Adapting Cognitive Task Analysis to Elicit the Skill Chain of a Game

Abstract

Playing a game is a complex skill that comprises a set of more basic skills which map onto the component mechanics of the game. Basic skills and mechanics typically build and depend on each other in a nested learning hierarchy, which game designers have modeled as skill chains of skill atoms. For players to optimally learn and enjoy a game, it should introduce skill atoms in the ideal sequence of this hierarchy or chain. However, game designers typically construct and use hypothetical skill chains based solely on design intent, theory, or personal observation, rather than empirical observation of players. To address this need, this paper presents an adapted cognitive task analysis method for eliciting the empirical skill chain of a game. A case study illustrates and critically reflects the method. While effective in foregrounding overlooked low-level skills required by a game, its efficiency and generalizability remain to be proven.

Statistical Significance Testing at CHI PLAY: Challenges and Opportunities for More Transparency

“…We analyzed all 130 papers with the updated codebook. During this fnal analysis, a further n=11 papers were excluded: Four papers did not feature statistical inferences, and were therefore deemed false positives [15,31,47,74]; two studies used exploratory factor analyses [109,161], which (unlike NHST) are [125,171,173], or only reported non-signifcant results without further information on the statistical analysis [119,175]. This resulted in a fnal sample of N=119 papers, which forms the basis of our systematic review results.…”

Statistical Significance Testing at CHI PLAY: Challenges and Opportunities for More Transparency

“…We analyzed all 130 papers with the updated codebook. During this fnal analysis, a further n=11 papers were excluded: Four papers did not feature statistical inferences, and were therefore deemed false positives [15,31,47,74]; two studies used exploratory factor analyses [109,161], which (unlike NHST) are designed for exploratory analyses; fnally, fve papers did not employ NHST when reporting results [125,171,173], or only reported non-signifcant results without further information on the statistical analysis [119,175]. This resulted in a fnal sample of N=119 papers, which forms the basis of our systematic review results.…”

Tracing Player Knowledge in a Parallel Programming Educational Game

“…In order to elicit the set of required concepts/skills, we employed the methodology defined by Horn, Cooper, and Deterding (2017), which resulted in the 21 skills shown in the left column of Table 1, which we will denote by KC.…”