• Skip to main content
  • Skip to header right navigation
  • Skip to site footer
HCI Games Group

HCI Games Group

Researching Affective Systems and Engaging Interactions

  • Home
  • Blog
  • People
  • Opportunities
  • Projects
  • Publications
  • Teaching
  • Contact
  • CLICK ME!!!
The HCI Games Group in 2020.

Creatures of Habit — Examining Automatic Behaviour in Online Games

You are here: Home / Game Design / Creatures of Habit — Examining Automatic Behaviour in Online Games
August 15, 2016 by Gustavo Tondello

Written by Mike Schaekermann.

In everyday life, we seldom do things for the first time. Instead, a large part of our behaviour is determined by habits rather than conscious motivation [1]. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to assume that habitual behaviour may also be a strong determinant for what we do as players in online gaming environments. A major focus of the HCI Games Group is on developing a deeper understanding of the psychological constructs that drive human behaviour in digital games. In this spirit, one of our ongoing projects revolves around the underrepresented topic of habits in online games.

Predictions of play time, based on periodic patterns in server log data

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) naturally lend themselves to a closer examination of habitual gaming patterns for two reasons: first, players who like a particular game often spend large amounts of time in its virtual environment, increasing the chance of certain behaviours to be performed repeatedly and eventually turn into habits. Second, it is not uncommon for game studios to store detailed information about what players do in the game environment — a technique referred to as “telemetry” [5]. This information is normally used to analyse usage patterns and improve a game title over time, but it can also be leveraged for scientific endeavours like ours. Only a few studies from the fields of psychology and human-computer interaction have looked at how habit can be measured [4], how the formation of habit strength can be modelled over time [6] and in what way habit strength may be used to predict future behaviour in online virtual environments [2,3].

In our ongoing research project about the role of habit in online gaming environments, we apply time series modelling and data mining techniques to extract highly repetitive patterns of behaviour from massive data sets of MMOGs. In particular, we are taking closer look at player personality traits in the game Destiny, and have recently launched a large-scale online survey for this project. If you are a passionate Destiny player and would love to learn about your own personal player type, you should not hesitate to take our survey as well!

In hopes that we caught your interest in the force of habit, we will keep you updated about the progress of this project in future posts and scientific publications. This project is in collaboration with Mike Schaekermann, Lennart Nacke from the University of Waterloo, Canada, as well as Anders Drachen from Aalborg University, Denmark, and Rafet Sifa from Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS), Germany.


Contact

If you are interested in this project and have some more questions about it, as always, I would love you to hear from you — either via Twitter: @HardyShakerman or email: mikeschaekermann@gmail.com


References:

[1] Neal, D. T., Wood, W., Labrecque, J. S., & Lally, P. (2012). How do habits guide behavior? Perceived and actual triggers of habits in daily life. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48(2), 492–498. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2011.10.011

[2] Wohn, D. Y. (2012). The Role of Habit Strength in Social Network Game Play. Communication Research Reports, 29(1), 74–79. http://doi.org/10.1080/08824096.2011.639912

[3] Wohn, D., Velasquez, A., Bjornrud, T., & Lampe, C. (2012). Habit as an explanation of participation in an online peer-production community. In Proceedings of the 2012 ACM annual conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems — CHI ’12 (p. 2905). New York, New York, USA: ACM Press. http://doi.org/10.1145/2207676.2208697

[4] Verplanken, B., Myrbakk, V., & Rudi, E. (2005). The measurement of habit. In The routines of decision making. (pp. 231–247). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Retrieved from http://opus.bath.ac.uk/9436/

[5] El-nasr, M. S., Drachen, A., & Canossa, A. (2013). Game Analytics. (M. Seif El-Nasr, A. Drachen, & A. Canossa, Eds.). London: Springer London. http://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-4769-5

[6] Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009. http://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.674

Gustavo's Profile Pic
Gustavo Tondello
Co-Founder, Software Engineer, Gamification Specialist at MotiviUX | Website | + posts

Dr. Gustavo Tondello was an instructor and support coordinator for the Cheriton School of Computer Science. He was a Ph.D. student at the University of Waterloo under the supervision of Dr. Lennart Nacke and Dr. Daniel Vogel and a graduate researcher at the HCI Games Group. He is a co-founder of MotiviUX and a member of the International Gamification Federation. His research interests include gamification and games for health, wellbeing, and learning, user experience in gamification, and gameful design methods. His work focuses on the design and personalization of gameful applications. His publications advanced the current knowledge on player and user motivations in games and gameful applications and introduced new frameworks and approaches to designing personalized gameful applications and serious games. He periodically blogs about gamification for the HCI Games Group and on his personal blog, Gameful Bits. Before coming to Canada, Gustavo earned his M.Sc. in Computer Science and his B.Sc. in Information Systems from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) and worked for several years as a Software Engineer in Brazil. Gustavo is also a Logosophy researcher affiliated with the Logosophical Foundation of Brazil and North America.

  • Gustavo Tondello
    https://hcigames.com/author/gustavo/
    The Use of Games and Play to Achieve Real-World Goals
  • Gustavo Tondello
    https://hcigames.com/author/gustavo/
    The Gameful World
  • Gustavo Tondello
    https://hcigames.com/author/gustavo/
    The HCI Games Group will be at CHI PLAY 2015
  • Gustavo Tondello
    https://hcigames.com/author/gustavo/
    Playful Interactions at CHI PLAY 2015
Category: Game Design, Games User Research, HCI, ResearchTag: Destiny, games, GUR, UX

About Gustavo Tondello

Dr. Gustavo Tondello was an instructor and support coordinator for the Cheriton School of Computer Science. He was a Ph.D. student at the University of Waterloo under the supervision of Dr. Lennart Nacke and Dr. Daniel Vogel and a graduate researcher at the HCI Games Group. He is a co-founder of MotiviUX and a member of the International Gamification Federation. His research interests include gamification and games for health, wellbeing, and learning, user experience in gamification, and gameful design methods. His work focuses on the design and personalization of gameful applications. His publications advanced the current knowledge on player and user motivations in games and gameful applications and introduced new frameworks and approaches to designing personalized gameful applications and serious games. He periodically blogs about gamification for the HCI Games Group and on his personal blog, Gameful Bits. Before coming to Canada, Gustavo earned his M.Sc. in Computer Science and his B.Sc. in Information Systems from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) and worked for several years as a Software Engineer in Brazil. Gustavo is also a Logosophy researcher affiliated with the Logosophical Foundation of Brazil and North America.

Previous Post: « What is Gamification anyway?
Next Post: Does Gamification Work in the Software Development Process? »

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Sidebar

Recent Posts

  • HCI Games Group’s Field Guide to CHI 2021
  • The Challenge of Knowledge Translation
  • An Interview With Horror Sound Designer Orest Sushko || Part III – What Horror Games Can Learn From The Sound Design of Horror Movies

Archives

  • May 2021
  • February 2021
  • August 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • February 2017
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • February 2016
  • October 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • March 2015

Categories

  • Book Review
  • Conferences
  • Game Design
  • Games User Research
  • Gamification
  • Gaming Experiences
  • HCI
  • Interviews
  • News
  • Projects
  • Publications
  • Research
  • Social Media Update/Blog
  • Talks
  • Teaching

Archives

  • May 2021
  • February 2021
  • August 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • February 2017
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • February 2016
  • October 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • March 2015

Categories

  • Book Review
  • Conferences
  • Game Design
  • Games User Research
  • Gamification
  • Gaming Experiences
  • HCI
  • Interviews
  • News
  • Projects
  • Publications
  • Research
  • Social Media Update/Blog
  • Talks
  • Teaching

Archives

  • May 2021
  • February 2021
  • August 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • February 2017
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • February 2016
  • October 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • March 2015

Categories

  • Book Review
  • Conferences
  • Game Design
  • Games User Research
  • Gamification
  • Gaming Experiences
  • HCI
  • Interviews
  • News
  • Projects
  • Publications
  • Research
  • Social Media Update/Blog
  • Talks
  • Teaching
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Instagram
  • YouTube

Copyright © 2023 · HCI Games Group · All Rights Reserved. We acknowledge that we live and work on the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabeg, and Haudenosaunee peoples. The University of Waterloo is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land promised to the Six Nations that includes six miles on each side of the Grand River. We wish to honour the ancestral guardians of this land and its waterways: the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Wendat, and the Neutrals. Many Indigenous peoples continue to call this land home and act as its stewards, and this responsibility extends to all peoples, to share and care for this land for generations to come.