Research work of Dr. Sujit Gujar on Your Favorite Gameplay Speaks Volumes about You: Predicting User Behavior and Hexad Type has been awarded the Best Paper Award at HCI International 2023 held at Copenhagen, Denmark from 23 – 28 July.

 This research work was carried out by Dr. Sujit Gujar in collaboration with faculty at  Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST). 

Here is the research work as explained by the authors – Reza Hadi Mogavi, Chao Deng, Jennifer Hoffman, Ehsan-Ul Haq, Sujit Gujar, Antonio Bucchiarone, Pan Hui:

In recent years, the gamification research community has widely and frequently questioned the effectiveness of one-size-fits-all gamification schemes. In consequence, personalization seems to be an important part of any successful gamification design. Personalization can be improved by understanding user behaviour and Hexad player/user type. This paper comes with an original research idea: It investigates whether users’ game-related data (collected via various gamer-archetype surveys) can be used to predict their behavioural characteristics and Hexad user types in non-game (but gamified) contexts. The affinity that exists between the concepts of gamification and gaming provided us with the impetus for running this exploratory research.

We conducted an initial survey study with 67 Stack Exchange users (as a case study). We discovered that users’ gameplay information could reveal valuable and helpful information about their behavioural characteristics and Hexad user types in a non-gaming (but gamified) environment.

The results of testing three gamer archetypes (i.e. Bartle, Big Five, and BrainHex) show that they can all help predict users’ most dominant Stack Exchange behavioural characteristics and Hexad user type better than a random labeler’s baseline. That said, of all the gamer archetypes analysed in this paper, BrainHex performs the best. In the end, we introduce a research agenda for future work.

Conference page: HCI-GAMES | HCI International 2023

July 2023