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Games as a Platform to Tackle Grand Challenges

Research Excellence.

Research Council of Finland logos: Center of Excellence and Flagship Programme

We are the only body of research at Tampere University that holds both Centre of Excellence and Flagship status by the Research Council of Finland. Research excellence stems from capable, diverse and multidisciplinary people, supportive work culture and world-class research infrastructure.

Center of Excellence in Game Culture Studies

The Research Council of Finland’s Centres of Excellence are the pinnacles of research excellence in Finland, representing both existing cutting-edge knowledge in their fields, and the ability to create new international avenues of research, and to train new talented experts for the academia and rest of the society. Our Center of Excellence in Game Culture Studies (GameCult) is advancing the theoretical and empirical understanding in the cultural agency and meaning-making processes in games. With more than 30 involved researchers from social sciences, humanities and technical sciences from Tampere University, University of Turku and University of Jyväskylä, GameCult is the leading network of researchers in game culture studies. For more information about GameCult, please visit the website or contact directors Frans Mäyrä or Olli Sotamaa, (firstname.lastname [at] tuni.fi.) or research coordinator Elina Koskinen. Email firstname.m.lastname [at] tuni.fi.

UNITE Flagship – Forest-Human-Machine Interplay

The Research Council of Finland’s Flagship Programme is – besides the Center of Excellence programme – the other most appreciated and sought-after support instrument for high-quality research in Finland. The purpose of the Flagship Programme is to increase the economic and societal impact that emerges from research. Our Flagship UNITE is supporting forest sector’s transition to a climate-smart, resource-efficient, multi-functional, and humane biosociety through four research themes: Technology, Methods, Decision making tools and Gamification. UNITE is led by University of Eastern Finland, and besides Tampere University the consortium includes also Finnish Geospatial Research Institute, and the Natural Resources Institute Finland. For more information about UNITE, please visit the website or contact theme director Juho Hamari or collaboration officer Timo Nummenmaa. Emails firstname.lastname [at] tuni.fi.

Infrastructure

High-quality research infrastructure is a necessity for high-impact research. At Tampere University, we are continuously investing to our spaces and tools to ensure our experts in games and gamification have the best technological environment to conduct their research. Our most important research infrastructure includes digital interaction observatory Ludus with e.g. ten sensorized gaming booths, immersive visual technologies lab CIVIT with e.g. volumetric video capture equipment, and several specialized human-computer interaction laboratories. In addition, we host two unique impact and collaboration venues - Paidia at Nokia Arena, and Oasis at City Centre Campus.

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Selected publications

Buruk, O. and Özcan, O. (2018). Extracting Design Guidelines for Wearables and Movement in Tabletop Role-Playing Games via a Research Through Design Process. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Paper 513, 1–13.

Dindar, M. (2018). An empirical study on gender, video game play, academic success and complex problem solving skills, Computers & Education, Volume 125, 2018, Pages 39-52, ISSN 0360-1315.

Hamari, J., Koivisto, J. and Sarsa, H. (2014). Does Gamification Work? — A Literature Review of Empirical Studies on Gamification, 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Waikoloa, HI, USA, 2014, pp. 3025-3034.

Hamari, J., Sjöklint, M. and Ukkonen, A. (2016). The sharing economy: Why people participate in collaborative consumption. J Assn Inf Sci Tec, 67: 2047 -2059.

Kallio, K. P., Mäyrä, F., & Kaipainen, K. (2011). At Least Nine Ways to Play: Approaching Gamer Mentalities. Games and Culture, 6(4), 327-353.

Kiili, K. (2005). Digital game-based learning: Towards an experiential gaming model, The Internet and Higher Education, Volume 8, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 13-24, ISSN 1096-7516.

Pirkkalainen, H., Salo, M., Tarafdar, M., Makkonen, M. (2019). Deliberate or Instinctive? Proactive and Reactive Coping for Technostress, Journal of Management Information Systems, 36:4, 1179-1212.

Sotamaa, O. (2010). When the Game Is Not Enough: Motivations and Practices Among Computer Game Modding Culture. Games and Culture, 5(3), 239-255.

Thibault, M., Buruk, O., Buruk, S.S. and Hamari, J. (2020). Transurbanism: Smart Cities for Transhumans. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1915–1928.