Software e framework de gravação da interação de jogadores com jogos digitais

Abstract

In scientific researches that touch the development of digital games, valuable quantitative and qualitative data can be obtained from researcher-guided gameplay sessions in order to verify research questions. These questions are not limited to the interaction between a person and a game's interfaces, and they involve a lot of other observational elements that allow a better comprehension not only about the game, but about other important phenomena that occur during the gameplay, such as dialogues between the researcher(s) and the player(s), the ergonomic aspects that gain relevance in the gameplay, and physical reactions to game events. A way to register these data is through video and audio recording, which allows analysis and sharing of any visual and sonorous phenomena that may have been captured by the recording, but producing a good recording introduce many challenges to the researcher. Hence, a well defined process of recording planning and practice reduces loss of important data for the research, which can involve methodological errors (e.g., bad camera placement), technological errors (e.g., incorrect choice of video dimensions), and practical errors (e.g., the recording does not satisfy who will be benefited by it). This work presents a software and a framework for recording gameplay sessions that, together, seek to address the complexity of the process of obtaining rich observational data.