“Using Player Type Models for Personalized Game Design – An Empirical Investigation” conducted by Marc Busch, Elke Mattheiss, Christina Hochleitner, Peter Fröhlich and Manfred Tscheligi (AIT, Center for Technology Experience) together with Wolfgang Hochleitner, Michael Lankes (FH Hagenberg) and Rita Orji (University of Waterloo) was awarded as "Best IxD&A paper of the year 2016”.
Personalization of systems to the personal needs and preferences of users is generally regarded as good means to improve user experience of individuals – however, empirical investigations of the benefits of personalized solutions are still lacking. Utilizing a current player type model, which identifies user preferences for specific game elements, AIT scientists created a personalized mobile game and assessed whether the model can predict player experience. It turned out that the model still needs improvement to be able to foretell the experience with a real game.
The Interaction Design and Architecture(s) Journal (IxD&A) understands itself as an interdisciplinary arena and “think tank” to present top level researches on the future of technology mediated experiences. It is a peer-reviewed open access journal which is SCOPUS and ESCI indexed. Being awarded as best paper shows that this investigation stands out from a number of highly relevant research papers in the area of technology experience.