Joe Cutting

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The title of my PhD is "Measuring the experience of playing self-paced games". I'm interested in measuring the experience of playing self-paced games like Candy Crush Saga or Civilization. Initially I looked at measuring how hard players were thinking during the game by measuring the size of their pupils. Previous studies had shown that the more "cognitive effort" people put into a task the larger their pupils get but I didn't find that people used significant cognitive effort when playing games. So I looked at measuring how well games held players' attention. I did this by putting irrelevant distractor images around the game and seeing how many people notice whilst playing the game. I more recent experiments I put the distractors inside the game and measured how many people notice. This is an effective measure of game attention and also has implications for game design, serious games and other areas such as violence in video games.

 

Here's a list of publications and conference presentations

 

"Measuring Game Experience using Visual Distractors", Chi Play 2017, Amsterdam. Doctoral workshop and Poster

"Gears of Paw: Lessons from collecting cats in Neko Atsume" J Cutting and D Gundry, IGGI games conference 2017, York, Conference presentation.

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"Visual distractors can measure game attention" J Cutting, IGGI games conference 2016, London, Conference presentation

“Telling Stories with Games” in Museums At Play: Games, Interaction and Learning, 2011, Chapter in edited book