play may well stop to accommodate this change. Similarly other less dramatic changes might amass to stop play such as fatigue or hunger, or a player might have other concerns such as chores or work the time for which the play activities might be eating into. This is also alongside the possible changes within the game. The game might become too repetitive or too challenging for the player’s current state of mind, and this too will drive down the motivation to continue to play.

The conception of the motivations and de-motivations to play a specific game presented here is different from other conceptions which focus on such motivations as ‘immersion’ (Brown and Cairns 2004) or Flow (Cowley et al. 2008) as the ideas presented here should also account for players who are not looking for such deeply engaging experiences, as well as those that are. Indeed the data collected suggests that some players who have experienced the effects of ‘immersion’ or Flow like experiences in the past now reject many games or gameplaying contexts as they feel that losing track of time (say) with a game is more destructive and futile than beneficial and productive. As such some players deliberately seek out games which are not likely to take hours of their life at a time; games which are easy to pick up and put down.

3.1.3 Reflection

A player who has selected a game to play and has played it may continue to engage with the game afterwards. This engagement will take the form of explicit or implicit reflection. The player will be considering if playing that game was a positive or negative experience. They might even discuss the merits of the game amongst their social group. Indeed much of the data used in this research is essentially the reflections of players. It is apparent that while a player may select a game experience and play it, they might decide, on reflection that the experience overall is not worth repeating. Other non-negative reflections are related to the relative merits of particular games and will result in realizations which are fed back into future selections. Precisely what is being reflected on is explored in the following sections.

3.2 Identification with features

In the previous sections regarding the cycle of engagement a few hints are given as to what drives player engagement in this process. In general terms it seems that for each feature at each phase of the engagement the individual is determining if they are the ‘kind of person’ who might engage in such a game with such a feature. This identification operates for multiple pertinent features and seems to be summed or massed for any whole product. This sub-hypothesis then should help us understand how different people engage in different games, as if a player feels at any point that their perception of the fiction, graphical presentation, challenge type, and other features results in an overall positive engagement then they will be likely to play, where as if the same features are perceived, in summation, negatively then they are not likely to play.

One powerful example of how features are perceived in a socially relative personal way is of the adolescent subject who extensively played a certain JRPG (or Japanese Role-Playing Game) but felt the ‘super-deformed’ graphical style employed in much of the game was ‘babyish’. That is he seemed to feel that the graphical style was more suited to an audience younger than himself, but in summation the other features of the experience were sufficiently aligned to his cultural understanding of who he was and what he should be playing, to allow him to engage with the game despite the ‘babyish’ graphics.

What is also apparent from the data is that different individuals perceive the importance of features differently in terms of the weight they ascribe to these features. For example while one individual finds a degree of difficulty which will challenge their skills off-putting other players will deliberately play a game at its hardest setting as a personal challenge and would become fed up with a game at which they were always successful. I have related these weighted positives and negatives to a loose conception of ‘costs’ and ‘returns’. Costs might be loosely separated into material costs (money, space, portability, time commitment required) and social or cultural costs (is there a sense that in playing this I will perceive myself badly or I will be perceived badly by others in this context). Returns might be that a player is obtaining a ‘fun’ experience, whatever the particular user deems an acceptably fun experience to be (getting some exercise, inspiration, obtaining knowledge about the state of the art, experiencing an interesting narrative, and immersing oneself in an alternative world were examples encountered). Material returns are less difficult to suggest that they used to be. With the relatively recent introduction of motion control it seems that some players are interested in the fitness aspect which is used to market some products. Similarly self improvement and mental agility training game types are also apparently popular, suggesting that some players are looking for extrinsic returns such as enhanced mental fitness. This cost/benefit aspect of engagement suggests that the degree of overall engagement with a product could be said to be an aggregation of feature relative positions, or a summation of costs and returns to a net sum of overall ‘cultural’ (socially relative, personally expressed) value.

This socially developed sense of ‘kinds of people’ and what behavior is acceptable for such, which feeds into the cost/benefit sum, could be related to such Pragmatist ideas as Cooley’s ‘Looking Glass Self’ (1902); the theory that an individual’s sense of self is constructed by subjective reasoning about how the individual imagines they might be perceived by others in their society or immediate social context. We might say that so constructed the individual will behave in a way that seeks to reinforce this identity and seek to minimize any possibilities that they might be perceived poorly. We could also suggest that these expressions are expressions of cultural values (where an individual has learned suitable modes of conduct from their social interactions). That is not to say that an individual will embody all socially dictated grand cultural values (such as an abhorrence of murder say), though some of these types of value might impinge on some players’ engagement (and as such some players will state that they are uncomfortable playing a game where one plays at murder) but personally acquired, fine grained values (such as playing a game with cartoony graphics will reflect badly on an adolescent boy, but may reflect less badly on a woman in her 20s, or even that owning the latest videogame console reflects badly on a male dancer in his late 20s who believes that games are for dullards or a fashionable, female student in her teens who believes that games are for boys, but a technology savvy male, computing student in his 20s will feel remiss if he didn’t live in a house with all the latest hardware).

3.3 Value Seeking Process

In combination the hypotheses set out in the above sections suggest that players are engaging with games as collections of features with ascribed cultural value which are constantly evaluated and negotiated and the values summed throughout a course of engagement, from before the game is actively played, through active playing, to reflecting on the experience. The sense of cultural value is realized as a type of socially relative personal identification. So when an individual asks “Am I the kind of person who would play this game?” they are also asking “If I play this game, what does that say about me?” and “If I saw someone playing this game, what would that tell me about them?”, quite similar to Cooley’s ‘looking Glass self. So at each phase of engagement these implicit questions are being asked in slightly different ways.

3.3.1 Selection as investigating and finding potential positive cultural value

The space of potential gameplay offerings is not fully known by any individual, rather they form impressions of what offerings exist and what the nature of those offerings are from a variety of sources. These impressions are then contrasted with their sense of identification to determine if this activity is possibly one in which the individual feels that they can engage. The source of the information also helps to form this sense of identification, and the impression of the offering might not be formed simply on surface features such as themes, graphics, or characters, but at this stage, for many individuals, these features are more important here than they are at other phases of the engagement. The sources of information and methods used are those discussed in the relevant sub-sections above.

Essentially if an individual is sufficiently engaged by the prospect and can reconcile the investments required to play the game then they might seek it out and play it. If the investments are too great then they will play it if the investments are reduced, but otherwise will not seek it out (they are the kind of person who would play a game with those features in principle, but there is not enough time, it would be a waste of money, or it’s not worth upgrading hardware for are stated examples). If an individual is not engaged by the prospect of playing that game, then they will not seek it out or be inclined to play it without a context where the previously considered features become less relevant (not wanting to seem a ‘kill joy’ if everyone else in a social setting is playing together, that is they are not normally the kind of person who would play this game, but in this context they might as well participate and would then find it to be fun for example).

3.3.2 Engaging in play as long as a sense of positive cultural value persists

Once a player has reached the point of accepting an offering as suitable or agreeable (that they are likely to be the kind of person who would play such a game or with such a device), they will then be disposed to play it. This engagement as a state of disposition is not fixed, in that it is not such that a player who is engaged by the idea of playing will automatically then set about playing the game ‘fully’ (as the designer intended); rather it is such that the negotiations between the player’s sense of identification, the imagined reactions of their social context, and the actual experience of playing the game are fully initiated. Initially there is a sense of traversal from wanting to play the game to ‘actually’ or ‘really’ playing. This phase might be seen as ‘giving the game a chance’ and lacks a clear end unless the match between expectations and the actual experience of play shows that the game dramatically disappoints the player, at which point the value sum will be negative and the individual will stop being engaged and thus stop playing. We could say that for every new element that is introduced throughout the playing of a game the player will be ‘giving it a chance’, but this is increasingly subtle with the player also having extra investments in play (having spent the time to gain skill, develop characters, engage with the narrative or similar).

Once a player has selected an offering and then encountered that offering without being ‘put off’ by a negative sum of identification, they may be said to have recognized it as a game that they would be disposed to playing. However many games are not a simple interaction repeated over and over again but often progressively introduce new elements to the player as the player gains skill, tokens, or progresses through the story or different challenges and levels. As such for many games the player will be constantly evaluating the offering as they go; shifting their sense of value in light of new elements. Even though the terrain of the game is shifting, the player must always feel that they are engaged in an activity of positive net worth or they will stop playing or will not return to play in future sessions.

It is likely that as players move from the negotiated factors of selection to factors associated with play there is a shift of emphasis away from surface factors (thematic, graphics and such) toward ludic factors (game mechanic, challenge and such). That is players might find that they feel that they are the kind of person who would play a game with a particular graphical style say, and as they play the game become less concerned with the particular graphical style and more concerned with the actualities of playing the game; meeting the challenges or progressing through the story for example. This is the position of Aarseth (2004) who argues that the nature of any avatar is likely to fade into the background as a player focuses on ludic aspects of the game as they play. Likewise Juul’s (2010) assertion that the ‘fiction’ of a game is the first factor encountered and engaged with before other elements are considered is not completely rejected.

The degree to which they have already formed an identification will influence a player’s degree of perseverance, such that offerings with which the player has formed a strong personal connection (by developing characters or other ‘actors’ and objects, engaging with a story, or developing skill) will be much more resilient to problems such as a particularly difficult challenge, a bug, a displeasing plot direction, or any other unexpected negative experience. That is players can become more or less the kind of person who would play such a game as they acquire or lose any sense of personal connection. Similarly as a player invests resources to make progress in a game they become less likely to disengage until the player feels that this investment has resulted in a payoff, few people like to feel that they are ‘quitters’, however players do not like to feel that they are being forced to repeat gameplay elements they have already mastered or understood. This sense of progress and growth toward an arbitrary goal (a higher score, a new level, the next part of the story) can be related to an interpretation of Flow theory that suggests that ‘skill matching’ does not create engagement without the individual feeling that progress is being made toward a personally meaningful end (Csikszentmihalyi 1990).

Another type of development which is particularly true of multiplayer games is that of a social nature. Especially where online play might be concerned, the amount of socialization for some types of games (i.e. Massively Multiplayer Online games or MMOs) acts as a means of reinforcing some users’ engagements or a means of driving down engagement for others. To some players the appeal of having a set of trusted and decent playmates is apparent where the facility to play against others online is available. However, some are likely to find that they are not the kind of person who wants to micromanage other people in terms of competition schedules and training sessions, or that they are not the kind of person who wants to spend a large amount of time engaged in activities to support the play activity they identify with, and will become less engaged as the amount of required social interaction increases.

Another factor which might influence a player’s sense of engagement is a shift in context. External factors might have the player become less likely to feel that they are the kind of person who would engage in a game as other life pressures impinge on the experience. Take for example a player who is engaged by the degree to which the game facilitates social play; if the social context changes, for example by play mates ceasing to play, then the game will become less engaging as this feature or factor is less well supported.

3.3.3 Reinforcing the degree of sense of value by reflection

It is apparent that past experiences are fed back into future selections. This feedback does not seem to loop directly from putting one game aside to openly selecting the next, rather there appears to be an ongoing period of reflection, which seems to summarize the pros and cons of past experiences resulting in more carefully considered future selections.

It seems there are two types of reflection, implicit reflection and explicitly expressed reflection. That is there are times when an individual appears to be forming an opinion that can only be based on their past experiences without necessarily consciously analyzing their experience, and there are times when individuals’ experiences with various offerings can be heard being openly discussed respectively. The act of tacit reflection is difficult to demonstrate other than in the player, when quizzed, relating their preference (or dislike) of new propositions to past experiences, but struggling to put their finger on why they have this value position other than in relation to those same past experiences. It is when a user tries to relate the qualities of an offering to others that the reflective player must make value judgements as to what factors to highlight and espouse or reject. A number of observations could be made about the nature of reflection, but suffice it to say that much of the data used in this programme of research was based on interviews where the interviewer implied that the interviewee should explicitly reflect on their past gaming experiences and engagements. While this might seem introspective and thus a collection of possibly poorly realized subjective reports on interviewees’ tacit knowledge, hopefully the methodology employed has heterophenomenologically arrived at an account with some utility.

The less formal interviews in the data (along with some field notes on casual observations made) reveal that in discussing which experiences individuals found engaging, there is a degree of rhetoric involved. Individuals expounding the merits of the experiences they engage with and those that they do not; occasionally attempting to convince the other of the merits or faults of games they have played, which serves to amplify the sense of identification and hence degree of engagement.

Comment 15 4. conclusions

Hopefully, the summary of the theory provided above gives the reader enough information to be able to decide if these hypotheses make sense, and if the main hypothesis of a cyclical process of seeking cultural value fits the explored domain. Obviously the methodology employed focuses on certain aspects of a player’s experience. So no sense of a player’s emotion is considered explicitly, for example. Many apparent omissions are likely due to them being expected in the data due to a priori positions, as for example little mention was made by subjects of their preferred emotional states, other than a game should be fun or interesting and not boring.

A small (9 respondent) survey of interested parties asked to review a very brief summary of the results reveals that the degree of fit and relevance is good with two caveats. These caveats are that the short presentation of the theory only seemed to account for extensive cycles of engagement and not one off experiences which might still be deemed engaging, and that the result is an obvious truism. Hopefully this more extensive presentation of the theory helps to demonstrate that to some extent the one-off interaction is included as an extreme case (where the individual is the kind of person who would play that game in that context, but not necessarily in others), while the charge that the theory is an obvious truism is not supported by the empirical literature, as there seems to be very little which deals with concepts of a process of finding engagement in videogames by a constantly evaluated or negotiated sense of cultural value. So if this theory is a truism it seems to have little impact on much empirical research into player experiences, maybe because it has not been stated clearly.

5. discussion

A pertinent observation about player engagement is made by Carr (2005). In attempting to account for an observation that girls in a specifically convened female only gaming club Carr notes that “Different people will accumulate particular gaming skills, knowledge and frames of reference, according to the patterns of access and peer culture they encounter – and these accumulations will pool as predispositions, and manifest as preferences.” while “Preferences are an assemblage, made up of past access and positive experiences, and subject to situation and context.”, which seems to be quite closely related to the theory presented here. This observation is substantively different from say those of Malone (1981) and subsequent multi factor theories as it does not state that players engage with Challenge, Curiosity and Fantasy (or some other factors such as novelty and spectacle; excitement of combat; game characters; persistence; exploration; advancement; unraveling of puzzles; building, creating and controlling; humour; relation to one’s hobby or interest; audiovisual quality; imaginary world; and winning (Ermi and Mäyrä 2003)), but gives us some indication of what process a player goes through in arriving at the specific combination of factors that engages them.

In terms of related work from other domains McCarthy and Wright (2004) have taken a theoretically driven approach which has arrived at similar conclusions drawing for Pragmatic theory. That is the research presented in this paper was empirical abductive research, where as McCarthy and Wright seem to have used a theoretical deductive approach, but we have arrived at a position which neatly fits into a Pragmatic position. Where the theory in this paper relates the engagement with videogames to Cooley’s ‘Looking glass self’ and notes that engagements are cyclical and sit within a social context McCarthy and Wright take theories from Dewey (1934) and Bakhtin (1993) to arrive at related conclusions about the felt experience of the use of technology in general. One point of similarity is that they also recognise that an engagement is not simply a single (or repeated) instance of use, but also contains expectation and reflection, placing the experiencing subject and the object of experience in the broadest context. The breadth of this context extending out into personal conception of personal meaning and cultural value of the individual’s life, not just their life related to the technological artifact. This consideration of the overall felt experience (history, reflection, context) of the individual then determines the degree of meaning and value they then apply to the experience they are having as they have it.

So is a theory that players must be able to find the value in playing as a kind of investment of cultural negatives in order to make net cultural gains useful?

As a means of reframing the problem of Game Design to consider the broad cultural context of different player perspectives, some surveyed games professionals have shown an interest. However it seems apparent that some sectors of the industry are well aware that users must identify themselves as potential players and are already extending their thinking to traditionally under exploited kinds of players (e.g. Nintendo’s successes with products that purport to promote mental and physical fitness, and play in a social context). Certainly recent attempts at marketing games seem to focus on the player as much as the game, in a seeming attempt to demonstrate to the user what kinds of people would be players of the games and devices being released.

As a means of framing understanding of what engages players, it could be suggested that the core hypothesis is too broad; so inclusive as to describe all human experience of entertainment products at a macro level, with little to say about individual cases of subjective engagement. However the supporting hypotheses and how they interrelate could be said to provide a meso level description of engagement which hopefully helps us understand individual cases more clearly.

It is obvious that more work is required. The summary presented in this paper is necessarily quite brief. It is immediately apparent that each contributing factor or hypothesis could be explained in much more detail, with reference to the data from which it was derived. An effort will be made to disseminate these detailed descriptions at a later date. Similarly while an attempt was made to saturate a small number of critical hypotheses, other hypotheses which might be of significant interest to the fields of design and research are relatively under saturated; as such further research to flesh out these ideas will be needed. An attempt to translate these theoretical findings into some practical artifacts would both help to validate the theory to some extent and to provide further operational information for design practitioners.

6. REFERENCES

AARSETH, ESPEN. 2004. ‘Genre Trouble: Narrativism and the Art of Simulation.’ In FirstPerson: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

ATLAS.TI SCIENTIFIC SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT GMBH. 1993. Atlas.ti. Windows. Atlas.

BAKHTIN, M. 1993. Toward a Philosophy of the Act. 1st ed. Austin: University of Texas Press.

BROWN, EMILY, AND PAUL CAIRNS. 2004. ‘A Grounded Investigation of Game Immersion’. In CHI ’04 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1297–1300. Vienna, Austria: ACM.

BRYANT, ANTONY. 2007. The SAGE Handbook of Grounded Theory. Los Angeles ;;London: SAGE.

CARR, D. 2005. ‘Contexts, Gaming Pleasures, and Gendered Preferences’. Simulation & Gaming 36 (4) (December): 464–482. doi:10.1177/1046878105282160.

COOLEY, CHARLES. 1902. Human Nature and the Social Order. New Brunswick (U.S.A.): Transaction Books.

COWLEY, BEN, DARRYL CHARLES, MICHAELA BLACK, AND RAY HICKEY. 2008. ‘Toward an Understanding of Flow in Video Games’. Comput. Entertain. 6 (2): 1–27.

CSIKSZENTMIHALYI, MIHALY. 1990. Flow : the Psychology of Optimal Experience. 1st ed. New York: Harper & Row.

DEWEY, JOHN. 1934. Art as Experience. Perigee Trade pbk. ed. New York: Perigee Books.

ERMI, LAURA, AND FRANS MÄYRÄ. 2003. ‘Power and Control of Games: Children as the Actors of Game Cultures’. In Level Up: Digital Games Research Conference, 234–244. Utrecht.

FABRICATORE, CARLO, MIGUEL NUSSBAUM, AND RICARDO ROSAS. 2002. ‘Playability in Action Videogames: A Qualitative Design Model’. Human-Computer Interaction 17 (4) (December): 311–368. doi:10.1207/S15327051HCI1704_1.

GLASER, BARNEY. 1978. Theoretical Sensitivity: Advances in the Methodology of Grounded Theory. Sociology Press, Mill Valley, CA.

———. 1992. Basics of Grounded Theory Analysis. [S.l.]: Sociology Press.

GLASER, BARNEY, AND ANSELM STRAUSS. 1967. Discovery of Grounded Theory. Sociology Press, Mill Valley, CA.

JUUL, JESPER. 2010. A Casual Revolution : Reinventing Video Games and Their Players. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

MALONE, THOMAS. 1981. ‘Toward a Theory of Intrinsically Motivating Instruction’. Cognitive Science 5 (4) (October): 333–369. doi:10.1207/s15516709cog0504_2.

MCCARTHY, JOHN, AND PETER C. WRIGHT. 2004. Technology as Experience. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press.

SWEETSER, PENELOPE, AND DANIEL JOHNSON. 2004. ‘Player-Centered Game Environments: Assessing Player Opinions, Experiences, and Issues’. In Third International Conference, Proceedings. Eindhoven: Springer Berlin / Heidelberg.

Videogame Engagement as a Process of Seeking Cultural Value

Empirical investigations of videogame play and videogame engagement

Comment 1

are often delimited along demographic or genre lines. This paper summarizes an attempt to generate a theory of videogame play and engagement

Comment 2

which is not restricted to arbitrary factors of types of players or types of games. In order to achieve this theory a version of Classic Grounded Theory (Glaser 1978) was employed.

Comment 3

The result reveals a highly generalized theory: that players engage with games if they can find a sense of net personal cultural value as they select, play and reflect on their play experiences.

Comment 4

The theory is presented and explained and the contributing hypotheses are also presented and explained.

Comment 5

suggesting some utility to the fields of Game Design and Videogame Research.

Comment 7

Further work is suggested which will clarify and possibly modify the theory to increase the perceived fit, relevance, and utility.

Comment 8

Categories and Subject Descriptors: K.8.0 [Personal Computing]: General

General Terms: Games

Additional Key Words and Phrases: engagement, qualitative analysis, flow, fun, videogames, identity, culture, Pragmatism, Grounded Theory Methodology

1. INTRODUCTION

This paper summarises the findings of a research programme that set out to empirically create a theory relating to individuals’ experiences of videogame playing.

With the perspective that many contemporary empirical theories are too narrow in focus (e.g. Malone 1981 studied only elementary school children) , methodologically inappropriate (e.g. Sweetser and Johnson 2004 report having based part of their work on a “Grounded Theory” analysis of a 4 participant focus group), or place undue weight on folk developed assumptions (e.g. Brown and Cairns 2004 seem to take as their starting point that “immersion” is the ultimate objective of videogame players) and that a data driven approach with minimal a priori assumptions relating to types of games, types of players, or proposed engagements and objectives might have a chance of arriving at a useful theory with broad applicability, a data-driven methodology was selected, interpreted and employed.

The methodology employed was an interpretation of Glaser’s (1978) Classic Grounded Theory Methodology (CGT), as Glaser positions CGT as a methodology that, if applied correctly, should produce a global dependant variable or central hypothesis supported by contributing variables and sub-hypotheses in a data-driven or empirical manner, that should account for most of the variation found in data related to the domain of study. As this methodology was employed then the resulting theory is a highly generalised concept accounting for players’ reported experiences of engaging with videogames, but with a systematic connection to sub-hypotheses and ultimately data related to the domain. It is hoped that in ‘grounding’ the hypotheses in information about our chosen domain that the theory developed can clearly account for the domain rather than account for arbitrary or ‘grand’ theory.

 

Sections later in this paper summarise the resulting global hypothesis and the sub-hypotheses that contribute to it, and in order that the reader is clear about how this theory was derived the following section explains the particular interpretation of Classic Grounded Theory (CGT) employed. The concluding sections of this paper explore if the utility of the theory with respect to the fields of videogame design and player research, and if such a general theory or the supporting hypotheses can be further modified or reformulated to be of greater utility to interested audiences and if so how. These concluding sections also attempt to place the theory in a broader theoretical context.

Ultimately, the contribution of this work is felt to sit in 2 areas. The first is in applying CGT in a domain quite different from those it might normally be applied to.

2. INTERPRETATION OF CGT METHODOLOGY AS EMPLOYED

2.1 Overview of Grounded Theory

For various reasons the term Grounded Theory (GT) is applied to multiple research perspectives, including a form of analysis applied to qualitative data (e.g. Sweetser and Johnson 2004) or a means of analysing the behavior of individuals relative to a specific hypothesis (Brown and Cairns 2004; Fabricatore, Nussbaum, and Rosas 2002), delimiting the domain according to a priori hypotheses about what is important. Early in the programme of research which forms the basis of this paper the decision was made to understand the methodology in the broadest sense, and hopefully to develop a theory inductively (though perhaps more accurately abductively) derived from the domain of people playing videogames. This ‘inductive’ approach is most forcefully expressed by one of the co-originators of the term ‘Grounded Theory’, Barney Glaser (BG Glaser and Strauss 1967; BG Glaser 1978; B Glaser 1992).

In this version of GT no a priori hypotheses are formed, as the objective of the methodology is to form hypotheses based on available data rather than to validate existing theory. In order to achieve hypotheses about the domain a methodology encompassing data collection, data analysis, and theory formulation is proposed.

There are several methods within the methodology, and the understanding of those methods as they have been applied in this research are summarized here in order that the reader can both understand where the theoretical concepts came from and how this research might be differentiated from other similarly labeled work.

There are 5 methods or activities which make up the CGT methodology:

• Data collection

• Comparative coding

• Theoretical ‘memoing’

• Sorting

• Writing

Each method is intended to move the research from information about a domain to a coherent theory about what is going on in that domain.

These methods are not linear, sequential activities but methods which apply in different proportion at different times. The following subsections will describe how and when they are used while also describing how these methods were employed in the research described in this paper.

For reasons of brevity no attempt will be made in the following text to explore the merits of the methodology from an epistemological basis, rather the following subsections are provided to allow the reader a means of evaluating how the theory was derived in order to differentiate this research from other similar attempts. For a critique of the Grounded Theory methodology see Bryant (2007).

2.2 Data Collection Method

Any information which is directly collected from the domain of study or is unequivocally concerned with that domain is useful and should be included. So where the thoughts and actions of people are concerned we might include formal interviews, informal conversations, focus groups, overheard conversations, diaries, and possibly observations, or applicable statistics, while other less textual sources might also provide useful insights. Deciding what to collect and when to use it is determined by the shape and direction of the current theory and progress of coding and memoing (see below). This ‘theoretical sampling’ approach helps to provide a degree of parsimony in the amount of data collected, as in linking data collection to data analysis and theory formation helps to ensure that only as much data will be collected as required. Relative to the process of coding (below) there are essentially two types of targets for sampling: ‘new’ kinds of case (by which we hope to generate new codes) and ‘similar’ kinds of case (by which we hope to flesh out the properties of existing codes).

The research reported in this research started by interviewing by opportunity (friends, relatives and colleagues), attempted to explore diary and observation data, further interviewed specific individuals (non-players, more ‘casual’ or more ‘hardcore’ players, and an increasing number of strangers with disparate tastes ), and included a few field noted observations about overheard and informal conversations. The total number of individuals who contributed either distinct codes or an illustration for a particular memo (post coding) was in the order of the mid 30s. The data was in the form of transcribed interviews, recorded but un-transcribed interviews, recorded observations, and field notes (the diaries proved unproductive).

2.3 Comparative Coding Method

The GT methodology grew out of research by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss (1967) which utilized a process they knew as ‘Constant Comparison’. This process is advocated as the coding method for CGT by Glaser (1978). The codes generated in CGT then are initially derived from comparing data to data. If an apparent part of the data appears to have a relationship with some other part then the nature of this relationship is noted as a code. Most simply then, codes are categories of data or properties of already identified categories. At a more complex level codes can be compared themselves producing meta or ‘theoretical’ codes. Coding is an attempt to reframe raw data, making the theory fit multiple cases rather than single interesting occurrences.

Codes were created in two ways in the research reported here, early in the programme transcriptions of the data were marked with subjective observations, which further into the programme (once the constant comparative emphasis was more clearly understood) were clustered into categories and properties which were subsequently added to in further iterations in the constant comparative manner described above. Few theoretical codes were created, but rather theoretical memos were created which accounted for the comparisons between existing codes. This way of coding with memos rather than specific theoretical codes was due in part to the software employed (Atlas.ti Anon. 1993), which made comparative codes or properties, and especially theoretical codes of codes, a little tricky, but in using memos to create theoretical codes rather than a specific ‘theoretical code’ facility of the supporting software, the result is assumed to be the same.

2.4 Theoretical Memoing Method

In the jargon of GT ‘memoing’ is the activity of interest, the main material of the methodology if you will. As the researcher iteratively collects data and codes it, and as they sort and write their outputs they should be constantly capturing each hypothesis they have about what it all means and how it all fits together. This central act of memoing drives every other activity. The researcher finds what to sample for next based on their theoretical observations about the codes they have generated, when to stop collecting and coding data based on how their memos are filling out, and it is the memos which are arranged (and further complemented) in the sorting process, which then yields a structured collection of memoed theoretical ideas to be written.

Memos are critical to two milestones found in the methodology. At some point the researcher will come to believe that their data collection and coding seem to be about a particular code. As the memos coalesce about this code the researcher will come to conclude that they may have identified what the domain may be about (in the jargon of the methodology they have identified the ‘core category’). Once this milestone is met the research moves from collecting data and coding openly for all possibilities and starts collecting data and coding specifically to selectively generate theoretical ideas about this code. The stopping rule for these selective iterations of coding is that once the researcher is no longer generating any new theoretical ideas they might be said to have theoretically saturated the core code. That is not to say that new codes might not be being generated by further iterations, but that as the researcher continues to sample, in accordance with their emerging theory new codes are interchangeable with old. Thus listing out all possible types of subject, perspective, context, tool, strategy, or whatever is not the point and developing categories of only those things that contribute to the emerging theory in terms of new theoretical ideas are important features in ensuring that the theory is developed parsimoniously. We might also say that in recognizing that not every case can be included we are leaving opportunity for any resulting hypothesis to be logically falsifiable.

This research recorded theoretical memos in the appropriate function of the software employed. Generally these memos consisted of short notes about what the codes might represent, as well as relationships between codes and possible targets for data collection. The core category selected for saturation by selective coding related to players’ felt identities and how these identities manifested as roles through which the player ascribed value to different game features. Memos were also raised relating these ideas to general theories drawn primarily from Social Psychology where appropriate, especially during selective coding and sorting. As explained below, the sorting process showed this concept of valorization of game features according to a player’s self sense to be somewhat inadequate in accounting for all the theoretical ideas raised, and as such was duly extended.

2.5 Memo Sorting Method

Once the core category is felt to be suitably saturated, the collection of memos is not expected to be in a state that would allow for immediate publication, rather while most of the memos are expected to implicitly relate to the core category or how the core category explicitly relates to others, these relations are likely to lack a structure suitable for writing up into a clear publication. There are likely to be gaps and inconsistencies which will need to be dealt with before writing can happen, if one intends to present a coherent theory rather than an incoherent collection of observations. Sorting then is the process of creating a framework for the intended dissemination of the research findings and is performed in order to make as many of the theoretical ideas work towards explaining the derivation of the core hypothesis as possible.

It is likely that new comparisons will be noticed in the act of sorting and as such the process of memoing continues throughout. It is also possible that gaps exist that require some further rounds of data collection and selective coding. It is also possible that the core hypothesis may well need modifying in order to account for more of the theoretical ideas and codes than previously realised. In this sense sorting is critical and is not entirely equivalent to the process of expounding generalised observations which often occurs in ethnographic work (e.g. Carr 2005).

In this research the pre-sort core category which related to a players sense of identity and assumed socio-cultural role relative to game features was felt to be somewhat inadequate, in that that concept failed to account for the mass of data, codes and thus theoretical ideas relating to the cyclical process of engagement. As such the sort revealed that it was more reasonable to talk of players’ cycles of identifying with games at a feature level, which is the theory presented here. The sort was physically accomplished by printing out the electronically captured memos, complimented by hand written memos which were raised during the sort, which were repeatedly placed into piles until almost every memo was included and a writable structure of chapters and subdivisions was visible.

2.6 Theory Writing Method

After sorting, writing then is not the process of structuring an argument as much as it is the process of laying out the sorted theoretical memos in a text, ensuring that the connections and derivations are made clear for the reader. Also in this process other theories are related to the presented theory (which is also possible in the sort, where general theoretical ideas might help to contextualise the saturated theory).

As such the reader can assume that the sections of this paper that set out the theory are in fact directly representative of the sorted memos expanded upon and linked; this paper being a summary of a much more comprehensive thesis which literally contains all the expounded memos.

3. The Developed theory

As proposed above, the following subsections represent the theoretical memos as an integrated text, with reference to specific data where necessary (and as space allows). Starting with the contributing hypotheses and leading to the composite or core hypothesis will hopefully allow the reader a means to evaluate the theory clearly that a top down presentation might obscure.

3.1 Process of Engagement

A major observation to make about player engagement is that it apparently does not happen as a singular event. The following subsection expands on the interim report published XXXXXX in which an early understanding of the methodology and early findings was published. The following differs from that published work in that the phases or stages were slightly different in the XXXX publication. What is common is that there is a phase of engagement that occurs before play, and the difference between the two presentations is due to greater saturation and borne out of a formal sorting process.

Essentially this sub-hypothesis is that there are 3 indistinct phases of engagement: Selection (before hands-on interaction); Play (actual hands-on interaction); and Reflection.

3.1.1 Selection

The mechanisms employed to select games are complex and depend on the particular individual and their sense of identifications. Tying the cycle of engagements to the sense of identity will be explored later in this report, in the section dealing with the core hypothesis. This sub-section and the sub-sections relating to playing and reflecting will focus on generalized patterns and procedures employed by individuals as they engage with a proposition.

Selection itself can be broken down into broad strategies, situated within contexts:

3.1.1.1 Selection of the singular activity of ‘videogame play’

Firstly we can talk of prospective players selecting videogame play, in current forms, as a potentially agreeable activity. This global point of selection can be best seen in the attitudes of those who reject videogame playing outright. Such individuals expressed attitudes suggesting that for some videogaming represents a male, juvenile, sedentary and solitary activity which is not for them, seeing themselves as variously adult, active, social and not male individuals. While some interest was expressed in novel developments in the products which militate the existing perceptions of gaming (primarily Nintendo’s attempts at introducing motion control and marketing which focused on social settings and players who were not necessarily male or juvenile), the non-gamer subjects had not made the investment of time, money, or effort in exploring these possibilities.

For those individual who had not rejected videogame play outright the data reveals a number of strategies employed and perspectives on what videogame activities they might actively seek. These selection criteria reach into a huge range of potentials for play, and are not simply the user finding an agreeable narrative or representation which is might be an easy assumption to make (Juul 2010). The following subsections explore some of the ‘whats’ or pre-play engagements made based on activities sought and some of the ‘hows’ or strategies employed in ascertaining these potentials. These factors will be revisited when discussing the derivation of the core hypothesis, later in this paper.

3.1.1.2 Selecting for an explicit context

Games are not played in a laboratory environment; they are played in a real-world context. Potential players often account for potential contexts of play and select games based upon those contexts. The data relating to the ways players recognize possible contexts of play before actual play occurs seem to be driven by primarily social factors.

That isn’t to say that prospective players are always seeking experiences which they can share with others, though this is not uncommon. Prospective players also recognize that there may be occasions when they might want an involving experience requiring an extensive commitment in terms of time and concentration possibly during unavoidable periods of solitude. In this sense a player might be looking to become ‘immersed’ in a game (though the term ‘immersion’ was only used by a single individual in this research) as a means of passing the time or avoiding boredom. These ‘anti-social’ sentiments are not shared by all; other subjects suggested that recognizing the potential commitment necessary in order to play certain types of games is the reason that they reject many videogaming activities, preferring to invest these resources in more ‘productive’ pursuits; a sentiment which will also be covered in more depth in later sections.

More social contexts are selected for when a player can imagine playing a game in the presence of or along with other players. As such a prospective player might select a game with performance or multi-player features. While a player might never actually get chance to play the game as a performance, or collaborate or compete with their peers, that a game provides the possibility is often a positive factor. Recognizing the possible tastes of witnesses or co-players is important in helping the prospective player determine the value of the game for social play, which will also be explored in the section of this paper which deals with ‘kinds of players’.

3.1.1.3 Selecting Specific Features

In selecting for a specific context we might expect a prospective player to be investigating the purported features of a game. Features which have a bearing on suitable contexts are not the only ones noticed. Prospective players explicitly or implicitly consider a great many design features. While ‘surface’ features are commonly attended to as suggested by Juul’s suggestion that a prospective player is first drawn to the ‘fiction’ of a game (2010), respondents also discussed ‘deeper’ features such as the type of challenge offered. One specific subject explicitly stated that he would eschew any game which might test his dexterity, preferring to engage in intellectual puzzles instead. Interviewees expressed such targets as graphical style and quality, game mechanics, activities including any overarching story or narrative, and challenge type. In fact it seems that any designed feature may be noted by a prospective player and used as a means of differentiation between possible offerings.

3.1.1.4 Selecting the Familiar

Selecting games according to familiarities seems to operate in two ways, selecting familiar game related features and selecting according to features not immediately related to games.

When a prospective player is selecting features based on their past experience of playing other games they are clearly drawing on their reflections about past experiences of play. This construction of predispositions is also noted by Carr (2005), and might be said to have been predicted by Pragmatist theories of engaging with pleasurable artifacts such as those of Dewey (1934). This act of selecting a game which promises experiences similar to those enjoyed in the past might account for the success of sequels, though obviously not all reflections are positive and can thus turn a prospective player off a certain set of features as well as on to them.

Another interesting facet of selecting according to the player’s past experiences is where a prospective player selects a videogame based on factors external to their videogaming experience. This is usually in the prospective player identifying with the subject matter (or fiction) offered by the game and may account for the successes of sports related properties and games based on films and television series. That is if a player feels that they are a fan of Football or Batman say, then they are more likely engage with games which include such themes. This principle can also act in the opposite direction, with familiar themes that the individual does not identify with acting to drive down the degree of engagement a prospective player has with the concept. For example, one interviewee expressed a dislike of Boxing as a justification for not liking beat-em-up style games. In fact he expressed that he was not someone who enjoys watching Boxing and so wouldn’t be someone who would like fighting games, which seems to be a sophisticated expression of identity, which will be covered later in this paper.

3.1.1.5 Selection Based on Trusted Opinion

The previous sub-sections dealt with what kinds of things prospective players might be evaluating as they select games to play. The following subsections deal with how prospective players get their impressions of games they haven’t yet played.

A clear source of information about what a game is like to play is to consult the opinions of those that have already played it. These opinions could be obtained from peers, reviews in the media, or other ‘expert’ opinion. In social groups where games and game play was seen as a valid topic of conversation information gleaned from the opinions of peers was most valued. However several subjects suggested that gaming was not often a valid topic of conversation, and so one of these subjects had formed a relationship with a clerk in his local game shop where the clerk had learned his tastes to such a degree that he trusted the clerk’s recommendations. Where media reviews were concerned, among the subjects that suggested that they did read such things there was a general impression that they were not as well trusted as peer recommendation, but were never the less used as a source of information about the features and overall quality of a game.

3.1.1.6 Selections Based on Marketing

Information sourced directly from the producers or publishers of videogames is another means by which potential players find out if a game might offer a suitable play experience. This could be information from the company websites of the game producing or publishing companies, media advertisements, media preview editorials, or even the game packaging. The amount of information sources consulted seems to loosely correlate with how much the prospective player identifies themselves as a game player. ‘Hardcore’ players may be aware of release dates and proposed features at a fairly fine grained level, while data from players at the other end of the hobby/commitment spectrum suggests that these players might only consult the game packaging as they browse games in a retail outlet.

The extent to which the player has investigated the promised features of a game may well influence their commitment at later phases of the engagement process. For example a player who might describe themselves as ‘hardcore’ who has tracked the development of a game from announcement through to sale, and who may well have engaged in the online fan community concerned with that specific offering, discussing hopes and fears for the final product, is less likely to give the game 2 minutes of their time before permanently deleting it from their hard disk (as the subject who downloaded games based on their title alone suggested he would).

That some less hobbyist players select games based on packaging, more often than not, suggests that they have very little understanding of the features of a game other than a theme and the positive description of the features commonly summarized on the packaging. The subjects who suggested that packaging information was their primary source of information seemed to select games by their theme (or ‘fiction’) more than any other features, even though this had in the past lead to disappointing play experiences.

3.1.1.7 Selection by Provenance

Where a game comes from can provide important information to a prospective player in helping them determine if it might be engaging. That is information about who made or published the game or who owns a copy of the game or gaming product can push up or pull down the engagement a player has with a game before they play it. If the game was developed by a team responsible for games that the prospective player is fond of, or the game is found in the collection of a friend the prospective player considers to have good taste, then the player is more likely to be engaged by the prospect of the game. Conversely if the game is developed or published by a company the prospective player considers to be producers of bad games or the game is found in the collection of someone considered to have a poor taste in games, then this provenance might act to drive down the individual’s engagement with the prospect of playing the game. Those prospective players who might describe themselves as gamers are more likely to know who produced a game and judge it on this knowledge, but such knowledge is also held, to some degree, by those who play more casually. For example one ‘casual’ subject suggested that Nintendo are more likely to produce games which are more aligned to what they are personally seeking than other publishers. Less hobbyist or ‘hardcore’ players are likely to trade games amongst their peers as a means of determining quality, essentially pooling agreeable games.

3.1.1.8 Selection by Availability

Often players might make no conscious decision to obtain a game; it is simply there. In this case the only decision the prospective player must make is whether to ‘have a go’ or not. In these cases many of the material costs are removed (such as time, effort or money spent to obtain the game) and the decision then only rests on whether the user feels that there might be other costs involved (embarrassment at playing a performance game in public say) relative to the benefits of playing (using our performance game example they might feel that in playing they become more socially connected to the other players). Where the context is less social (for example where the game is obtained cheaply, maybe as a bundled software product with a new device), the low cost of entry might have the player ‘give it a go’ where otherwise they might not. Judgment and engagement then rests on the later phases of engagement.

3.1.1.9 Selection by Trying

All other selection methods and criteria considered, there will be a point where the player starts playing the game. At this point engagement seems to go through a period of evaluation. Does the game meet up to expectations?

There is no clear cut off between a player’s initial evaluation and when they might be said to be playing ‘properly’, but there is enough evidence in the data to suggest that on occasion players have tried a game, decided that it wasn’t for them and stopped playing forever. Sometimes this is because they have encountered a game in a context that is not conducive to them seeing the benefits of continued play (such as one subject feeling that a game was far too hard to bother with having encountered it with players who were far more skilled than themselves and thus he became frustrated with his lack of skill), but more often it is simply that a game didn’t deliver what the prospective player imagined it might before they actually sat down to play it. Sometimes a player has minimal expectations and finds pleasure in their initial encounters. Sometimes though this pleasure is context dependant (such as individuals who wouldn’t normally play games, joining in with a group playing a game conducive to multi-player, party like activities), and once that context doesn’t exist anymore nor will they play anymore.

Occasionally though the player will find enough of what they thought they might get from the experience to remain engaged and to continue playing.

3.1.2 Play

While researchers such as Aarseth (Aarseth 2003) have argued that play must be the central object of study for games research, this project has essentially settled on a study of the conditions supporting engagement in play. That is the actual act of playing is bound into a social psychological praxis which informs the conditions of engagement; the actual engagement itself being a successful realization of the supporting factors of identification, expectation, context and so on. This is due in part to the differences in methodology, where the methodology used here deals with the heterophenomenology of reported player experiences Aarseth has traditionally focused on the artifact and their imputed meanings explored via personal play. That is much games research deals with the game and how it facilitates play while this research has developed a theory of how and why players make the choices they do; what experiences do games provide vs what kinds of experiences are players seeking to engage in. These are two sides of the same question.

As part of the process of selection, play and then reflection, the actual playing of the game is most simply stated as the period where a player considers them self to be an active player of the game. What factors hold them there for a session, or has the individual return for another session of play, are dealt with more completely in other sections of this paper. In terms of the phased process of engagement similar factors to those involved in game selection are constantly evaluated against the specific variable context during play, and if the weight of those factors becomes insufficiently positive then the player will stop playing. For example if the social situation changes to one that is insufficiently agreeable then the play may well stop to accommodate this change. Similarly other less dramatic changes might amass to stop play such as fatigue or hunger, or a player might have other concerns such as chores or work the time for which the play activities might be eating into. This is also alongside the possible changes within the game. The game might become too repetitive or too challenging for the player’s current state of mind, and this too will drive down the motivation to continue to play.

The conception of the motivations and de-motivations to play a specific game presented here is different from other conceptions which focus on such motivations as ‘immersion’ (Brown and Cairns 2004) or Flow (Cowley et al. 2008) as the ideas presented here should also account for players who are not looking for such deeply engaging experiences, as well as those that are. Indeed the data collected suggests that some players who have experienced the effects of ‘immersion’ or Flow like experiences in the past now reject many games or gameplaying contexts as they feel that losing track of time (say) with a game is more destructive and futile than beneficial and productive. As such some players deliberately seek out games which are not likely to take hours of their life at a time; games which are easy to pick up and put down.

3.1.3 Reflection

A player who has selected a game to play and has played it may continue to engage with the game afterwards. This engagement will take the form of explicit or implicit reflection. The player will be considering if playing that game was a positive or negative experience. They might even discuss the merits of the game amongst their social group. Indeed much of the data used in this research is essentially the reflections of players. It is apparent that while a player may select a game experience and play it, they might decide, on reflection that the experience overall is not worth repeating. Other non-negative reflections are related to the relative merits of particular games and will result in realizations which are fed back into future selections. Precisely what is being reflected on is explored in the following sections.

3.2 Identification with features

In the previous sections regarding the cycle of engagement a few hints are given as to what drives player engagement in this process. In general terms it seems that for each feature at each phase of the engagement the individual is determining if they are the ‘kind of person’ who might engage in such a game with such a feature. This identification operates for multiple pertinent features and seems to be summed or massed for any whole product. This sub-hypothesis then should help us understand how different people engage in different games, as if a player feels at any point that their perception of the fiction, graphical presentation, challenge type, and other features results in an overall positive engagement then they will be likely to play, where as if the same features are perceived, in summation, negatively then they are not likely to play.

One powerful example of how features are perceived in a socially relative personal way is of the adolescent subject who extensively played a certain JRPG (or Japanese Role-Playing Game) but felt the ‘super-deformed’ graphical style employed in much of the game was ‘babyish’. That is he seemed to feel that the graphical style was more suited to an audience younger than himself, but in summation the other features of the experience were sufficiently aligned to his cultural understanding of who he was and what he should be playing, to allow him to engage with the game despite the ‘babyish’ graphics.

What is also apparent from the data is that different individuals perceive the importance of features differently in terms of the weight they ascribe to these features. For example while one individual finds a degree of difficulty which will challenge their skills off-putting other players will deliberately play a game at its hardest setting as a personal challenge and would become fed up with a game at which they were always successful. I have related these weighted positives and negatives to a loose conception of ‘costs’ and ‘returns’. Costs might be loosely separated into material costs (money, space, portability, time commitment required) and social or cultural costs (is there a sense that in playing this I will perceive myself badly or I will be perceived badly by others in this context). Returns might be that a player is obtaining a ‘fun’ experience, whatever the particular user deems an acceptably fun experience to be (getting some exercise, inspiration, obtaining knowledge about the state of the art, experiencing an interesting narrative, and immersing oneself in an alternative world were examples encountered). Material returns are less difficult to suggest that they used to be. With the relatively recent introduction of motion control it seems that some players are interested in the fitness aspect which is used to market some products. Similarly self improvement and mental agility training game types are also apparently popular, suggesting that some players are looking for extrinsic returns such as enhanced mental fitness. This cost/benefit aspect of engagement suggests that the degree of overall engagement with a product could be said to be an aggregation of feature relative positions, or a summation of costs and returns to a net sum of overall ‘cultural’ (socially relative, personally expressed) value.

This socially developed sense of ‘kinds of people’ and what behavior is acceptable for such, which feeds into the cost/benefit sum, could be related to such Pragmatist ideas as Cooley’s ‘Looking Glass Self’ (1902); the theory that an individual’s sense of self is constructed by subjective reasoning about how the individual imagines they might be perceived by others in their society or immediate social context. We might say that so constructed the individual will behave in a way that seeks to reinforce this identity and seek to minimize any possibilities that they might be perceived poorly. We could also suggest that these expressions are expressions of cultural values (where an individual has learned suitable modes of conduct from their social interactions). That is not to say that an individual will embody all socially dictated grand cultural values (such as an abhorrence of murder say), though some of these types of value might impinge on some players’ engagement (and as such some players will state that they are uncomfortable playing a game where one plays at murder) but personally acquired, fine grained values (such as playing a game with cartoony graphics will reflect badly on an adolescent boy, but may reflect less badly on a woman in her 20s, or even that owning the latest videogame console reflects badly on a male dancer in his late 20s who believes that games are for dullards or a fashionable, female student in her teens who believes that games are for boys, but a technology savvy male, computing student in his 20s will feel remiss if he didn’t live in a house with all the latest hardware).

3.3 Value Seeking Process

In combination the hypotheses set out in the above sections suggest that players are engaging with games as collections of features with ascribed cultural value which are constantly evaluated and negotiated and the values summed throughout a course of engagement, from before the game is actively played, through active playing, to reflecting on the experience. The sense of cultural value is realized as a type of socially relative personal identification. So when an individual asks “Am I the kind of person who would play this game?” they are also asking “If I play this game, what does that say about me?” and “If I saw someone playing this game, what would that tell me about them?”, quite similar to Cooley’s ‘looking Glass self. So at each phase of engagement these implicit questions are being asked in slightly different ways.

3.3.1 Selection as investigating and finding potential positive cultural value

The space of potential gameplay offerings is not fully known by any individual, rather they form impressions of what offerings exist and what the nature of those offerings are from a variety of sources. These impressions are then contrasted with their sense of identification to determine if this activity is possibly one in which the individual feels that they can engage. The source of the information also helps to form this sense of identification, and the impression of the offering might not be formed simply on surface features such as themes, graphics, or characters, but at this stage, for many individuals, these features are more important here than they are at other phases of the engagement. The sources of information and methods used are those discussed in the relevant sub-sections above.

Essentially if an individual is sufficiently engaged by the prospect and can reconcile the investments required to play the game then they might seek it out and play it. If the investments are too great then they will play it if the investments are reduced, but otherwise will not seek it out (they are the kind of person who would play a game with those features in principle, but there is not enough time, it would be a waste of money, or it’s not worth upgrading hardware for are stated examples). If an individual is not engaged by the prospect of playing that game, then they will not seek it out or be inclined to play it without a context where the previously considered features become less relevant (not wanting to seem a ‘kill joy’ if everyone else in a social setting is playing together, that is they are not normally the kind of person who would play this game, but in this context they might as well participate and would then find it to be fun for example).

3.3.2 Engaging in play as long as a sense of positive cultural value persists

Once a player has reached the point of accepting an offering as suitable or agreeable (that they are likely to be the kind of person who would play such a game or with such a device), they will then be disposed to play it. This engagement as a state of disposition is not fixed, in that it is not such that a player who is engaged by the idea of playing will automatically then set about playing the game ‘fully’ (as the designer intended); rather it is such that the negotiations between the player’s sense of identification, the imagined reactions of their social context, and the actual experience of playing the game are fully initiated. Initially there is a sense of traversal from wanting to play the game to ‘actually’ or ‘really’ playing. This phase might be seen as ‘giving the game a chance’ and lacks a clear end unless the match between expectations and the actual experience of play shows that the game dramatically disappoints the player, at which point the value sum will be negative and the individual will stop being engaged and thus stop playing. We could say that for every new element that is introduced throughout the playing of a game the player will be ‘giving it a chance’, but this is increasingly subtle with the player also having extra investments in play (having spent the time to gain skill, develop characters, engage with the narrative or similar).

Once a player has selected an offering and then encountered that offering without being ‘put off’ by a negative sum of identification, they may be said to have recognized it as a game that they would be disposed to playing. However many games are not a simple interaction repeated over and over again but often progressively introduce new elements to the player as the player gains skill, tokens, or progresses through the story or different challenges and levels. As such for many games the player will be constantly evaluating the offering as they go; shifting their sense of value in light of new elements. Even though the terrain of the game is shifting, the player must always feel that they are engaged in an activity of positive net worth or they will stop playing or will not return to play in future sessions.

It is likely that as players move from the negotiated factors of selection to factors associated with play there is a shift of emphasis away from surface factors (thematic, graphics and such) toward ludic factors (game mechanic, challenge and such). That is players might find that they feel that they are the kind of person who would play a game with a particular graphical style say, and as they play the game become less concerned with the particular graphical style and more concerned with the actualities of playing the game; meeting the challenges or progressing through the story for example. This is the position of Aarseth (2004) who argues that the nature of any avatar is likely to fade into the background as a player focuses on ludic aspects of the game as they play. Likewise Juul’s (2010) assertion that the ‘fiction’ of a game is the first factor encountered and engaged with before other elements are considered is not completely rejected.

The degree to which they have already formed an identification will influence a player’s degree of perseverance, such that offerings with which the player has formed a strong personal connection (by developing characters or other ‘actors’ and objects, engaging with a story, or developing skill) will be much more resilient to problems such as a particularly difficult challenge, a bug, a displeasing plot direction, or any other unexpected negative experience. That is players can become more or less the kind of person who would play such a game as they acquire or lose any sense of personal connection. Similarly as a player invests resources to make progress in a game they become less likely to disengage until the player feels that this investment has resulted in a payoff, few people like to feel that they are ‘quitters’, however players do not like to feel that they are being forced to repeat gameplay elements they have already mastered or understood. This sense of progress and growth toward an arbitrary goal (a higher score, a new level, the next part of the story) can be related to an interpretation of Flow theory that suggests that ‘skill matching’ does not create engagement without the individual feeling that progress is being made toward a personally meaningful end (Csikszentmihalyi 1990).

Another type of development which is particularly true of multiplayer games is that of a social nature. Especially where online play might be concerned, the amount of socialization for some types of games (i.e. Massively Multiplayer Online games or MMOs) acts as a means of reinforcing some users’ engagements or a means of driving down engagement for others. To some players the appeal of having a set of trusted and decent playmates is apparent where the facility to play against others online is available. However, some are likely to find that they are not the kind of person who wants to micromanage other people in terms of competition schedules and training sessions, or that they are not the kind of person who wants to spend a large amount of time engaged in activities to support the play activity they identify with, and will become less engaged as the amount of required social interaction increases.

Another factor which might influence a player’s sense of engagement is a shift in context. External factors might have the player become less likely to feel that they are the kind of person who would engage in a game as other life pressures impinge on the experience. Take for example a player who is engaged by the degree to which the game facilitates social play; if the social context changes, for example by play mates ceasing to play, then the game will become less engaging as this feature or factor is less well supported.

3.3.3 Reinforcing the degree of sense of value by reflection

It is apparent that past experiences are fed back into future selections. This feedback does not seem to loop directly from putting one game aside to openly selecting the next, rather there appears to be an ongoing period of reflection, which seems to summarize the pros and cons of past experiences resulting in more carefully considered future selections.

It seems there are two types of reflection, implicit reflection and explicitly expressed reflection. That is there are times when an individual appears to be forming an opinion that can only be based on their past experiences without necessarily consciously analyzing their experience, and there are times when individuals’ experiences with various offerings can be heard being openly discussed respectively. The act of tacit reflection is difficult to demonstrate other than in the player, when quizzed, relating their preference (or dislike) of new propositions to past experiences, but struggling to put their finger on why they have this value position other than in relation to those same past experiences. It is when a user tries to relate the qualities of an offering to others that the reflective player must make value judgements as to what factors to highlight and espouse or reject. A number of observations could be made about the nature of reflection, but suffice it to say that much of the data used in this programme of research was based on interviews where the interviewer implied that the interviewee should explicitly reflect on their past gaming experiences and engagements. While this might seem introspective and thus a collection of possibly poorly realized subjective reports on interviewees’ tacit knowledge, hopefully the methodology employed has heterophenomenologically arrived at an account with some utility.

The less formal interviews in the data (along with some field notes on casual observations made) reveal that in discussing which experiences individuals found engaging, there is a degree of rhetoric involved. Individuals expounding the merits of the experiences they engage with and those that they do not; occasionally attempting to convince the other of the merits or faults of games they have played, which serves to amplify the sense of identification and hence degree of engagement.

4. conclusions

Hopefully, the summary of the theory provided above gives the reader enough information to be able to decide if these hypotheses make sense, and if the main hypothesis of a cyclical process of seeking cultural value fits the explored domain. Obviously the methodology employed focuses on certain aspects of a player’s experience. So no sense of a player’s emotion is considered explicitly, for example. Many apparent omissions are likely due to them being expected in the data due to a priori positions, as for example little mention was made by subjects of their preferred emotional states, other than a game should be fun or interesting and not boring.

A small (9 respondent) survey of interested parties asked to review a very brief summary of the results reveals that the degree of fit and relevance is good with two caveats. These caveats are that the short presentation of the theory only seemed to account for extensive cycles of engagement and not one off experiences which might still be deemed engaging, and that the result is an obvious truism. Hopefully this more extensive presentation of the theory helps to demonstrate that to some extent the one-off interaction is included as an extreme case (where the individual is the kind of person who would play that game in that context, but not necessarily in others), while the charge that the theory is an obvious truism is not supported by the empirical literature, as there seems to be very little which deals with concepts of a process of finding engagement in videogames by a constantly evaluated or negotiated sense of cultural value. So if this theory is a truism it seems to have little impact on much empirical research into player experiences, maybe because it has not been stated clearly.

5. discussion

A pertinent observation about player engagement is made by Carr (2005). In attempting to account for an observation that girls in a specifically convened female only gaming club Carr notes that “Different people will accumulate particular gaming skills, knowledge and frames of reference, according to the patterns of access and peer culture they encounter – and these accumulations will pool as predispositions, and manifest as preferences.” while “Preferences are an assemblage, made up of past access and positive experiences, and subject to situation and context.”, which seems to be quite closely related to the theory presented here. This observation is substantively different from say those of Malone (1981) and subsequent multi factor theories as it does not state that players engage with Challenge, Curiosity and Fantasy (or some other factors such as novelty and spectacle; excitement of combat; game characters; persistence; exploration; advancement; unraveling of puzzles; building, creating and controlling; humour; relation to one’s hobby or interest; audiovisual quality; imaginary world; and winning (Ermi and Mäyrä 2003)), but gives us some indication of what process a player goes through in arriving at the specific combination of factors that engages them.

In terms of related work from other domains McCarthy and Wright (2004) have taken a theoretically driven approach which has arrived at similar conclusions drawing for Pragmatic theory. That is the research presented in this paper was empirical abductive research, where as McCarthy and Wright seem to have used a theoretical deductive approach, but we have arrived at a position which neatly fits into a Pragmatic position. Where the theory in this paper relates the engagement with videogames to Cooley’s ‘Looking glass self’ and notes that engagements are cyclical and sit within a social context McCarthy and Wright take theories from Dewey (1934) and Bakhtin (1993) to arrive at related conclusions about the felt experience of the use of technology in general. One point of similarity is that they also recognise that an engagement is not simply a single (or repeated) instance of use, but also contains expectation and reflection, placing the experiencing subject and the object of experience in the broadest context. The breadth of this context extending out into personal conception of personal meaning and cultural value of the individual’s life, not just their life related to the technological artifact. This consideration of the overall felt experience (history, reflection, context) of the individual then determines the degree of meaning and value they then apply to the experience they are having as they have it.

So is a theory that players must be able to find the value in playing as a kind of investment of cultural negatives in order to make net cultural gains useful?

As a means of reframing the problem of Game Design to consider the broad cultural context of different player perspectives, some surveyed games professionals have shown an interest. However it seems apparent that some sectors of the industry are well aware that users must identify themselves as potential players and are already extending their thinking to traditionally under exploited kinds of players (e.g. Nintendo’s successes with products that purport to promote mental and physical fitness, and play in a social context). Certainly recent attempts at marketing games seem to focus on the player as much as the game, in a seeming attempt to demonstrate to the user what kinds of people would be players of the games and devices being released.

As a means of framing understanding of what engages players, it could be suggested that the core hypothesis is too broad; so inclusive as to describe all human experience of entertainment products at a macro level, with little to say about individual cases of subjective engagement. However the supporting hypotheses and how they interrelate could be said to provide a meso level description of engagement which hopefully helps us understand individual cases more clearly.

It is obvious that more work is required. The summary presented in this paper is necessarily quite brief. It is immediately apparent that each contributing factor or hypothesis could be explained in much more detail, with reference to the data from which it was derived. An effort will be made to disseminate these detailed descriptions at a later date. Similarly while an attempt was made to saturate a small number of critical hypotheses, other hypotheses which might be of significant interest to the fields of design and research are relatively under saturated; as such further research to flesh out these ideas will be needed. An attempt to translate these theoretical findings into some practical artifacts would both help to validate the theory to some extent and to provide further operational information for design practitioners.

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Engineering works: what is (and is not) “engineering” for interactive computer systems?

Ann Blandford University College London Dept. of Computer Science, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT A.Blandford@ucl.ac.uk

 

ABSTRACT

What does it mean to “engineer” an interactive computer system? Is it about the team doing the work (that they are engineers), about the process being followed, about the application domain, or what? Is engineering about managing complexity, safety or reliability?

Comment 1

For physical artifacts, it may be possible to achieve consensus on how well engineered a product is, but this is more difficult for digital artifacts.

Comment 2

 

In this talk, I will offer some perspectives, both positive and negative, on the nature of engineering for interactive computer systems

Comment 3

and, at least implicitly, the nature and future of the EICS conference series.

Author Keywords

Engineering; HCI; safety; reliability; professionalism.

ACM Classification Keywords

H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces – Interaction styles.

General Terms

Human Factors; Design; Reliability; Verification.

INTRODUCTION

The aim of this short paper is to facilitate discussion on the role and value of engineering in relation to interactive computer systems.

Comment 4

It arises, in part, from an activity at the most recent IFIP WG2.7 / 13.4 (User Interface Engineering) working meeting: to develop a short video to communicate the value of engineering for user interfaces. It also arises from discussions I have had with various people on the nature and scope of the EICS conference. Both activities have generated more heat than light. It is, intentionally, not a well engineered argument for a particular position, but a series of vignettes putting forward different cases, for and against particular views of engineering in relation to interactive computer systems (ICS). My intention, which may or may not be realized, is that the community should establish a better shared understanding of the nature, value and role of engineering in the ICS context.

Comment 5

If it’s done by engineers then it is engineering

I am a Chartered Engineer. I started my career as a Graduate Trainee Engineer, at about the time the Finniston report [7] was published. That report emphasized the importance of engineering to the future of the economy, and also argued strongly for the status of professional engineers. Within the UK, that is a battle which has now been lost: “anyone in the UK may describe themselves as an engineer. Seeking to regulate or legislate on the use of a now common term is recognized by the Engineering Council as totally impractical.” [6] So, at least in the UK, anyone can call themselves an engineer, and – by extension – claim that what they are doing is engineering. A subset can make a stronger claim: that we are accredited as professional engineers. But is what any of us do “engineering”? Let us consider definitions of engineering.

Engineering: definitions

A dictionary definition of engineering is: “The application of scientific and mathematical principles to practical ends” [14]. The emphasis in the Engineering HCI Community of ACM is on “the application of scientific knowledge and rigorous design methodology to reliably predict and, thus, help improve the consistency, usability, economy and safety of solutions to practical problems” [1]. Both of these definitions focus on principles and rigor for addressing practical problems. Clearly, these principles should apply in the design of complex, safety-critical systems [10]. It is much less clear what it means to engineer the user experience, in terms of fun or affect (a theme in this year’s call for papers). The science of fun is poorly developed, the mathematics of fun even more so. User experience is not so well understood that it can be reliably predicted or delivered consistently without extensive iterative testing, which is standard ICS development practice, and not particular to an engineering approach.

The importance of iteration in iCS

Most HCI text books assert that iteration is essential in the design of ICS. Rogers et al [12] focus on four main phases of developing interactive systems: establish requirements; design alternatives; prototype; and evaluate. Iteratively. Best practice in the development of ICS includes requirements gathering and user testing, neither of which is particularly amenable to the application of scientific or mathematical principles, although both can be done rigorously and are essential to the delivery of systems that are safe and usable.

Tools such as CogTool [13] bring an engineering rigor and prediction to important aspects of user interaction with interactive devices, based on task performance. Similarly, model-based approaches to system development [9] support the task-based development of ICS. However, none of these “engineering” approaches take account of the softer, but equally important, aspects of the use of ICS, including the full user experience, how the ICS fits within its broader context of use, and how people conceptualise the activity the ICS is designed to support [2]. Without taking such aspects of use into account, the engineering of ICS runs the risk of delivering solutions to the wrong practical problems.

A case study: CHI+MED

The CHI+MED programme [5] provides an interesting object of study in terms of engineering ICS. CHI+MED is studying the design and use of interactive medical devices: safety-critical devices such as infusion pumps that are themselves moderately complex, and are used in highly complex settings. There are many aspects of these devices that can be subjected to an engineering approach, including modeling their safety properties [4] and formal verification [8]. Such approaches are necessary, but not sufficient. There are many aspects of the use of such devices in practice [11] that need to be understood and designed for. Without systematic study of the use of devices in context, and rigorous description of the “problem”, which defines requirements for the next generation of systems, and without careful testing of device prototypes, it is easy to deliver solutions that are verified by not validated [3]. There is a risk that by separating off “engineering” approaches to ICS, the engineering becomes distanced from the practical problems that it is intended to address.

Conclusion

There is an argument, based on the above, that engineering is the servant of design – that the user needs are identified outside the engineering process, that the engineer’s job is just to make the design as conceived by others work (ensuring that the system performs as intended – traditionally referred to as ‘verification’). This seems at odds with the broader view of software development lifecycles that development is iterative [3], and is concerned with considerations of usability, utility and experience (all of which are arguably elements of ‘validation’), which should also be concerns for engineering.

The title of this paper, “Engineering works”, is a play on words. One reading is a claim: that engineering makes things better; that it provides assurance that the proposed solution to a problem (an ICS) is well engineered: that it will not crash or permit the system to get into unsafe states, and will manage complexity well. The second reading is as a noun, “works”, qualified with an adjective, “engineering”; engineering work is needed when things have gone wrong, or need maintenance. In the context of EICS, I suggest that both meanings pertain: that engineering can make complex systems work well, but that the engineering approach needs active maintenance to remain relevant to other aspects of ICS design and to avoid becoming narrow and irrelevant.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This paper has benefitted from discussions with many people, but the viewpoints put forward are my own. CHI+MED is funded by EPSRC EP/059063/01.

REFERENCES

1. ACM (n.d.) acm.org/communities/engineering/ accessed 17/4/13.
2. Blandford, A., Green, T. R., Furniss, D., & Makri, S. (2008). Evaluating system utility and conceptual fit using CASSM. J. Human-Computer Studies, 66(6), 393-409.
3. Boehm, B. W. (1988). A spiral model of software development and enhancement. Computer, 21(5), 61-72.
4. Bowen, J. & Reeves, S. (in press) Modelling Safety Properties of Interactive Medical Systems. EICS 2013. To appear.
5. CHI+MED (n.d.). chi-med.ac.uk.
6. Engineering Council (n.d.). Status of Engineers. engc.org.uk/statusofengineers.aspx ac. 17/4/13.
7. Finniston, H. M. (1980). Engineering our future: report. HM Stationery Off.
8. Masci, P., Ayoub, A., Curzon, P., Harrison, M., Lee, I., Sokolsky, O. & Thimbleby, H. (in press) Verification of Interactive Software for Medical Devices: PCA Infusion Pumps and FDA Regulation as an Example. EICS 2013. To appear.
9. Meixner, G., Paternò, F., & Vanderdonckt, J. (2011). Past, Present, and Future of Model-Based User Interface Development. i-com, 10(3), 2-11.
10. Navarre, D., Palanque, P., Ladry, J. F., & Barboni, E. (2009). ICOs: A model-based user interface description technique dedicated to interactive systems addressing usability, reliability and scalability. ACM Trans. CHI, 16(4), 18.
11. Rajkomar, A., & Blandford, A. (2012). Understanding infusion administration in the ICU through Distributed Cognition. biomedical informatics, 45(3), 580-590.
12. Rogers, Y., Sharp, H., & Preece, J. (2011). Interaction design: beyond human-computer interaction. Wiley.
13. Teo, L. H., John, B., & Blackmon, M. (2012). CogTool-Explorer: a model of goal-directed user exploration that considers information layout. Proc CHI. 2479-2488.
14. The Free Dictionary (n.d.) thefreedictionary.com/engineering accessed 17/4/13.

 

 

  FeedFinder: A Location-Mapping Mobile Application for Breastfeeding Women

1st Author Name – Affiliation – Address – e-mail address

2nd Author Name – Affiliation – Address – e-mail address

3rd Author Name – Affiliation – Address – e-mail address

ABSTRACT

Breastfeeding is positively encouraged across many countries as a public health endeavour. The World Health Organisation recommends breastfeeding exclusively for the first six months of an infant’s life. However, women can struggle to breastfeed, and to persist with breastfeeding, for a number of reasons from technique to social acceptance. This paper reports on four phases of a design and research project, from sensitizing user-engagement and user-centred design, to the development and in-the-wild deployment of a mobile phone application called FeedFinder.

Comment 1

FeedFinder has been developed with breastfeeding women to support them in finding, reviewing and sharing public breastfeeding places with other breastfeeding women.

Comment 2

We discuss how mobile technologies can be designed to support public health endeavours, and suggest that public health technologies are better aimed at communities and societiesrather than individual.

Comment 3

Author Keywords breastfeeding, mobile, user-centred design, public health.

ACM Classification Keywords H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI):

Miscellaneous.

INTRODUCTION

Breastfeeding is viewed as a positive health behaviour that has lasting health benefits for the breastfeeding mother and her child. In the UK women are recommended to breastfeedfor the first six months exclusively and to supplement additional food for at least a year [15]. Research has suggested that infants who are not breastfed are more likely to contract short-term infections (including respiratory and ear) and in particular infections that require a period of hospitalization. Longer-term implications can include a greater likelihood to become obese in later life, to develop type 2 diabetes, as well as slightly higher levels of blood-pressure and blood cholesterol. For breastfeeding women, evidence suggests that benefits include a reduction in the risk of breast and ovarian cancer [20]. According to the 2010 Infant Feeding Study [15] 81% of women in the UK initiate breastfeeding within the first 48 hours, with 69% of women continuing to breastfeed their infant at 1 week. By the six to eight week medical check-up 55% of women are continuing to breastfeed their infant. By six months just over a third of women (34%) are continuing to breastfeed their infant, well below the target of exclusive breastfeeding up to six months. Those women that are most likely to breastfeed are older, with 87% of women aged over 30 choosing to breastfeed their infant, compared to 58% of women aged under 20 choosing to breastfeed. In addition, women who undertook managerial and professional occupations were more likely to breastfeed (90%), than women who have never worked (71%).

There is much perceived pressure among women to breastfeed [21], from midwifery care through to public health messaging, where the choice to breastfeed is framed in moralistic terms. Choosing to breastfeed therefore becomes strongly linked with being a “good mother”, while choosing not to breastfeed is viewed as morally and socially deviant [18]. And, while breastfeeding is often described as the natural and trouble-free feeding method [38], many women experience practical difficulties and concerns in breastfeeding during the first few weeks of a baby’s life.

Breastfeeding requires learning on behalf of both the mother and baby, which requires support from local health services, practice, perseverance and persistence [5]. Less than optimal techniques can result in an extremely painful breastfeeding experience. And as the quantity of breast milk a baby consumes through breastfeeding not known, women can have concerns about insufficient milk supply and milk consumption, which undermine confidence in their ability to breastfeed and their bodies ability to ensure their baby thrives [4]. Finally, social, cultural and public values, familial history, class and regional influences all play a partin a woman’s choice to breastfeed or not [29].

The Public Construction of Breastfeeding

Women’s feeding choices are influenced not only by their own opinions, but by the socio-cultural context in which those decisions take place. A woman’s family, partner and the community in which she lives and works all play a part in the decision she makes as to whether she will breastfeed and continue to breastfeed up to and past six months [28, 29]. Previous research has identified that support forbreastfeeding outside of the home is limited within the UK  [29]. The act of breastfeeding is considered intimate and personal and therefore not appropriate for public consumption [6]. This lack of perceived public, practical and moral support for breastfeeding can be extremely problematic for breastfeeding women, as this sense of disapproval is viewed as a negative judgment of them as a person [28]. In response women arrange their day such that they remain close to home or to designated lactation rooms, in order that they never have to feed in public [6]. The work of keeping breastfeeding invisible clearly increases the labour associated with breastfeeding [37]. This paucity of day-to-day contact with breastfeeding is also evident in media production and consumption. For example, content analysis of British TV showed that bottlefeeding was shown often in televised programmes, but breastfeeding only appeared once [17]. Photos of women breastfeeding have, until very recently, been banned from social networking sites [27]. In addition, news stories in print media regularly report on instances where women have been asked not to breastfeed in a public place. This contrives to achieve a context where it is rare to see a woman breastfeeding an infant in public [6], and, where public breastfeeding is a necessity, there is a social expectation it will be discrete [32]. As less women are seen breastfeeding in public, breastfeeding is seen as a less available infant feeding option, especially for those from socio-economic groups where breastfeeding is less common [24, 35].

Lactivism and Community Support

It has been suggested that the transition to motherhood can be a motivational force for women to engage in political activism [34]. And, since breastfeeding in public is not a neutral activity [29], but rather a political performance where the caring practice associated with, in particular, very young babies is made visible to the public [6, 36], there has been an increasing amount of activism in relation to breastfeeding in public in recent years. Nurse-ins are perhaps the pinnacle of this kind of ‘lactivisim’, where breastfeeding women congregate to breastfeed en-mass, typically in restaurants, cafes and shops where a women haspreviously been told that they can’t breastfeed. Breastfeeding picnics similarly focus on bringing women together en-mass to breastfeed, but usually take place in family friendly places such as parks. Boyer et al [6] make the distinction between these two forms of lactivisim, stating that nurse-ins focus on breastfeeding mothers rights as consumers (to breastfeed in cafes, airplanes, etc.), whereas breastfeeding picnics focus on breastfeeding mothers rights as citizens (to breastfeed in parks, on benches). However, she also highlights how these forms of lactivism can further alienate some women who simply see themselves as trying their best to cater to their infant’s needs when breastfeeding publically.

HCI and the New Mother / Parent

HCI has turned to new mother- and parent-hood as a transitional time in life which digital technologies may be well placed to support [3]. There exists a diverse range of design studies and devices from pregnancy suits to enable the non-pregnant partner to better empathise with the experiences of the pregnant women [19] through to devices to support pregnant women manage and share their healthcare records [13]. Research has investigated how new mothers use social networking technologies to find confidence in their new role, as well as maintain their identity beyond that of ‘mother’ [14]. Recently a small body of work within HCI has responded to needs around breastfeeding specifically, with for example the development of a relational agent that is able to engage in an empathetic dialogue with a mother to deliver information about breastfeeding antenatally [12]. Other projects have explored how a mobile application can aid people in correctly pasteurising breastmilk donated to human milk banks in developing countries [7]. Contributing to this work, this paper provides a case study of a user-centred design process undertaken with new mothers in the design, development and evaluation of a mobile application which enables women to find, review and share public places for breastfeeding.

Comment 4

We report on methods used for engaging new mothers in a design process, and reflect on the role that mobile technologies can take in delivering public health that focuses on change in the community, rather than change in the individual.

Comment 5

BREASTFEEDING IN THE NORTH EAST UK

The North East UK has low rates of breastfeeding initiation and continuation when compared with the national average. Around 54.5% of new mothers initiate breastfeeding within the first 48 hours, below the national average of 72.5%. While breastfeeding initiation in the area has improved slightly since 2006, continuation of breastfeeding beyond the first six to eight weeks is the lowest in the country, with only 31.9% of infants receiving some breast milk at six to eight weeks. Recent research notes that despite good maternity units and innovative interventions to support breastfeeding, breastfeeding is rarely seen in public [29], with participants stating that adequate and comfortable places were rarely provided.

DESIGNING FEEDFINDER

We followed an iterative user-centred design cycle in the design of FeedFinder, initially seeking to develop a sensitising account of women’s experiences of breastfeeding locally.

Comment 6

Generative design ideation around these accounts led to the concept of a breastfeeding mapping application to allow women to find, review and share places for breastfeeding. Further inquiry took the form of a series of design workshops that explored what values contribute to good and bad breastfeeding experiences. Finally, a medium fidelity prototype was evaluated using cooperative evaluation to identify any usability issues.

Comment 7

Sensitising Interviews with Breastfeeding Mothers

At the outset of the project we conducted four one-to-one 30-minute sensitising interviews with new mothers in a local café, 12 to 16 weeks after the birth of their first baby. Each mother had reported prior to giving birth that it was their intention to breastfeed their baby. At the point of interview three women were breastfeeding their babies exclusively and one woman was formula feeding her baby exclusively. These interviews focused primarily on initial experiences of breastfeeding, but also touched on wider experiences of early motherhood. Each interview was audio recorded, transcribed and analysed using an inductive thematic analysis. We report on two reoccurring themes related to breastfeeding pressures and the act of public breastfeeding.

Pressures on Unfamiliar Ground

For each of the women the choice to breastfeed had initially been entangled with social, professional and familial identities and relationships. Two women had chosen to breastfeed as a result of their professions (a nutritionist and a support worker at a charity supporting early years education and health). “I felt pretty pressured [to breastfeed] in the first place cause I work for Sure Start, so there we encourage Mums to breastfeed and it’s best thing obviously, I know it is anyway” (Sandra). Cara on the other hand stated that she had never really questioned whether she would breastfeed. As a nutritionist she considered it to be the best start for her child and “… was determined to try and try and try even if it doesn’t work.” Sarah similarly reported the sense that breastfeeding was the best thing for her baby and although she “… wasn’t overly enthusiastic about it” she felt that breastfeeding was a familiar option since her mother had breastfed her and her siblings. Although Sarah felt that breastfeeding was what she wanted to do, she was acutely aware that both her mother-in-law and her own mother wanted her to breastfeed. “Yeah, like my family encouraged me to breastfeed as well so ya know, both my Mum and my Husband’s Mum were like quite keen for me to do it.” While each woman might have made the decision to at least try breastfeeding for their own reasons, their choices was made antenatally. And for each of the women the experience is something quite different from their original perception. Cara explained: “I knew it would be tiring – but I didn’t realize how tiring it was going to be.I’ve got a couple of friends who have already given up because they found it too tiring. Some days you have more time between feeds, but most of the time it’s sort of every hour, hour and a half.” And, while Cara was able to overcome some of the uncertainty associated with breastfeeding a baby (for example, knowing when to feed and knowing whether the baby has had enough), Sandra found herself unable to: “I’m not breastfeeding anymore. I started mix feeding. It’s just too, too hard, too tiring. She was too greedy, but she’s in a lot better routine now, I wish I hadn’t given up, but… I didn’t realise how difficult it was going to be … I had no idea when she was going to need feeding.” The choice to continue or not with breastfeeding has to be both the best choice for the baby and the mother. So while Sandra might wish she hadn’t given up breastfeeding, she is now better able to sleep as she can share the care of her baby with her partner more fully, and feels “much happier now I have stopped.” In making this choice Sandra wasn’t just choosing what was best for her and her partner, but also her baby “she [the baby] took the bottle so well I thought it was the best thing for her, but I do wish I’d tried for longer.” However, once making this choice Sandra had to fight to legitimise it. She considers that she continued to breastfeed “more for other people than for me, like the midwives and things. They ask you if you are still breastfeeding and if you have any concerns they push you to do a couple more days… I was terrified about telling my midwife I didn’t want to breastfeed anymore so I avoided her.”

Exposing a New Self

In the early weeks of motherhood the women we interviewed attempted to confine breastfeeding to the home. Cara would “try and time feeds so I could feed him at home, get out and then be back at home for the next one or somewhere where I could hide away”. But the attempt to provide this care for their babies in private hindered the extent to which they could continue managing other aspects of their lives.

Sandra tells us how ‘I couldn’t even nip to the shops’, ‘I didn’t come into town in case she did wanted to be fed’. Yet, for most breastfeeding women there comes a time when one must breastfeed in public. In doing so, they are confronted with the public perception of breastfeeding. For instance, Sarah was aware “from my antenatal classes is that breastfeeding is really low in the north east”. As a result when the women made the finally decision to breastfeed in a public place they seemed to anticipate that it would be perceived by others as a controversial activity. Sarah told us with surprise “I haven’t had any problems – no one has said anything to me or anything like that.”, while Sandra armed herself with legal knowledge when breastfeeding outside of the home: “because of the job I do I would know I was well within my rights to be doing it.”

Having “jumped in at the deep end” and fed in public, Cara seemed to positively embrace a sense of freedom: “I don’t care where I do it. I fed him on the Quayside market sitting on a step the other day! I’ve turned into one of those mothers who will just get their boobs out everywhere. I just don’t care anymore.” While Sarah is also “not that bothered about breastfeeding in public”, she took a much more deliberated approach to breastfeeding in a public place: “…I’ve spoken to a few people at church just to like gage what other people’s opinion [of breastfeeding in public] is, like am I too confident, should I be more like reserved? But I don’t think I have been. Like, I only do it when I’m sitting out of the way or in a café I’d sort of sit in a corner, like I try and sit somewhere more discrete…” This concern with whether there is a proper way to feed in public is felt by Cara not through her own concerns, but through the concerns of others she is close to: “My friends who don’t have babies, they would be like, this woman just got her boob out in McDonalds, and I would tell them well I hope you know I’m going to be doing that don’t you. And they were like well you will have to be discrete won’t you and I was like well I’ll try.”

And, while both Sarah and Cara use a feeding scarf in order to be discrete in public if and when necessary, Sarah attempts to be discrete also through planning and choosing where she can breastfeed when out and about: “I think it’s useful in bigger department stores knowing there’s somewhere you can go which I hadn’t known existed beforehand… but I’m quite happy to sit in a coffee shop if I need to.” Similarly although Cara will breastfeed anywhere she has at times sought to find places where breastfeeding is welcome, but has found online resources to be lacking: “…the resources are old, they aren’t kept up to date. Like it said there was a good one [breastfeeding room] in Boots and I went in and they don’t have one anymore. It didn’t matter in my case but that could panic people who don’t like to feed in public at all.”

While drawing attention to a range of issues related to early experiences of motherhood, the interview data highlights some challenges experienced by new mothers who choose to breastfeed. In particular, we see how breastfeeding a young baby can be unpredictable, such that women do not feel confident to leave the house in case they have to breastfeed outside of their home. We see that breastfeeding outside of the home is considered a challenge not only because of the fact that intimate parts of one’s body may be exposed, bodily fluids might be leaked, but also because women are unsure how their breastfeeding might be perceived by the public, and how they might cope with public hostility.

Comment 8

Design Workshops

Following analysis and ideation our design response took the form of a mobile phone application that allows women to find, review and share places for public breastfeeding. The application could serve the very practical benefit of allowing women to know where other women have had positive experiences of breastfeeding in public places, while also potentially highlighting the variety and breadth of places where women do have positive experiences of breastfeeding in public. To explore the design as well as understand the specificities of how such an application we conducted a series of design workshops.

Within the UK context local community breastfeeding support groups are available to offer informal places for women (often with new babies) to gather and breastfeed. On the whole, these groups offer a much needed space for women to meet other women who have recently become mums, as well as a place where women can come to solicit support and advice on breastfeeding. We were invited to run our design sessions within four of these community support groups around the city and its suburbs, and through this engaged with a further 21 mothers.

Our design sessions were structured around two lightweight and flexible activities, the first focused on mapping women’s experiences of breastfeeding locally (mapping past experiences) and the second focused on drawing out the experiential qualities that make a place good for breastfeeding (prioritizing location qualities). Each activity was designed to be relatively quick to complete, require minimum hands-on activity from the women (since they could be breastfeeding) and could be conducted either with individual women, or with groups of women. Each workshop was audio recorded, transcribed and analysed using an deductive thematic analysis.

Mapping Past Experiences

Using an annotated map of the area surrounding each breastfeeding community group we asked the women to map places where they had breastfeed publically and to describe some of their (positive and negative) experiences of breastfeeding locally. The data further suggested that women experience anxiety in relation to breastfeeding in public. And while this anxiety and feeling of embarrassment fades over time and with experience (“I don’t find it embarrassing because I think you get over that really quickly, within the first of weeks…”) it was considered to exacerbate stress relating to early breastfeeding experiences (“What am I going to do, where am I going to go and that’s another anxiety you’ve got to get over and not only have you got to make sure they latch on properly and you’re doing all the other things, you’re trying to go through a mental checklist and the problem of finding somewhere and then thinking are they going to let me, is it going to be alright?”)

In discussing public breastfeeding with our participants we heard a handful of negative stories. Nancy told us of her experience breastfeeding in a high-end pizza chain: “… They were absolutely awful in there… When they saw me getting [my baby] ready to feed they were like ‘oh don’t come and sit over here. Oh no no, go and sit over here in this corner…’ I’m like no what’s wrong with me sitting here because I was quite near the window and they were like ‘oh no, we’d rather you go and sit there’ and then I had people walking out of there because I was feeding…” However, overall the women’s experiences were positive when they did breastfeed in public, with one participant reporting that a stranger in cafe had congratulated her for breastfeeding.

In our group discussions women often shared with one another good places to breastfeed around the city, as well as discussing certain problems that had to be overcome when looking for somewhere to breastfeed. The pragmatics of navigating a busy café with a buggy (“…there’s nothing worse than banging into every table and chair going…”), to knowing that a member of staff would carry a hot drink to the table (“because you can’t manage a buggy, a baby, a toddler if you’ve got one and whatever drink”), or that free drinking water was available. Common strategies for juggling these practical concerns was to only visit places which had baby changing facilities as the women considered that this indicated some level of baby friendliness.

Prioritizing Place Qualities

The second activity aimed to understand what qualities of a place were important to a positive public breastfeeding experience. We explored this through a card sorting activity. 14 cards were designed, each representing a feature or quality used to describe a place: clean, open, bustling, stylish, convenient, baby facilities, friendly, comfy, familiar, privacy, spacious, affordable, entertaining, calm. To complete the activity an individual or group of women were asked to provide a description of the quality in question and then place it on a target; the nearer the centre the more important, the nearer the perimeter the less important (see Figure 1). Blank cards were also available for women to include additional qualities of places that they considered important to a positive breastfeeding experience.

Through this activity we discovered that the qualities central to a positive experience of public breastfeeding were in part changeable dependent upon the age of the women’s baby and thereby their experience in breastfeeding. For example, for those new to breastfeeding, women tended to prefer to feed their babies somewhere private so as to concentrate on getting the baby to latch on properly. Alternatively, women with older babies tended to prefer somewhere quiet so as to reduce possible distractions (“Especially now as he’s got older I need somewhere quiet rather than somewhere that there’s loads going on because literally he’ll be on and off and on and off to see what’s going on.”). Similarly, while women got used to breastfeeding and in particular different ways of holding and supporting their baby while feeding, they tended to seek out places to breastfeed with supportive soft seating.  However, as women became more experienced and in tandem their baby developed better head control and strength, women found they could feed on hard seats, or the ground if necessary.

Figure 1: A Completed Prioritisation of Place Qualities

Co-operative Evaluation

The final element of our user-centred design cycle saw the cooperative evaluation [26] of a wireframe, medium fidelity prototype of FeedFinder. We brought the wireframe, which illustrated interactions required to find a review, add a review and add a place, to one of the breastfeeding community groups who had participated in the original design workshops. We asked six women to walkthrough the wireframe, completing three activities: finding and viewing the reviews for a place, adding a review for a place, and adding a new breastfeeding place to the map. As the women completed each task, we asked the women to ‘think-aloud’ their actions and discuss with any problems that they were encountering. Notes were made throughout each evaluation and any usability issues and potential remedies were discussed with the user.

Comment 9

WHAT IS FEEDFINDER?

FeedFinder is a mobile application, available for free on both iOS and Android that enables women (and other interested parties, such as breastfeeding community workers, midwives, partners, business owners) to explore and contribute to a map which describes how supportive the local community and services are toward women who breastfeed. Women can use FeedFinder to search for and view places on the map where other women have previously breastfed, along with those women’s reviews and ratings along five categories: Comfy(ness), Clean(liness), Privacy, Baby Facilities and Average Spend.

Women can also add new places to the map where they have breastfed and leave reviews for that place. We added a brief survey to FeedFinder to collect an overview of women’s experiences of using the application. The short survey asks users to rate how happy they are with the application, whether they would recommend the application to a friend and whether the application has helped them to find a place to breastfeed in the last week. The survey has an open text box for any additional comments. The survey is made available to women four weeks after the application was first downloaded.

RELEASING FEEDFINDER

The release of FeedFinder was planned to coincide with the birth of Prince George (July 2013) in order to maximise on possible interest within both regional and national press. The project was featured in television, radio and print media, including Sky News, BBC News as well as local press venues such as ‘the Journal’, the Metro radio and LBC radio.

We wanted the women who downloaded the application when it was first released to feel there was content there for them to interact with before hopefully moving onto adding reviews and new places to breastfeed based on their own  experiences. As such, we invited a number of local breastfeeding women (recruited primarily through the university and informal networks) to use an early version of the application to add reviews for places where they had experience of breastfeeding. In addition, we added reviews to the map within the local area based on data collected in our design workshops, and particularly in relation to the ‘Mapping Past Experiences’.

EVALUATING FEEDFINDER

FeedFinder has now been running for over 12 months and has seen an uptake of just under 3,000 members. FeedFinder has been used primarily in the UK however a smaller, but growing, number of venues and reviews have been added in the USA, Western Europe and Australia. At present, FeedFinder has 2888 women who have used or currently use FeedFinder, 1800 places where women have breastfed added, and a total of 1686 reviews.

Members on average used FeedFinder on 2.6 separate occasions over a period of 25 days. However those that interacted with the application on more than a single day, around 48% (1366 users), used the application almost twice that, with an average of 4.16 sessions over an average period of 53 days. The average session use time was 164.14 seconds (~3 minutes). During each session members performed on average 7.37 actions, viewing 1.45 venues and performed 5.2 map searches, with members searching 1.17 miles from their starting location. In addition, we found that 16% (475) of FeedFinder members have added at least one venue. A similar figure 14% (399) of members have contributed at least one review.

Members used the application throughout the day, but there were peaks in use three points during the day: 9am, 4pm and then 9pm. The application usage in the morning may reflect women searching to find places to breastfeed for later in the day. The 4pm peak in map searching may correspond with members attempting to find places to breastfeed while out and about. At 9pm the majority of reviews are submitted and places added suggesting that members find it easier to contribute to FeedFinder when in  the evening, perhaps once the baby is in bed.

Figure 2 shows the FeedFinder map centred on the UK.

As FeedFinder made use of the Foursquare API it was possible to categorise places added to FeedFinder. The four place types added most commonly were Coffee Shops (108), Cafés (95), Pubs (82) and Department Stores (74). The most reviewed venue categories were Department Stores (119), Coffee Shops (95), Cafés (87) and Pubs (60).

Survey Data, Feedback and Member Correspondance

So far, a total of 109 unique comments have been received in the “additional comments” section of the survey. These comments provided insight on the need for more places (49), specific faults (43), potential new features (15),  motivations for use (33), and miscellaneous items (1).

Not Many Local Places Yet!

Most prominent was the identified need for more places, which was linked to the need for more users (15), for pre-populated data (6), and for more promotion and advertising (5). In some cases, despite its usefulness, members recognised the need for further content: “Easy to use app and has helped me to locate breastfeeding friendly locations. Would benefit from further reviews and more locations however I understand this requires user feedback.”

Figure 2: The FeedFinder map centred on the UK as of 09/14

Members were also keen to either be directly involved in this member feedback, or in recruiting or promoting feedback from others. One member wanted to integrated FeedFinder with Facebook to promote other members to provide reviews. “great concept. will improve with more recommendations. anyway of linking it to check ins with eg Facebook to remind people to add venues?”

Yet, feedback also pointed to a need to prepopulate the app with ‘obvious’ locations, and contradicts the above suggestions of member feedback. As one comment suggests: “I love the idea but there’s no places listed! Would have been much better if you’d done some research and pre-populated it with a few of the obvious places in advance. Mothercares, mamas and papas, John Lewis etc. You shouldn’t just rely on user submissions as people won’t use an app with no content. Hopefully it’ll have more content soon though.” These comments point to a conflict in the expectations for authoritative data and the design of FeedFinder to promote community generated data.

Consumers and Citizens

Motivation for use appears to come from both its current usefulness (9) and expected usefulness for expecting mothers (7). Four commenters were active promoters of the application, while eight others identified their use as ‘helping others’, often despite their own comfort in public breastfeeding and reduced need for the app (4). Promoters of the app were particularly interested in demonstrating the ease of public breastfeeding to nervous mothers. This was both for professional support workers: “As a breastfeeding worker, I use this app to show new mums how easy it is to find a decent place to feed, especially if they are worried about public feeding. It’s a great local app!” And for mothers: “I am happy to bf [breastfeed] my 22 month anywhere but will review places to aid new bf mothers or mothers that are more nervous to feed in public.”

The use of FeedFinder as a tool to promote breastfeeding more formally was also confirmed in email correspondence with three NHS trusts and two local councils. In all five cases FeedFinder is abeing used as part of campaigns to support and increase breastfeeding.

There was also a change in how these members approached FeedFinder as they grew in confidence. “I used the app more when my baby was new born, now my baby is 4-5 month I am more confident and feed where ever I want! I think it’s great for more nervous mothers so will still review places for them.” One of these commenters disagreed with the notion of only certain places being breastfeeding friendly: “If someone was nervous about feeding in public and found confidence in others feeding at a location without issue then that’s where this would be handy. For this reason only I’ve added some locations. But I hate the idea of acceptable places to feed, if your baby wants feeding then it’s fine to feed them, wherever, whenever.

“Focus on baby and be proud of what you’re doing.” This perspective was also evident in e-mail correspondence received by the authors, where, following the UK’s Equality Act, all locations across the country should be ‘relatively breastfeeding friendly’. Although FeedFinder aims to expand on the ‘relative’ element to this, some users (and non-users) reject this for an absolute model of breastfeeding friendly places.

Beyond using the application to support other breastfeeding mothers in finding places to breastfeed, we know some women used FeedFinder to attempt to influence local service provision. In email correspondence with a FeedFinder member and local lactivist, Violet, discusses how she used FeedFinder to show the customer service manager of a large department store how reviews for his store compared with a local competitor, and where his store might improve its facilities to improve women’s breastfeeding experience.

DISCUSSION

Feeling comfortable breastfeeding in public is as suggested by much of our interview and design data a time sensitive issue. For many, it is a case of doing it once or twice before feeling at ease with the act. FeedFinder appears to have been helpful in giving women the confidence to go out and breastfeed, with a large number of women (and breastfeeding supporters) downloading and using the application over a short period of time.

Figure 1: FeedFinder on iOS, the home screen, a mapped breastfeeding place, a review for a place, and the add a review screen

Some women then go onto to continue adding places and reviews to support a community of women after them is entering into public breastfeeding. Other women simply leave the community, their needs hopefully fulfilled. Here we frame FeedFinder as a supportive health technology and discuss the ecosystem of members that are necessary to make supportive public health technologies such as FeedFinder successful.

Changing the Individual, Changing the Environment

Much work within the HCI community has focused on how digital technologies might persuade or motivate individuals to engage in positive health behaviour [for example 1, 2, 10, 23]. Strategies used have ranged from those inspired by theories of individual behaviour change, and lived experiences of motivation [2, 11], through to ambient adaptations of public space that aim to make healthy choices more available [1, 33]. Within the domain of public and preventative health there is similarly an increasing interest on how web 2.0 technologies can and have changed the landscape of health communication [8].

In such discussion, there is an acceptance that the public at large is moving away from simply consuming information to being engaged in the production of information for themselves and others. And examples exist of public health web interactions that enable individuals to share healthcare experiences [16] or supporting the personalization of healthcare messages to specific communities.

Key to public health messaging and many persuasive health interventions is the notion of a “right” health behaviour regardless of culture and context. Accordingly, the core tenant of criticism in relation to public health approaches therefore is that these channels allow for patients to share their own healthcare advice and views, which will not necessarily agree with official, and rigorously evaluated (i.e. “right”) advice, and in fact may even be classified by experts as bad advice.

When a critical lens from within the field of HCI is applied to technologies which seek persuade or motivate healthy behaviour [9, 22, 30, 31], concerns are raised such that technologies have the potential to produce a context where healthy behaviour is forced and where negative comparisons with others are rife (in turn leading to neurosis).

The choice over whether to breastfeed or not is often constructed as a moral one, where breastfeeding is a value and cornerstone of “good” mothering [18, 21]. We cannot argue that FeedFinder is an example of a valueless technology, since its core focus is providing support to mothers who have chosen to breastfeed, and not those who haven’t. But, FeedFinder was not designed to persuade mothers to breastfeed. Instead, FeedFinder was designed from the position of offering a supportive health technology for women who have chosen to breastfeed, or for women who might chose to breastfeed should the socio-cultural context prove accepting. As such, we consider that FeedFinder contributes to a vision for public health services where the focus is not on whether particular (healthy) choices are actually made in practice, but instead on whether individuals within a society have the opportunities to make a particular (healthy) choice where it suits them [18].

FeedFinder has the potential to help women find out for themselves (from the comfort of their own home) how their local community and services respond to breastfeeding women, provide feedback to their local services about how they might improve their services in relation to breastfeeding women, as well as with time increase the number of women seen breastfeeding in public. All of which can help to contribute to providing breastfeeding as infant feeding option for those women who want to try.

So, rather than attempting to change the individual [2, 11], or design a new environment [1, 33], FeedFinder attempts to provide women with the tools to understand and affect change in their own environment for themselves.

Comment 10

Consumers, Communities and Citizens

It is clear from the data describing FeedFinder’s use that women used it in different ways at different times: sometimes acting as consumers (using FeedFinder as an information resource), at other times as citizens (leaving reviews and places for other breastfeeding women) and finally as a community (where FeedFinder was used by members to affect change in their own local contexts). This ecosystem of different types of members and users is essential to the success of applications like FeedFinder, with a large pool of (happy) consumers central to the emergence of communities and citizens [25].

The majority of our members used FeedFinder to search for and find places within their local area where other women had had positive breastfeeding experiences. We configure these women as consumers of FeedFinder, orientating in this moment of use to the application as an information resource. This is reflected in comments made within the survey, where members told us that the application needed more reviews and venues to be useful and that in part, we should be responsible for adding these to the application before its release. In actuality, we did work with women around the Newcastle area to seed the application with venues and reviews before its release, but had been unable to accomplish this nationwide, let alone worldwide.

Unsurprisingly though, the application isn’t viewed positively by women when they need to consume information about how their local community and services respond to women breastfeeding in public, and that information isn’t there. This suggests the importance of devising strategies through which the cold start problem can be overcome on a national and global level. Our approach has mostly been a social one, working with individuals and groups in the local area to promote and initially populate the map. But, we recognise also that this isn’t scalable. In response, HCI must develop design and engagement methods that work at the population level.

Comment 11

A small proportion of FeedFinder’s members, who initially consume information, eventually turn their focus to producing content for the community of breastfeeding women in their local area. In some cases these women are knowingly try to give back to the community that once was key in supporting them in public breastfeeding. Encouraging this kind of use of FeedFinder by its members is essential for maintaining an up-to-date record of breastfeeding experiences, as well as ensuring the FeedFinder map is well populated for consumers.

Supporting consumers into contributing to the community is an area ripe for further design research. Current opportunities include the exploration of reminders which prompt women to add a review after recently viewing a review or place on FeedFinder. Alternatively, it may be fruitful to explore how FeedFinder can support an experience of social cohesion among the community, for example providing ambient awareness of other women who are using FeedFinder during the small hours of the night (presumably during a nightfeed). Equally interesting, would be a feature that enabled women to see days and times of days where local places for breastfeeding are popular among the community, thereby supporting serendipitous opportunities for meeting other breastfeeding women.

Finally, we see a few of examples of individuals and services are using FeedFinder to affect change in their community. We frame these members as using FeedFinder to support their citizenship, since they are actively fighting or the rights of women in their local community to receive good breastfeeding support. For example, Violet used FeedFinder to show a local business how it could improve its breastfeeding provision. We recognise that those that use FeedFinder to fight for improved services are likely to be in a minority. Nevertheless, mechanisms such as greater connectivity between the FeedFinder dataset and local services may serve to better support FeedFinder citizens, for example through providing quick interactions whereby reviews can be sent to individual breastfeeding places to alert those places of their reviews and thereby areas of improvement, as well as potentially the financial case for doing so.

Designing with Mothers with Babies

The involvement of breastfeeding women within our iterative user centred-design process was essential in identifying and confirming the design space, as well as understanding how breastfeeding experiences might be rated and reviewed. When working with women with young children we quickly learned that design tasks needed to be incredibly flexible, quick and undemanding. Young babies crave to be held, even when they’re not being fed, which means that individuals participating in a design tasks will likely only ever have one hand free, ruling out many creative tasks. In addition, because the needs of a young baby can be particularly demanding and unpredictable it is important to develop design methods that can be easily paused and re-started, as well as not requiring a large amount of time to complete (we found ten minutes to be about right).

Finally, since a participant’s attention will be split consider developing methods that are easy to respond  to. We found tasks which were already part completed, or required ordering were sufficient for supporting useful design dialogue while being respectful of the amount and time and energy a women would have for participating in the project.

CONCLUSION

Breastfeeding in public causes many women anxiety and can make the early weeks of motherhood a lonely and isolating time. In response we have designed, developed and deployed a mobile application which supports women in finding, reviewing and sharing places for public breastfeeding. Through so doing, we have identified one vision for the design of technologies to support public health, which moves the focus away from the individual and instead holds a lens to communities and societies and asks whether these contexts provide opportunities within which healthy choices can be made.

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Interacting with the Computer: a Framework

J. Morton, P. Barnard, N. Hammond* and J.B. Long

M.R.C. Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge, England *also IBM Scientific Centre, Peterlee, England

Recent technological advances in the development of information processing systems will inevitably lead to a change in the nature of human-computer interaction.

Direct interactions with systems will no longer be the sole province of the sophisticated data processing professional or the skilled terminal user. In consequence, assumptions underlying human-system communication will have to be re-evaluated for a broad range of applications and users. The central issue of the present paper concerns the way in which this re-evaluation should occur.

First of all, then, we will present a characterisation of the effective model which the computer industry has of the interactive process. The shortcoming of the model is that it fails to take proper account of the nature of the user and as such can not integrate, interpret, anticipate or palliate the kinds of errors which the new user will resent making. For remember that the new user will avoid error by adopting other means of gaining his ends, which can lead either to non-use or to monstrously inefficient use. We will document some user problems in support of this contention and indicate the kinds of alternative models which we are developing in an attempt to meet this need.

The Industry’s Model (IM)

The problem we see with the industry’s model of the human-computer interaction is that it is computer-centric. In some cases, as we shall see, it will have designer-centric aspects as well.To start off with, consider a system designed to operate in a particular domain of activity. In the archetypal I.M. the database is neutralised in much the same kind of way that a statistician will ritually neutralise the data on which he operates, stripping his manipulation of any meaning other than the purely numerical one his equations impose upon the underlying reality. This arises because the only version of the domain which exists at the interface is that one which is expressed in the computer. This version, perhaps created by an expert systems analyst on the best logical grounds and the most efficient, perhaps, for the computations which have to be performed, becomes the one to which the user must conform. This singular and logical version of the domain will, at best, be neutral from the point of view of the user. More often it will be an alien creature, isolating the user and mocking him with its image of the world and its resources to which he must haplessly conform.

Florid language? But listen to the user talking.

“We come into contact with computer people, a great many of whom talk a very alien language, and you have constant difficulty in trying to sort out this kind of mid-Atlantic jargon.”

“We were slung towards what in my opinion is a pretty inadequate manual and told to get on with it”

“We found we were getting messages back through the terminal saying there’s not sufficient space on the machine. Now how in Hell’s name are we supposed to know whether there’s sufficient space on the machine?” .

In addition the industry’s model does not really include the learning process; nor does it always take adequate note of individual’s abilities and experience:

“Documentation alone is not sufficient; there needs to be the personal touch as well . ”

“Social work being much more of an art than a science then we are talking about people who are basically not very numerate beginning to use a machine which seems to be essentially numerate.”

Even if training is included in the final package it is never in the design model. Is there anyone here, who, faced with a design choice asked the questions “Which option will be the easiest to describe to the naive user? Which option will be easiest to understand? Which option will be easiest to learn and remember?”
Let us note again the discrepancy between the I.M. view of error and ours . For us errors are an indication of something wrong with the system or an indication of the way in which training should proceed. In the I.M. errors are an integral part of the interaction. For the onlooker the most impressive part of a D.P. interaction is not that it is error free but that the error recovery procedures are so well practised that it is difficult to recognise them for what they are. We would not want it thought that we felt the industry was totally arbitrary . There are a number of natural guiding principles which most designers would adhere to.
We do not anticipate meeting a system in which the command DESTROY has the effect of preserving the information currently displayed while PRESERVE had the effect of erasing the operating system. However , the principles employed are intuitive and non-systematic. Above all they make the error of embodying the belief that just as there can only be one appropriate representation of the domain, so there is only one kind of human mind.

A nice example of a partial use of language constraints is provided by a statistical package called GENSTAT. This package permits users to have permanent userfiles and also temporary storage in a workfile. The set of commands associated with these facilities are :

PUT – copies from core to workfile

GET – copies from workfile to core

FILE – defines a userfile

SAVE – copies from workfile to userfile

FETCH – copies from userfile to workfile

The commands certainly have the merit that they have the expected directionality with respect to the user. However to what extent do, for example, FETCH and GET relate naturally to the functions they have been assigned? No doubt the designers have strong intuitions about these assignments. So do users and they do not concur. We asked 40 people here at the A. P.U. which way round they thought the assignments should go: nineteen of these agreed with the system designers, 21 went the 0ther way . The confidence levels of rationalisations were very convincing on both sides!

The problem then, is not just that systems tend to be designer-centric but that the designers have the wrong model either of the learning process or of the non-D.P. users’ attitude toward error. A part-time user is going to be susceptible to memory failure and, in particular, to interference from outside the computer system. du Boulay and O’ Shea [I] note that naive users can use THEN in the sense of ‘next’ rather then as ‘implies’. This is inconceivable to the IM for THEN is almost certainly a full homonym for most D.P. and the appropriate meaning the appropriate meaning thoroughly context-determined .
An Alternative to the Industry Model

The central assumption for the system of the future will be ‘systems match people’ rather than ‘people match systems’. Not entirely so, as we shall elaborate, for in principle, the capacity and perspectives of the user with respect to a task domain could well change through interaction with a computer system. But the capacity to change is more limited than the variety available in the system . Our task, then, is to characterise the mismatch between man and computer in such a way that permits us to direct the designer’s effort.

Comment 1 In doing this we are developing two kinds of tool, conceptual and empirical. These interrelate within an overall scheme for researching human-computer interaction as shown in Figure 1.

Comment 2

 

Relating Conceptual and Empirical Tools

The conceptual tools involve the development of a set of analytic frameworks appropriate to human computer interaction. The empirical tools involve the development of valid test procedures both for the introduction of new systems and the proving of the analytic tools. The two kinds of tool are viewed as fulfilling functions comparable to the role of analytic and empirical tools in the development of technology. They may be compared with the analytic role of physics, metallurgy and aerodynamics in the development of aircraft on the one hand and the empirical role of a wind tunnel in simulating flight on the other hand.

Comment 3

Empirical Tools

The first class of empirical tool we have employed is the observational field study, with which we aim to identify some of the variables underlying both the occasional user’s perceptions of the problems he encounters in the use of a computer system, and the behaviour of the user at the terminal itself.

The opinions cited above were obtained in a study of occasional users discussing the introduction and use of a system in a local government centre [2]. The discussions were collected using a technique which is particularly free from observer influence [3 ].

In a second field study we obtained performance protocols by monitoring users while they solved a predefined set of problems using a data base manipulation language [4 ]. We recorded both terminal performance and a running commentary which we asked the user to make, and wedded these to the state of the machine to give a total picture of the interaction. The protocols have proved to be a rich source of classes of user problem from which hypotheses concerning the causes of particular types of mismatch can be generated.

There is thus a close interplay between these field studies, the generation of working hypotheses and the development of the conceptual frameworks.

Comment 4

We give some extracts from this study in a later section.
A third type of empirical tool is used to test specific predictions of the working hypothesis. The tool is a multi-level interactive system which enables the experimenter to simulate a variety of user interfaces, and is capable of modeling and testing a wide range of variables [5]. It is based on a code-breaking task in which users perform a variety of string-manipulation and editing functions on coded messages.

It allows the systematic evaluation of notational, semantic and syntactic variables. Among the results to be extensively reported elsewhere is that if there is a common argument in a set of commands, each of which takes two arguments, then the common argument must come first for greatest ease of use. Consistency of argument order is not enough: when the common argument consistently comes second no advantage is obtained relative to inconsistent ordering of arguments [6].
Conceptual Tools

Since we conceive the problem as a cognitive one, the tools are from the cognitive sciences.

Comment 5

Also we define the problem as one with those users who would be considered intellectually and motivationally qualified by any normal standards. Thus we do not admit as a potential solution that of finding “better” personnel, or simply paying them more, even if such a solution were practicable.

The cognitive incompatibility we describe is qualitative not quantitative and the mismatch we are looking for is one between the user’s concept of the system structure and the real structure: between the way the data base is organised in the machine and the way it is organised in the head of the user: the way in which system details are usually encountered by the user and his preferred mode of learning.

The interaction of human and computer in a problem-solving environment is a complex matter and we cannot find sufficient theory in the psychological literature to support our intuitive needs.

Comment 6

He have found it necessary to produce our own theories, drawing mainly on the spirit rather than the substance of established work.

Comment 7 Further than this, it is apparent that the problem is too complex for us to be able to use a single theoretical representation.
The model should not only be appropriate for design, it should also give a means of characterising errors – so as to understand their origins and enable corrective measures to be taken.
Take the following protocol.

The user is asked to find the average age of entries in the block called PEOPLE.

“I’ll have a go and see what happens” types: *T <-AVG(AGE,PEOPlE)

machine response: AGE – UNSET BLOCK

“Yes, wrong, we have an unset block. So it’s reading AGE as a block, so if we try AGE and PEOPLE the other way round maybe that’ll work.”

This is very easy to diagnose and correct. The natural language way of talking about the target of the operation is mapped straight into the argument order. The cure would be to reverse the argument order for the function AVG to make it compatible.

The next protocol is more obscure. The task is the same as in the preceding one.

“We can ask it (the computer) to bring to the terminal the average value of this attribute.”

types: *T -AVG( AGE)

machine response: AVG(AGE) – ILLEGAL NAME

“Ar.d it’s still illegal. .. ( … ) I’ve got to specify the block as well as the attribute name.”

Well of course you have to specify the block. How else is the machine going to know what you’re talking about? A very natural I.M. response. How can we be responsible for feeble memories like this.

However, a more careful diagnosis reveals that the block PEOPLE is the topic of the ‘conversation’ in any case.

The block has just been used and the natural language conventions are quite clear on the point.

We have similar evidence for the importance of human-machine discourse structures from the experiment using the code-breaking task described above. Command strings seem to be more ‘cognitively compatible’ when the subject of discourse (the common argument) is placed before the variable argument. This is perhaps analogous to the predisposition in sentence expression for stating information which is known or assumed before information which is new [7]. We are currently investigating this influence of natural language on command string compatibility in more detail.

Comment 8

The Block Interaction Model

Systematic evidence from empirical studies, together with experience of our own, has led us to develop a conceptual analysis of the information in the head of the user (see figure 2). Our aim with one form of analysis is to identify as many separable kinds of knowledge as possible and chart their actual or potential interactions with one another. Our convention here is to use a block diagram with arrows indicating potential forms of interference. This diagram enables us to classify and thus group examples of interference so that they could be counteracted in a coordinated fashion rather than piecemeal. It also enables us to establish a framework within which to recognise the origin of problems which we haven’t seen before. Figure 2 is a simplified form of this model. The blocks with double boundaries, connected by double lines, indicate the blocks of information used by the ideal user. The other lines indicate prime classes of interference. The terminology we have used is fairly straightforward: Domain – the range of the specific application of a system. This could be a hospital, a city’s buildings, a set of knowledge such as jobs in ~n employment agency. Objects – the elements in the particular data base. They could be a relational table, patients’ records. I Representation of domain I Representa ti on of work-base version of domain domain Representation of problem Operations – the computer routines which manipulates the objects. Labels – the letter sequences which activate operators which, together with arguments and syntax, constitute the commands. Work base – in general, people using computer systems for problem solving have had experience of working in a non-computerised work environment either preceding the computerisation or at least in parallel with the computer system. The representation of this experience we call the work-base version. There will be overlap between this and the users representation of the computer’s version of the domain; but there will be differences as well, and these differences we would count as potential sources of interference. There may be differences in ·the underlying structure of the data in the two cases, for example, and will certainly be differences in the objects used. Thus a user found to be indulging in complex checking procedures after using the command FILE turned out to be perplexed that the material filed was still present on the screen. With pieces of paper, things which are filed actually go there rather than being copied. Here are some examples of interference from one of our empirical studies [4]:

Interference on the syntax from other languages. Subject inserts necessary blanks to keep the strings a fixed length.

“Now that’s Matthewson, that’s 4,7, 10 letters, so I want 4 blanks”

types: A+<:S:NAME = ‘MATTHEWSON ‘:>PEOPLE

Generalised interference

“Having learned how reasonably well to manipulate one system, I was presented with a totally different thing which takes months to learn again.”

Interference of other machine characteristics on machine view

“I’m thinking that the bottom line is the line I’m actually going to input. So I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t lit up at the bottom there, because when you’re doing it on (another system) it’s always the bottom line.”

The B.I.M. can be used in two ways. We have illustrated its utility in pinpointing the kinds of interference which can occur from inappropriate kinds of information. We could look at the interactions in just the opposite way and seek ways of maximising the benefits of overlap. This is, of course, the essence of ‘cognitive compatibility’ which we have already mentioned. Trivially, the closer the computer version of the domain maps onto the user’s own version of the domain the better. What is less obvious is that any deviations should be systematic where possible.

In the same way, it is pointless to design half the commands so that they are compatible with the natural language equivalents and use this as a training point if the other half, for no clear reason, deviate from the principle. If there are deviations then they should form a natural sub-class or the compatibility of the other commands will be wasted.

Information Structures

In the block interaction model we leave the blocks ill-defined as far as their content is concerned. Note that we have used individual examples for user protocols as well as general principles in justifying and expanding upon the distinctions we find necessary. What we fail to do in the B. I .M. is to characterise the sum of knowledge which an individual user carries around with him or brings to bear upon the interaction. We have a clear idea of cognitive compatibility at the level of an individual. If this idea is to pay then these structures must be more detailed.

There is no single way of talking about information structures. At one extreme there is the picture of the user’s knowledge as it apparently reveals itself in the interaction; the view, as it were, that the terminal has of its interlocutor. From this point of view the motivation for any key press is irrelevant. This is clearly a gross oversimplification.

The next stage can be achieved by means of a protocol. In it we would wish to separate out those actions which spring from the users concept of the machine and those actions which were a result of him being forced to do something to keep the interaction going. This we call ‘heuristic behaviour’. This can take the form of guessing that the piece of information which is missing will be consistent with some other system or machine. “If in doubt, assume that it is Fortran” would be a good example of this. The user can also attempt to generalise from aspects of the current system he knows about. One example from our study was where the machine apparently failed to provide what the user expected. In fact it had but the information was not what he had expected. The system was ready for another command but the user thought it was in some kind of a pending state, waiting with the information he wanted. In certain other stages – in particular where a command has produced a result which fills up the screen – he had to press the ENTER key – in this case to clear the screen. The user then over-generalised from this to the new situation and pressed the ENTER key again, remarking

“Try pressing ENTER again and see what happens.”

We would not want to count the user’s behaviour in this sequence as representing his knowledge of the system – either correct knowledge or incorrect knowledge. He had to do something and couldn’t think of anything else. When the heuristic behaviour is eliminated we are left with a set of information relevant to the interaction. With respect to the full, ideal set of such information, this will be deficient with respect to the points, at which the user had to trust to heuristic behaviour.

Note that it will also contain incorrect information as well as correct information; all of it would be categorised by the user as what he knew, if not all with complete confidence, certainly with more confidence than his heuristic behaviour. The thing which is missing from B.I.M. and I.S. is any notion of the dynamics of the interaction. We find we need three additional notations at the moment to do this. One of these describes the planning activity of the user, one charts the changes in state of user and machine and one looks at the general cognitive processes which are mobilised.

Goal Structure Model

The user does some preparatory work before he presses a key. He must formulate some kind of plan, however rudimentary. This plan can be represented, at least partially, as a hierarchical organisation. At the top might be goals such as “Solve problem p” and at the bottom “Get the computer to display Table T”. The Goal Structure model will show the relationships among the goals. This can be compared with the way of structuring the task imposed by the computer. For example, a user’s concept of editing might lead to the goal structure: Two problems would arise here. Firstly the new file has to be opened at an ‘unnatural’ place. Secondly the acceptance of the edited text changes from being a part of the editing process to being a part of the filing process.

The goal structure model, then, gives us a way of describing such structural aspects of the user’s performance and the machines requirements. Note that such goals might be created in advance or at the time a node is evaluated. Thus the relationship of the GSM to real time is not simple. The technique for determining the goal structure may be as simple as asking the user “What are you trying to do right now and why?” This,may be sufficient to reveal procedures which are inappropriate for the program being used.
State Transition Model

In the course of an interaction with a system a number of changes take place in the state of the machine. At the same time the user’s perception of the machine state is changing. It will happen that the user misjudges the effect of one command and thereafter’ enters others which from an outside point of view seem almost random. Our point is, as before, that the interaction can only be understood from the point of view of the user.

This brings us to the third of the dynamic aspects of the interaction: the progress of the user as he learns about the system.

Let us explore some ways of representing such changes. Take first of all the state of the computer. This change is a result of user actions and can thus be represented as a sequence of Machine States (M.S.) consequent on user action.

If the interaction is error free, changes in the representations would follow changes in the machine states in a homologous manner. Errors will occur if the actual machine state does not match its representation.

We will now look at errors made by a user of an interactive data enquiry system. We will see errors which reveal both the inadequate knowledge of the particular machine state or inadequate knowledge of the actions governing transitions between states. The relevant components of the machine are the information on the terminal display and the state of a flag shown at the bottom right hand corner of the display which ‘informs the user of some aspects of the machine state (ENTER … or OUTPUT … ). In addition there is a prompt, “?”, which indicates that the keyboard is free to be used, there is a key labelled ENTER. In the particular example the user wishes to list the blocks of data he has in his workspace. The required sequence of machine states and actions is:

The machine echoes the command and waits with OUTPUT flag showing.

User: “Nothing happening. We’ve got an OUTPUT there in the corner I don’ t know what that means.

The user had no knowledge of MS2: we can hypothesise his representation of the transition to be:

This is the result of an overgeneralisation. Commands are obeyed immediately if the result is short, unless the result is block data of any size. The point of this is that the data may otherwise wipe everything from the screen. With block data the controlling program has no lookahead to check the size and must itself simply demand the block, putting itself in the hands of some other controlling program. We see here then a case where the user needs to have some fairly detailed and otherwise irrelevant information about the workings of the system in order to make sense of (as opposed to learn by rote) a particular restriction.

The user was told how to proceed, types ENTER, and the list of blocks is displayed together with the next prompt. However, further difficulties arise because the list of blocks includes only one name and the user was expecting a longer listing. Consequently he misconstrues the state of the machine. (continuing from previous example)

User types ENTER

Machine replies with block list and prompt.

Flag set to ENTER …

“Ah, good, so we must have got it right then.

A question mark: (the prompt). It doesn’t give me a listing. Try pressing ENTER again and see what happens.”

User types ENTER

“No? Ah, I see. Is that one absolute block, is that the only blocks there are in the workspace?”

This interaction indicates that the user has derived a general rule for the interaction:

“If in doubt press ENTER”

After this the user realises that there was only one name in the list. Unfortunately his second press of the ENTER key has put the machine into Edit mode and the user thinks he is in command mode. As would be expected the results are strange.

At this stage we can show the machine state transitions and the user’s representation together in a single diagram, figure 3.

This might not be elegant but it captures a lot of features of the interaction which might otherwise be missed.

The final model we use calls upon models currently available in cognitive psychology which deal with the dynamics of word recognition and production, language analysis and information storage and retrieval. The use of this model is too complex for us to attempt a summary here.

Comment 9 Conclusion

We have stressed the shortcomings of what we have called the Industrial Model and have indicated that the new user will deviate considerably from this model. In its place we have suggested an alternative approach involving both empirical evaluations of system use and the systematic development of conceptual analyses appropriate to the domain of person-system interaction. There are, of course, aspects of the I.M. which we have no reason to disagree with, for example, the idea that the computer can beneficially transform the users view of the problems with which he is occupied. However, we would appreciate it if someone would take the trouble to support this point with clear documentation. So far as we can see it is simply asserted.
Finally we would like to stress that nothing we have said is meant to be a solution – other than the methods. We do not take sides for example, on the debate as to whether or not interactions should be in natural language – for we think the question itself is a gross oversimplification. What we do know is that natural language interferes with the interaction and that we need to understand the nature of this interference and to discover principled ways of avoiding it.

Comment 10 And what we know above all is that the new user is most emphatically not made in the image of the designer.

References

[1 ] du Boulay, B. and O’Shea, T. Seeing the works: a strategy of teaching interactive programming. Paper presented at Workshop on ‘Computing Skills and Adaptive Systems’, Liverpool, March 1978.
[2] Hammond, N.V., Long, J.B. and Clark, l.A. Introducing the interactive computer at work: the users’ views. Paper presented at Workshop on ‘Computing Skills and Adaptive Systems’, Liverpool, March 1978.
[3] Wilson. T. Choosing social factors which should determine telecommunications hardware design and implementation. Paper presented at Eighth International Symposium on Human Factors in Telecommunications, Cambridge, September 1977.
[4] Documenting Human-computer Mismatch with the occasional interactive user. APU/IBM project report no. 3, MRC Applied Psychology Unit. Cambridge, September 1978.
[5] Hammond, N.V. and Barnard, P.J. An interactive test vehicle for the investigation of man-computer interaction. Paper presented at BPS Mathematical and Statistical Section Meeting on ‘Laboratory Work Achievable only by Using a Computer’, London, September 1978.
[6] An interactive test vehicle for the study of man-computer interaction. APU/IBM project report no. 1,MRC Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge, September 1978.
[7] Halliday, M.A.K. Notes on transitivity and theme in English. Part 1. Journal of Linguistics, 1967, 3, 199-244.

FIGURE 3: STATE TRANSITION EXAMPLE

 

An innovation approach to HCI is a way of addressing the problem of designing human-computer interactions, by introducing a new idea, a method or a device, which constitutes a significant positive change, adding value. For example, different innovation approaches have resulted in novel forms of human-computer interactions, including: virtual reality; voice recognition; gesture sensing; force feedback; wearable interfaces; whole-body sensing; spatial interactions; and transparent interfaces. Some of these novel forms of human-computer interaction are only at the invention stage of development; but have innovation potential, for example, wearable interfaces. Other forms are moving from the invention to the innovation stage of device development, for example, virtual reality, especially in the domain of simulation.

An innovation approach to HCI involves the research and development of innovations for the design of human-computer interactions. For example, the ‘graphical user interface’ (GUI) in the form of ‘windows, icon, menu, and pointing device’, (WIMP) and ‘what you see is what you get (WYSIWYG) is a break-through innovation, resulting largely from different Xerox and Apple research and development (R+D) projects. Note the GUI interface remains an innovation, notwithstanding the original direct manipulation invention of a light-pen to control screen data in World War II radar systems. Incremental innovation best characterises the development of icons as part of the GUI interface from the Apple Lisa onwards. Both types of innovation are associated with R+D groups (for example, Xerox; Apple etc) and members of those and other groups (for example, Engelbert; Kay etc).

The research and development of an innovation approach to HCI constitutes a way forward in  addressing the problem of designing human-computer interactions. For example, the innovation of the GUI resulted from a range of different (and even hotly disputed) patents, emanating from Xerox, Apple and other R+D organisations. The innovation also resulted from many different ideas and the experience afforded by their exchange between such organisations. For example, Apple engineers visited the Xerox Parc facilities and Parc employees subsequently moved to Apple to work on the Lisa and the Macintosh. Patents, expert advice, experience and the design of other innovations supported both preliminary and final steps, as well as the manner for taking such steps, addressing the problem of designing innovative human-computer interactions.

Finally, an innovation approach to HCI has ways of establishing how and  whether the problem of designing human-computer interactions has been addressed or not. For example, the Apple Lisa, released in 1983, featured a high-resolution, stationary-based GUI. However, the most significant, positive change, adding value, is the Apple Macintosh, which was the first commercially successful product to use a multi-panel user interface. The Macintosh used trial-and-error design to build on the experience acquired from the earlier design of the Lisa. The success or not of patents, expert advice, experience and the design of other innovations also indicates, whether the problem of designing human-computer interactions has been addressed or not.

Examples of  Innovation Approaches to HCI

Obrist et al. (2014): Opportunities for Odor: Experiences with Smell and Implications for Technology

This paper suggests how novel, emerging smell technology might be applied to develop smell-enhanced human-computer interaction:

Innovation Illustration – Obrist et al: Opportunities for Odor: Experiences with Smell and Implications for Technology

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A craft approach to HCI is a way of addressing the problem of designing human-computer interactions. Craft seeks to develop ‘best practice’ design to satisfy user requirements in the form of an interactive system. For example, best practice of different kinds has informed the specification and implementation of interactive systems, such as e-mail; internet banking; on-line government services; electronic shopping etc.

A craft approach to HCI involves the research and development of best practice for the design of human-computer interactions to satisfy user requirements in the form of an interactive system. Contributions to such best practice have been made by R+D groups, such as Xerox and Apple, by universities, offering courses in HCI; by text books; by professional organisations; sharing design experience etc. For example, the results of such craft best practice can be observed in the address book facility, associated with e-mail, which obviates the need for users to remember e-mail addresses. Also, the address form-fill facility, following partial typing of the addressee’s name.

The research and development of a craft approach to HCI constitutes a way forward in addressing the problem of designing human-computer interactions to satisfy user requirements in the form of an interactive system. For example, the best practice of design has evolved from word of mouth advice to wire frame specifications. Further, the best practice of evaluation has evolved from scientific experiment on alternative types of design to on-line real-time assessment of user performance and experience. The scope of craft design best practice has evolved from usability to fun to emotion, to experience etc. Best practice is supported by: heuristics; methods; expert advice; successful designs; case-studies etc. Such craft best practice can now be found in HCI courses, text books and practitioner case-study reports.

Finally, a craft approach to HCI has ways of establishing whether the problem of designing human-computer interactions to satisfy user requirements in the form of an interactive system has been addressed or not. For example, the design and evaluation of successive versions of interactive systems, such as e-mail; internet banking etc can be assessed in terms of their success, as reflected by user satisfaction and experience; uptake of the ideas by other designers; professional awards etc. The extent to which this success is supported by heuristics; methods; expert advice; other designs; case-studies etc in satisfying or not user requirements in the form of an interactive system can also be assessed. Current e-mail systems meet many (if not all of these different design criteria).

Examples of Craft Approaches to HCI

Wright et al. – FeedFinder: A Location-Mapping Mobile Application for Breastfeeding Women

This paper reports on four phases of a design and research project, from sensitizing user-engagement and user-centred design, to the development and in-the-wild deployment of a mobile ‘phone application called FeedFinder, a location-mapping mobile application for breastfeeding women.

Craft Approach Illustration: Wright et al. – FeedFinder: A Location-Mapping Mobile Application for Breastfeeding Women

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An applied approach to HCI is a way of addressing the problem of designing human-computer interactions, by applying other discipline knowledge to support such design. For example, disciplines such as psychology, sociology, ethnomethodology, linguistics, artificial intelligence etc have all been applied in different ways to the design of human-computer interactions.

An applied approach to HCI involves the research and development of applying other discipline knowledge to support the design of human-computer interactions. Such knowledge may take the form of user models, human performance data etc. Such applications have been made by scientists, HCI researchers, and design practitioners. An example application is the psychology finding that recognition is more effective than memory for activating commands, whether expressed in text or icon form. The application is generally considered to have been a success, in particular in GUI interfaces.

The research and development of an applied approach to HCI constitutes a way forward in addressing the problem of designing human-computer interactions. First, relevant other discipline knowledge is identified as being potentially supportive of HCI design. Such knowledge is almost always descriptive, as in scientific knowledge. For example, psychology’s assertion that recognition is more effective than memory. Second, the applied discipline knowledge is rendered prescriptive for the purposes of applied design. Such prescription may take the form of guidelines; heuristics; methods; expert advice; other designs; case-studies etc.

Finally, an applied approach to HCI has ways of establishing how and whether the problem of designing human-computer interactions has been addressed or not. For example, interactive systems, whose design has been informed by prescribing other discipline knowledge can be assessed in terms of their success – as reflected in user satisfaction; workload; experience; design uptake etc. The extent to which this success has resulted from the application of guidelines; heuristics; methods; expert advice; other designs; case-studies etc derived from other disciplines can also be assessed. In the absence of success, however, it is unclear whether the original other discipline description or the derived HCI applied design prescription is at fault.

Examples of Applied Approaches to HCI

Morton, J., Barnard, P., Hammond, N., and Long, J. B. – Interacting with the Computer: a Framework

The paper argues that recent technological advances in the development of information processing systems will inevitably lead to a change in the nature of human-computer interaction. Direct interactions with systems will no longer be the sole province of the sophisticated data processing professional or the skilled terminal user. In consequence, assumptions underlying human-system communication will have to be re-evaluated for a broad range of applications and users. The central issue of the present paper concerns the way in which this re-evaluation should occur.

Applied Approach Illustration – Interacting with the Computer – a Framework

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