UCI wants to go beyond just supporting competitive gaming. Constance Steinkuehler, a professor of informatics there, believes gaming and esports research can do everything from improving student educational performance to fostering a culture of teamwork. She says that competing in high-level esports takes sophisticated communication and mastery of complex schemes.
Read the full story at The Christian Science Monitor.
In the workplace, increased use of mobile devices and next generation collaboration tools is also having a negative effect, albeit in a different way than in the consumer world. In the workplace, tech addiction is not a problem of addiction. Rather, it is the increased use of pervasive technology that makes it hard for workers to focus on deep work and complete tasks that require extended periods of concentration.
Because the challenges and threats of tech usage at work are different than those at home, a different approach is needed to address them. To meet this need, a consortium of organizational and academic experts recently formed to bring the human back to the center of the workplace. The newly-formed Humanizing the Digital Workplace Consortium was founded “to identify solutions and offer guidance to organizations about creating people-centric approaches that improve worker productivity, creativity and wellbeing.”
Read the full story at CMSWire.
One of the most shocking findings that we uncovered was that 34% of employees like their jobs less when they find themselves in a distracting workplace and 66% of workers have never discussed solutions to address workplace distraction with their managers. When workplace distractions are reduced, whether through training or policies, we found that 75% of employees are more productive, 57% have increased motivation, and 49% are overall happier at work. These statistics are further supported by findings from a UC Irvine study that show “people compensate for interruptions by working faster, but this comes at a price: experiencing more stress, higher frustration, time pressure, and effort. In addition to the negative emotional impacts on employees, businesses also feel the consequences since even the briefest interruptions can double a worker’s error rate.
Read the full story at Inc.
Toxicity often seems like a foregone conclusion in online communities, just something that happens when a game becomes too big or popular. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
During a presentation at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, expert panelists talked about what creators can do to help prevent their communities from succumbing to abuse and harassment. User experience researcher and veteran social media moderator Katherine Lo began by debunking a key myth about online behavior: the long-held belief that someone acts like an asshole because they’re hiding behind a fake name.
Read the full story at Rolling Stone.
Kids live and breathe conflict. Helping them to develop productive ways of resolving conflict, including an ability to problem solve and actively listen, feel and show empathy for others, and create and maintain positive relationships can have powerful effects. Can a game like Minecraft help?
Read the full story at Connected Camps.
Listen to Software Design Decoded authors Marian Petre and André van der Hoek interviewed on the Greater Than Code podcast.
Esports are coming to colleges around the country with the creation of varsity programs and unofficial leagues. One of the collegiate leaders in esports is UC Irvine. It was one of the first colleges to have a varsity program and built the first esports arena on a college campus. UC Irvine’s influence in esports has trickled down to local high schools in Southern California with the formation of the Orange County High School Esports League.
Constance Steinkuehler, a professor at UC Irvine, has been helping get the OC Esports League up and running. “(At UC Irvine) we have seen lots of added engagement with students,” she said. “There isn’t a lot of academic research on esports yet but we have seen a positive effect on student performance and retention.”
Read the full story at SportTechie.
A study by Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues shows that after only 20 minutes of interrupted work, “people reported significantly higher stress, frustration, workload, effort, and pressure.”
Read the full story at Five Thirty Eight.
“Developing forms of measurement that deviate from engagement and growth is important for the industry, but what will determine the power of a move like this is how it will factor into Twitter’s business objectives,” says Katherine Lo, an online community researcher at University of California Irvine.
Read the full story at Wired.
“If you’re going into a new environment — whether that’s a video game, or a social-media platform, or a subreddit — look into the social norms of that community first,” says Nikki Crenshaw, a researcher at Blizzard Entertainment, the maker of World of Warcraft and other online games. Crenshaw got her doctorate in informatics last year from the University of California, Irvine, where she studied naming practices in online video games.
Read the full story at The New York Times Magazine.