Papers by Michael Nitsche
Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Interaction design and children, 2014
In this paper, we describe our approach to designing electronic puppet-building workshops for mid... more In this paper, we describe our approach to designing electronic puppet-building workshops for middle to early high school students. Power Puppet uses traditional puppet building materials-paper and cloth as the main resources, together with simple circuits elements such as LED's, batteries and magnets. We document our process of designing puppet-building workshops that include STEM education criteria. We collaborated with the Center for Puppetry Arts to design these workshops in such a way that part of the making will include basic electronic input and output components. We aim to open this tradition up for larger audiences to enhance hardware CS education in STEM fields.
ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences
Party Mascot is an experimental design for a dynamic, interactive prop used in "actual play" stre... more Party Mascot is an experimental design for a dynamic, interactive prop used in "actual play" streaming. Taking the form of a talking mechanical bird, the Party Mascot extends audience participation on the Twitch platform from its native chat interface to the physical playspace. Building on a critical review of frame analytical approaches to role-playing game studies and supported by an ethnographic study of actual play performers, the Party Mascot is designed to "ficker" between social, gameplay, and fctional frames of interaction. It can accommodate any number of participants and adapts to multiple roles within new mediated performance contexts. Shifting spectatorship from the screen to the physical world, the Party Mascot can reconfgure audience/performer relationships, open new avenues for game design, and engage the genre of actual play as a new site of experimentation and innovation between the producers and consumers of media. CCS CONCEPTS • Hardware → Communication hardware, interfaces and storage; Tactile and hand-based interfaces; • Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI); Interaction devices; Haptic devices; Human computer interaction (HCI); Interaction paradigms; Collaborative interaction; • Software and its engineering → Software organization and properties; Contextual software domains; Virtual worlds software; Interactive games.
We have developed an embodied puppet interface that translates a player’s body movements to a vir... more We have developed an embodied puppet interface that translates a player’s body movements to a virtual character, thus enabling the player to have a fine grained and personalized control of the avatar. To test the efficacy and short-term effects of this control interface, we developed a two-part experiment, where the performance of users controlling an avatar using the puppet interface was compared with users controlling the avatar using two other interfaces (Xbox controller, keyboard). Part 1 examined aiming movement accuracy in a virtual contact game. Part 2 examined changes of mental rotation abilities in users after playing the virtual contact game. Results from Part 1 revealed that the puppet interface group performed significantly better in aiming accuracy and response time, compared to the Xbox and keyboard groups. Data from Part 2 revealed that the puppet group tended to have greater improvement in mental rotation accuracy as well. Overall, these results suggest that the embo...
Based on preliminary findings from two puppet making and prototyping workshops, an emergent impor... more Based on preliminary findings from two puppet making and prototyping workshops, an emergent importance of ownership is identified among participants. The workshops center around puppet construction and performance but differed in population and design. We identify key mechanisms of the observed feeling of owernership in the different populations and lay out directed design choices to further support such ownership
Video games structure play as performance in both the virtual and the physical space. On the one ... more Video games structure play as performance in both the virtual and the physical space. On the one hand, the player encounters game worlds as virtual stages to act upon. On the other hand, the game world stages the player and re-frames the play space. This essay sets out to suggest some of the elements that are at work in this dualism of games as performative media. The two key elements here are the mediation of the game environment and the transformation of the player through virtual puppetry. Both cases will be argued with a focus on spatiality in performance.
We report on an ongoing collaboration that uses puppetry as a shared cultural expression in educa... more We report on an ongoing collaboration that uses puppetry as a shared cultural expression in educational workshop that inform intercultural exchange. Collaborators in Atlanta, USA and Medellín, Colombia work in tandem on the design and implementation of puppet-building workshops. These workshops use narrative framing, craft-based prototyping, and performance-based validation to teach students basic prototyping skills. They specifically encourage them to relate to their local culture and to inform an ongoing dialogue between the two cultural spheres.
International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, 2020
How can new materialism and non-human agency inform game design research? Through a process of ga... more How can new materialism and non-human agency inform game design research? Through a process of game-design-as-research, the hybrid setting creation game Primal Clay offers one possible answer. In Primal Clay, human players collaborate with Hydrostone and an interactive narrative to produce a fictional game world, engaging in digital as much as material encounters. Relying on notions of material agency, this essay shows the ways in which material can exert "thing power" within the context of a collaborative, co-creative game. It concludes that materials can actively contribute to the play form, and that foregrounding such processes has the potential to broaden the field of digital game design.
Frontiers in Virtual Reality, 2020
Spatial skills allow us to mentally imagine and manipulate objects and their spatial relations. T... more Spatial skills allow us to mentally imagine and manipulate objects and their spatial relations. These skills are crucial in both every day and expert tasks. The present paper reports on an evaluation of a 3D game developed to train a specific spatial skill known as penetrative thinking—the ability to imagine cross-sections of 3D objects from their surface features. In the game, users change the location and orientation of a virtual plane to make cuts through 3D objects in a series of spatial puzzles. Users operate an interface to position the virtual plane until a “slice” at the location of the plane matches a target cross-section of a virtual object. Multiple spatial puzzles with different properties are completed throughout the game. In one version of the game, users completed the puzzles in an immersive virtual environment and operated a tangible interface to move the virtual plane. A secondary version of the game required users to view the puzzles in a virtual environment displa...
Handbook of Experimental Pharmacology, 2019
The Prototyping Puppets project presents a craft-based prototyping project for STEM education of ... more The Prototyping Puppets project presents a craft-based prototyping project for STEM education of early middle school level students in informal learning. The project combines crafting and performing of hybrid puppets. It was pilot tested in two expert workshops (n=6 and n=10), which focused on crafting practices and materials and two student workshops (n=8 and n=9), which included performance elements. The resulting data back the main design concept to combine craft and performance in a STEM-focused maker project. They suggest particular focus on key elements of our educational scaffolding that focus on material performance in combination with crafting. We close with an outlook toward emerging changes as references for related work.
Understanding Machinima : Essays on Filmmaking in Virtual Worlds
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2009
We suggest harvesting the power of multiplayer design to bridge content across different media pl... more We suggest harvesting the power of multiplayer design to bridge content across different media platforms and develop player-driven cross-media experiences. This paper first argues to partially replace complex AI systems with multiplayer design strategies to provide the necessary level of flexibility in the content generation for cross-media applications. The second part describes one example project-the Next Generation Play (NGP) project-that illustrates one practical approach of such a player-driven cross-media content generation. NGP allows players to collect virtual items while watching a TV show. These items are re-used in a multiplayer casual game that automatically generates new game worlds based on the various collections of active players joining a game session. While the TV experience is designed for the single big screen, the game executes on multiple mobile phones. Design and technical implementation of the prototype are explained in more detail to clarify how players carry elements of television narratives into a non-linear handheld gaming experience. The system describes a practical way to create casual game adaptations based on players' personal preferences in a multiuser environment.
Aesthetics of Play …, 2005
Creating dramatic and engaging characters is one of the 'holy grail'issues in video gam... more Creating dramatic and engaging characters is one of the 'holy grail'issues in video games. Anotherrelatedfocus is the implementation of morality in game characters. We look into a combination of these two issues inside the game character's definition. This ...
This project applies the principles of puppetry to virtual reality game design and interface desi... more This project applies the principles of puppetry to virtual reality game design and interface design. It consists of a virtual reality prototype that showcases three possible third person interface designs based off three different forms of puppetry. Each has been testing in a pilot IRB study and iterated on as a result of the provided feedback. In this paper we outline the background research and question that led into the project, as well as the project design process and outcome.
Introduction This essay deals with the montage of moving images in 3D video games. Because this i... more Introduction This essay deals with the montage of moving images in 3D video games. Because this is an extremely wide field some restrictions apply. The first: we look only at editing during interactive gameplay that is somehow initiated by the player. That means, the cut has to be triggered by the player in one way or the other. In games, this is usually implemented either in a direct way – the player triggers the cut with a certain input; or in an indirect way – the game system triggers the cut in dependency to actions performed by the player inside the game space. The resulting visual assemblage of moving images is a crucial part of the game because the player's interaction and the cut are interdependent. In that way, the argument avoids a dominance of the visual side and film studies alone that would suggest some form of 'cinema envy' [11]. Indeed, this essay will argue that there is nothing to be envious about because games are not seen as derivatives of film but as ...
Proceedings of the 2015 British HCI Conference, 2015
We report on the necessity, design, proof of concept implementation, and initial evaluation of a ... more We report on the necessity, design, proof of concept implementation, and initial evaluation of a basic prototyping kit for senior citizens. Even though elderly users have a rich level of experience and are increasingly computer literate, the maker culture largely ignores them as a productive group. This study presents the development of an explorative prototyping kit especially for senior citizens. Its qualitative evaluation was conducted in multiple small workshops with 15 participants in total. The results indicate positive acceptance of the developed tool overall but also show challenges in the design and a lowerthan-expected connection to pre-existing work experiences in the participants. It calls for a review of a purely constructivist approach and a necessary re-framing of computing classes in senior education.
INTRODUCTION Keep the Ball Rolling is a collaborative research project between researchers at Rye... more INTRODUCTION Keep the Ball Rolling is a collaborative research project between researchers at Ryerson University, University of Toronto, and Georgia Tech. It stands in a Serious Games tradition that approaches games as instruments for experimental psychology. Benefits of such an approach have been documented (Calvillo-Gámez, Gow, & Cairns, 2011), but Järvela et al. note a lack of guidelines, which “presents challenges especially when comparing findings between studies and in generalizing the results” (Järvelä, Ekman, Kivikangas, & Ravaja, 2014). This abstract suggests such overarching design criteria through the discussion of the design of Keep the Ball Rolling as a sample project.
We have built an embodied puppet interface to explore the control and cognitive relations players... more We have built an embodied puppet interface to explore the control and cognitive relations players establish with their virtual avatars. We are particularly interested in how these relations could be extended and what lasting effects occur. Here we report the results of a study that revealed that altering the mapping between the embodied puppet and virtual avatar led to changes in the way people sketch in the real world. Our results show that motor adaptations during the game carry over to real world activity. This effect could be extended to develop rehabilitation applications.
Through productive play, the process of playing itself is reframed as a form of crafting. The ess... more Through productive play, the process of playing itself is reframed as a form of crafting. The essay explores the context for playing as crafting as it draws from craft research and game studies to present a different view of emergent play. Huizinga’s definition of play serves as a starting point into a shift to craft-like practices, which are illustrated with a discussion of selected machinima work that serves as example for this concept of playing as crafting. Finally, the overlap between playing and crafting is discussed as an example for critical making.
2020 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces (VR), 2020
Archiving Performative Objects aimed at applying and conserving puppetry as creative practice in ... more Archiving Performative Objects aimed at applying and conserving puppetry as creative practice in VR. It included 3D scanning and interaction design to capture puppets and their varying control schemes from the archives of the Center for Puppetry Arts. This paper reports on their design and implementation in a VR puppetry set up. Its focuses on the evaluation study (n=18) comparing the interaction of non-experts vs expert puppeteers. The data initially show little differences but a more detailed discussion indicates differing qualitative assessments of puppetry that support its value for VR. Results suggests successful creative activation especially among experts.
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Papers by Michael Nitsche
The full theoretical and technical discussions as well as the evaluation results are outside the scope of this submission.