Festival Area: Power it Up!

Organisation Description

The Institute of Digital Games inaugurated their new premises on Wednesday 25 September 2019. To celebrate this they highlighted the bright future of the digital games and games research in Malta.

Is it possible to predict the motivation of players just by observing their gameplay data? Even if so, how should we measure motivation in the first place? To address the above questions, on the one end, we collect a large dataset of gameplay data from players of the popular game Tom Clancy’s The Division. On the other end, we ask them to report their levels of competence, autonomy, relatedness and presence using the Ubisoft Perceived Experience Questionnaire. After processing the survey responses in an ordinal fashion we employ preference learning methods based on support vector machines to infer the mapping between gameplay and the reported four motivation factors. Our key findings suggest that gameplay features are strong predictors of player motivation as the best obtained models reach accuracies of near certainty, from 92% up to 94% on unseen players. See the full version accepted for IEEE Conference on Games, 2019 here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.00040 – Your Gameplay Says It All: Modelling Motivation in Tom Clancy’s The Division – David Melhart, Ahmad Azadvar, Alessandro Canossa, Antonios Liapis, Georgios N. Yannakakis

Explore your musicality in a Japanese garden atmosphere. Control a mischievous kappa, a traditional yokai spirit, and feel the musical possibilities of your surroundings. Through a loop mechanic, your kappa is able to multiply itself, creating subtle rhythms or exaggerated cacophonies. Created for research purposes as a tool to demonstrate musicality in digital games, OTOGARDEN is inspired by the musicking concept introduced by musicologist Christopher Small, the works of media artist Toshio Iwai, and the Japanese musical soundscape.

SOMETHING SOMETHING SOUP SOMETHING could be defined as a videogame. We prefer to think of it as an interactive thought experiment: a piece of technology that discloses situations and presents notions in ways that are interactive and negotiable (and maybe even playful).

SOMETHING SOMETHING SOUP SOMETHING it is designed to reveal, through its gameplay, that even a familiar, ordinary concept like ‘soup’ is vague, shifting, and impossible to define exhaustively.

SOMETHING SOMETHING SOUP SOMETHING is also designed to stimulate reflection on the possibility to analytically define what a game is.

Our ‘interactive thought experiment’ involves some narrative, it allows for a bit of exploration, it features a section that quantifies the performance of the ‘players’ in relation to a pre-established goal… But does the presence of those ‘ludological ingredients’ warrant its definition as a video game? What if only a part of it could be formally recognized as a video game? Is it even wise or productive to strive for a complete theoretical understanding of concepts like ‘soup’ or ‘game’?

Costantino Oliva is an international doctoral research student, currently working on his Ph.D. with the Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta.

His research delves into musical analysis of digital games, particularly the musical activities that individuals perform whilst playing these games – a concept he has termed as Ergodic Musicking.

Find out more about doctoral research opportunities at the University: www.um.edu.mt/doctoralschool

Video produced by the Marketing, Communications & Alumni Office

The M.Sc. in Digital Games is a two-year full-time (or a four-year part-time) programme taught by leading researchers in fields of game analysis, game design and game technology at the Institute of Digital Games.

Find out more at: www.um.edu.mt/digitalgames Video by James Moffett (Communications & Alumni Relations Office)