GAMING PROJECT

I was invited to participate in a research project about building a platform to help facilitate gaming sessions between long-distance couples. The project had two different aspects I participated in. The first was a design project focused on building mockups and developing the product and its visual aspects for further research and development. The second aspect was about doing analysis and thematic analysis of user interview transcripts, surveys, and diary studies. During this time, I helped to develop a key finding of what was ultimately the final paper, which was an archetype for different couples and the ways they like to game. We developed three different groups: only co-op, prefer co-op, and prefer competitive. We did not find any evidence of couples who would only play competitive games and only preferred them. The joke I made was that all those couples were no longer together.

During the research phase of the project, I started to develop lots of useful and informative data visualizations to summarize our findings and document the quantitative results. Because of this, I was invited to help participate in the writing of the research paper and get co-authorship. My primary contribution to the paper was creating all of the data visualizations present in the paper. You can read more about the paper here.