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UCLIC Research Seminar Series
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Zoom Details
For those attending virtually, please use this link: ucl.zoom.us/j/91445603395
Abstract
During the COVID-19 lockdowns, the already rising prevalence of mental illnesses intensified. To connect with others and to find a stress relieve many turned to digital gaming. Not surprisingly digital games were recommended as a tool to satisfy social needs during lockdowns. While many researchers show that digital games indeed help to satisfy social needs, some players face several challenges when trying to engage with the gaming culture and community. Anxiety and fear about social interactions can lead to withdrawal from socializing in the physical world, yet players with social anxiety preferentially choose MMORPGs — a highly social genre — raising questions of whether social anxiety expresses differently during in-game interactions.
Therefore, in this seminar we will dive deeper into the relationship between the experience of social anxiety in the digital world and how it manifests and alters the player's behaviour in-game. Building on these insights we may be able to develop more playful and easier accessible tools for assessing mental burdens such as social anxiety.
Links to the papers:
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Martin Johannes Dechant, Robin Welsch, Julian Frommel, and Regan L Mandryk. 2022. (Don't) stand by me: How trait psychopathy and NPC emotion influence player perceptions, verbal responses, and movement behaviours in a gaming task. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 468, 1-17. doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3502014
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Martin Johannes Dechant, Julian Frommel, and Regan Mandryk. 2021. Assessing Social Anxiety Through Digital Biomarkers Embedded in a Gaming Task. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 544, 1-15. doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445238
- Martin Dechant, Susanne Poeller, Colby Johanson, Katelyn Wiley, and Regan L. Mandryk. 2020. In-game and Out-of-game Social Anxiety Influences Player Motivations, Activities, and Experiences in MMORPGs. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1-14. doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376734
Biography
Dr. Martin Dechant is a Lecturer in Digital Mental Health in the Division of Psychology & Language Sciences - Clinical, Education & Health Psychology at the University College London and is part of the UCL Interaction Centre. In his research he investigates how digital tools may be harnessed for the development of novel mental health and wellbeing digital assessment as well as intervention techniques.
He completed his PhD at the University of Saskatchewan focusing on the development of game-based behavioural markers for the assessment of social anxiety. Furthermore, he worked on the development of playful assessment techniques for assessing the cognitive performance of users as well as novel interaction techniques for immersive media, such as VR/AR. After his PhD he joined as visual perception research at the vision science lab of ZEISS vision care Germany in Tuebingen. Prior joining UCL he worked as UX-Designer and application developer for several companies including SensoMotoric Instruments (bought by Apple) and Tobii Technologies.