Tell me how you play and i’ll tell you who you are

HCII 2023 conference involved 7472 authors from 86 countries. 1578 papers have been accepted and published in the proceedings before the conference. Among them, 257 papers have been accepted in the LBW proceedings to be published after the conference and only one for each thematic area has been awarded. One of these, for the HCI in Games thematic area, is Your Favorite Gameplay Speaks Volumes About You: Predicting User Behavior and Hexad Type, authored by:

• Reza Hadi Mogavi (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong),
• Chao Deng, Jennifer Hoffman (Accessible Meta Research and Development, United States),
• Ehsan-Ul Haq (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong),
• Sujit Gujar (International Institute of Information Technology, India),
• Antonio Bucchiarone (Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy) and
• Pan Hui (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong / University of Helsinki, Finland)

Paper Abstract

“In recent years, the gamification research community has widely and frequently questioned the effectiveness of one-size-fits-all gamification schemes. As a result, personalization seems to be an important part of any successful gamification project. Personalization can be improved through understanding user behavior and Hexad player/user type. This paper presents an original research idea: it seeks to understand whether gamification-related user data (collected through various gamer-type surveys) can be used to predict their behavioral characteristics and types of Hexad users in non-gaming (but gamified) contexts. The affinity that exists between the concepts of gamification and gaming prompted us to conduct this exploratory research.

We conducted an initial study with 67 Stack Exchange users (as a case study). We found that the users’ information about the game could reveal valuable and useful information about their behavioral characteristics and Hexad user types in a non-gaming (but gamified) environment.

The results of tests conducted on three player archetypes (Bartle, Big Five, and BrainHex) show that all can help predict the most dominant behavioral characteristics of Stack Exchange users and the Hexad user type better than the baseline of a random labeler. That said, among all the player archetypes analyzed in this paper, BrainHex performs the best. Finally, we introduced a research agenda for future work.”

“Consistent with the hallmark of the MoDiS unit within the Digital Society Center in FBK, the focus of the research,” – Bucchiarone comments – “has been geared toward devising solutions for customizing and adapting gamification-based systems. The study of such systems was used to understand user behaviors and, based on this information, to be able to customize gamification mechanics in order to increase the impact on the overall goals of the system (e.g., CO2 reduction in mobility systems, increased learning and achievement of skills within a learning program). In other words, this work sought to understand how player-related information obtained in the context of games can be used to predict behavioral features and user types in other contexts, within different gamified systems.  The affinity between the concepts of gamification and gaming prompted us to conduct this exploratory research.”

The full paper is available through SpringerLink, provided that you have proper access rights.