Neuroscience on Fighting Games at GHItaly 2017

In order to catch up with what I did in Brain for Games, I write here about the proceeding of the work I presented at GHItaly 2017[1]. GHItaly is a Games-Human Interaction workshop that in 2017 was held during a CHI conference in Italy.

The work I presented [2] was a proposal of a theoretical framework that uses neuroscientific theories and models to predict how players might be able to understand the link between actions to be performed on the input device and avatar’s actions. Fighting games indeed present a nice context in which the avatar has usually very detailed biological and human-like features, such that I hypothesized mirror neurons to play a role. Furthermore, I reasoned about spatial compatibility and perspective taking in analyzing the relation between the player and the avatar. I used Tekken, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat and Soulcalibur (all on the PlayStation 3 platform) in order to compare different command systems in light of these theories.

An unespectedly difficult part of the framework was defining commands in relation to inputs. This part was later refined in the paper version of the work that is currently in submitted status.

The proceedings can be found here.

References:

[1]: De Marsico, M., Ripamonti, L. A., Gadia, D., Maggiorini, D., & Mariani, I. (2017, September). GHItaly’17: 1st Workshop on Games-Human Interaction. In Proceedings of the 12th Biannual Conference on Italian SIGCHI Chapter (p. 29). ACM.

[2]: Mattiassi, A. (2017). Command Systems And Player-Avatar Interaction In Successful Fighting Games In Light Of Neuroscientific Theories And Models. on CEUR in Proceedings of GHItaly.