She is currently working on the following projects:
- New Methods to Measure Impact of Games
In this project, the team is looking at developing new methods to evaluate the impact of games for both health and as crowd sourcing mechanism.
In the area of health, the team published a journal paper on a new method that combines game analytics with qualitatives methods in a systemic way to formatively evaluate in a naturalistic setting a game used for health behavior change. [This work was funded by Aetna Foundation].
In the area of crowdsourcing mechanisms, the team is looking to extend heursitic evaluation and visualization techniques to address challenges faced by crowd sourcing games. Heuristic evaluation is being extended to address specific audience questions as well as progression and variety for longevity of play. The team is also extending visualization methods to allow comparison and general analysis of problem solving strategies. [This project is funded by Darpa under the Crowd Sourced Formal Vertification Program].
Team: Magy Seif El-Nasr (PI), Alessandro Canossa, Zhengzing Chen, Shree Durga, Troung-Huy Nguyen, Mariya Shiyko, and Carmen Sceppa
Example Papers:
- Seif El-Nasr, M., Durga, S., Shiyko, M., and Sceppa, C. (2015). Data-Driven Retrospective Interviewing (DDRI): A Proposed Methodology for Formative Evaluation of Pervasive Games. Entertainment Computing Journal.
- Nguyen, T., Seif El-Nasr, M., and Canossa, A. (2015). Glyph: Visualization Tool for Understanding Problem Solving Strategies in Puzzle Games. Foundations of Digital Games. (Won best paper award)
- Health Behavior Change through Using Games and Social Media
In this project, the team is looking at the use of games as a way to enable health behavior change. The team collaborated with the company Igniteplay to investigate the use of Spa Play as a game for helping women in the age range of 30-50 to change their habits concerning healthy eating and exercise.
The team has also investigated the potential of using such a game or other health apps within underserved population. [This project was funded by Aetna Foundation]
Team: Magy Seif El-Nasr (PI), Shree Durga, Mariya Shiyko, and Carmen Sceppa
Example Papers:
- Seif El-Nasr, M., Durga, S., Shiyko, M., and Sceppa, C. (2015). Unpacking Adherence and Engagement in Persuasive Health Games. Foundations of Digital Games.
- Subramanian, S., Hallinan, S., Seif El-Nasr, M., Shiyko, M., and Sceppa, C. (2015). Investigating Behavior Change Indicators and Cognitive Measures in Persuasive Health Games. Foundations of Digital Games.
- Durga, S., Seif El-Nasr, M., Shiyko, M., Sceppa, C., Naab, P., and Andres, L. (2013). Leveraging Social Play in Health-Based Games to Promote Sustained Behavior Change in Healthy Eating and Exercise. DIGRA.
- Infrastructure for Interactive Narratives as Social Simulations
In this project, the team is developing an infrastructure composed of a set of tools that sit on top of the virtual humans toolkit developed at ICT, USC to add narrative content to enable social simulations, used for training, evaluating team performance, or investigating gender bias, to mention a few applications. [Project is funded by NSF Advance and NSF CISE]
Team: Magy Seif El-Nasr (PI), Stacy Marsella (Co-PI), Troung-Huy Nguyen, Elin Carstendottir, Matthew Gray
Early Papers:
- Seif El-Nasr, M., Nguyen, T., Carstensdottir, E., Gray, M., Isaacowitz, D., and Desteno, D. (2014). Social Gaming as an Experimental Platform. Social Believability in Games Workshop at FDG 2014.
- Nguyen, T., Carstensdottir, E., Seif El-Nasr, M., Gray, M., Isaacowitz, D., Desteno, D., Ngo, N. (2015). Modeling Warmth and Competence in Virtual Characters. Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA) Conference.
- Understanding Affect and Individual Differences through virtual and Game Envionments
In this direction, the team is looking at using games as a method to investigate several psychological constructs in collaboration with the Psychology Department at Northeastern University. We are investigating Trust using a game where virtual characters display variety in terms of warmth and competence. We also investigated the use of virtual environments to explore individual differences and personality. Additionally, we looked at the use of games to understand emotions and affect. [Some of these projects are funded internally as well as through an NSF grant]
Team: Magy Seif El-Nasr, Alessandro Canossa, Randy Colvin, Derek Isaacowitz, David Desteno, Lisa Barrett, Zhengzing Chen, and Stephanie Tignor.
Early Papers:
- Canossa, A., Badler, J., Seif El-Nasr, M., Tignor, S., and Colvin, R. (2015). In Your Face(t) Impact of Personality and Context on Gameplay Behavior. Foundations of Digital Games.
- Understanding Games Research
In this project, the team is exploring the evaluation and structure of games research from 1990s till now.
Team: Magy Seif El-Nasr, Alessandro Canossa, Katherine Isbister, Zhengzing Chen, Troung-Huy Nguyen, and Eddie Melcer.
Early Papers:
- Melcer, E., Nguyen, T., Chen, Z., Canossa, A., Seif El-Nasr, M. and Isbister, K. (2015). Games Research Today: Analyzing the Academic Landscape 2000-2014. Foundations of Digital Games. (Won best paper award)
Current industrial collaborators: IgnitePlay
Please see PLAIT website for active research projects.
Resources
- Methods
- Data Repositories
- Game Trace Archive, TU Delft Game Data Archive, 12 datasets from Dota, Wow, Board Game, Card Game, MineCraft, FacebookApp, RTS.
- Repository of video, audio, and meta data 160 total volumes, 14794 files, 3,568 hours or recording, and 3,268 participants
- Research Data Archive, Harvard repository for quanitative and qualitative research data to push social science research, 60,016 Datasets, and 296,317 files
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