There is nothing more wondrous in software than a dancing bear. Well, maybe an evil dancing bear. In this workshop, learn to express your schadenfreude through the design of software. Learn the glorious irony in the creation of pain stations: a paradise lost complete with repetitive treadmills of grinding. Alternatively, if you enjoy babygoats on trampolines and other "happy things, this session will provide a model for learn to design invoke play, and sustain it through interaction and feedback, and if you are evil, then take it away. We learn three aspects of discount design methods as simplified user testing, narrowed prototypes, and heuristic flow models for delivering software for impact and persuasion. Create live action simulation, with insights on the difference between imitation and emulation, and when they are most useful. Use ethnographic methods for conducting contextual analysis, learn about data-informed models; create documentation like procedural workflows and hierarchical flow charts for the creation of your very own WAAD (work activity affinity diagram) fro creating needs, requirements and design

1. How to Design the Fun out of
Things
Brock Dubbels, PhD
GScale Game Development and Testing Lab
Dept. Computing and Software
McMaster Libraries
McMaster University

2. Barbell Factory
Usability and User Expereince

3. Bullying

4. Time Flies
• Fun & Flow
– fun occurs, the subjective tracking of activity
duration diverges from the actual duration and
objective experience (Sackett et al.).
– This is similar to the reported descriptions of the
subjective experience of Flow (Csikszentmihalyi,
1992; Sutton-Smith, 2001).

5. Approach Motivation
Feeling that time is moving faster seems to be
the specific result of our desire to approach or
pursue something, not a more general effect of
increased attention or physiological arousal. For
example, people may tend to pursue an activity
that is fun.

6. Approach Motivation
• States high in approach motivation make time
seem like it is passing fast because it narrows
our memory and attention processes, which
shuts out thoughts and feelings that are not
related
– (Elliot and Covington (2001) ; Elliot, Gable, and
Mapes (2006) ; Elliot (2006)

7. Experience of Play
• Play, Fun, and Flow:
– When fun occurs, the subjective tracking of
activity duration diverges from the actual duration
and objective experience
• (Sackett et al.).
– This is similar to the reported descriptions of the
subjective experience of Flow
• (Csikszentmihalyi, 1992; Sutton-Smith, 2001).

8. Attraction of Play
• States high in approach motivation make time
seem like it is passing fast because it narrows
our memory and attention processes, which
shuts out thoughts and feelings that are not
related.
– (Elliot and Covington; Elliot, Gable, and Mapes;
Elliot, “The Hierarchical Model of Approach-
Avoidance Motivation”; Gable; Sackett et al.).

9. Play

10. Play?

11. Play is
• a spontaneous activity
that comes about as a
mood, or emotional
atmosphere and can be
compared to way finding.
A player may be asked to:
– Create their destination
– Invent a reason for why
they are going there
– Create a method for how
they will travel

12. Play and Function
• "Biologically, its function is to reinforce the
organism’s variability in the face of
rigidifications of successful adaptation”
– (Sutton-Smith, 1997, 231).
• Play allows for a reframing of reality, and
reconsideration of context and the realm of
the possibilities.
– (Dubbels, 2010)

13. Toys, Objects, & Language
Structure Play
• play as imagination is
action,
• imagination as play
without action.
– Vygotsky (1977)

14. Play as Discourse

15. Embodied Signals

16. Design Indicates Ethos

21. Play and Cultural Role
• Play strengthens societies by uniting
individuals through ritual activity and helping
them achieve common goals.
– Huizinga (1950)
• Toys, jokes, and games are often as symbols of play to
face collective fears about cultural issues that quickly
overwhelm the individual: bigotry, racism, rejection,
terrorism, addiction, and poverty.
• Toys, jokes, and games are things we can study as
distributed cognition by examining them as tools, rules,
roles, and context.

26. Activity Ethos
Ethos Model Play Game/ Work Threat
Z Consequence Ambiguous Directed Defined
X Content Story Narrative Exposition
Y Interpretation Mimesis Diegesis Compliance

27. Coherence Relations
• Law of Coherence:
– For low prior knowledge learners, low ambiguity/
high coherence is best.
– For high prior knowledge learners, high
ambiguity/ low coherence is best,

28. CNA of a Story
• Two frogs dwelt in the same pool. The pool
being dried up under the summer's heat, they
left it and set out together for another home. As
they went along they chanced to pass a deep
well, amply supplied with water, on seeing
which, one of the Frogs said to the other: "Let us
descend and make our abode in this well." The
other replied with greater caution: "But suppose
the water should fail us, how can we get out
again from so great a depth?"

29. Causal Network Analysis

30. CNA of a Game

31. Play: Off-Loading Complexity
Dubbels (2013)

32. User Experience
– User experience is the totalityof the effect or effects felt by a user as a result
of interaction with, and the usage context of, a system, device, or product,
including the influence of usability, usefulness, and emotional impact during
interaction, and savoring the memory after interaction.
– “Interaction with” is broad and embraces seeing, touching, and thinking about
the system or product, including admiring it and its presentation before any
physical interaction.

33. Elements of UX
• Usability
– Usabilityis the pragmatic component of user experience, including effectiveness, efficiency,
productivity, ease-of-use, learnability,retainability,and the pragmatic aspects of user
satisfaction.
• Usefulness
– Usefulness is the component of user experience to which systemfunctionalitygives the ability
to use the systemor product to accomplish the goals of work(or play).
• Functionality
– Functionalityis power to do work(or play) seated in the non-user-interface
computationalfeatures and capabilities.

34. Elements of UX
• Emotional Impact
– Emotional impact is the affective component of
user experience that influences user feelings.
Emotional impact includes such effects as
pleasure, fun, joy of use, aesthetics, desirability,
pleasure, novelty, originality, sensations,
coolness, engagement, appeal and can involve
deeper emotional factors such self-identity, a
feeling of contribution to the world and pride of
ownership.