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User Experience Research & Design in Games

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Hello, I am Lennart Nacke

I am an Associate Professor and the Research Director of the HCI Games Group at the University of Waterloo in Canada. I have edited a textbook on Games User Research and authored hundreds of academic articles in gamification, user experience research, human-computer interaction, and game design. My work has been discussed in the New Yorker, Forbes, MIT Technology Review, CTV News, New Scientist, The Daily Mail, PC Gamer Magazine, and other media outlets. I hold a Ph.D. in game development and love to work in user experience research and design. My Google Scholar profile and the HCI Games Group publications show my latest research. I also have a gameful design and user experience research and training company called MotiviUX, Inc.

Besides mentoring a group of excellent researchers, I teach online and in-person classes on game design, user experience research and design, games user research, and writing research papers. I was fortunate enough to give keynotes at gamification and human-computer interaction conferences (like Mensch und Computer and GamiFIN) in the past. Our research group has worked with funding and support from companies such as RBC Royal Bank of Canada, TD Bank, Scotiabank, Red Meat Games, Alpha Laboratories, MLD Solutions, Wiggles 3D, FlourishiQ, Spirit 50, Gamified UK, and government agencies such as the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and Mitacs.

Lennart Nacke in a winter coat smiling.

Select publications

  1. Abeele, V. V., Spiel, K., Nacke, L., Johnson, D., & Gerling, K. (2020). Development and validation of the Player Experience Inventory: A scale to measure player experiences at the level of functional and psychosocial consequences. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 135, 102370. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijhcs.2019.102370
  2. Tondello, G. F., Arrambide, K., Ribeiro, G., Cen, A. J. L., & Nacke, L. E. (2019, September). “I don’t fit into a single type”: A Trait Model and Scale of Game Playing Preferences. In IFIP Conference on Human-Computer Interaction INTERACT 2019 (pp. 375-395). Springer. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-29384-0_23
  3. Tondello, G. F., Kappen, D. L., Ganaba, M., & Nacke, L. E. (2019, July). Gameful design heuristics: a gamification inspection tool. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 224-244). Springer. [PDF]
  4. Drachen, A., Mirza-Babaei, P., & Nacke, L. E. (Eds.). (2018). Games user research. Oxford University Press.
  5. Nacke, L. E., & Deterding, S. (2017). The maturing of gamification research [Editorial]. Computers in Human Behavior, 71, 450–454. DOI: 10.1016/j.chb.2016.11.062 [PDF]
  6. Nacke, L. E. (2017). Games user research and gamification in human-computer interaction. XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students, 24(1), 48-51. DOI: 10.1145/3123748 [PDF]
  7. Tondello, G. F., Wehbe, R. R., Diamond, L., Busch, M., Marczewski, A., & Nacke, L. E. (2016, October). The gamification user types hexad scale. In Proceedings of the 2016 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (CHI PLAY) (pp. 229-243). DOI: 10.1145/2967934.2968082 [PDF]
  8. Deterding, S., Dixon, D., Khaled, R., and Nacke, L. (2011). From game design elements to gamefulness: defining “gamification”. In Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments (MindTrek ’11). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 9–15. DOI: 10.1145/2181037.2181040 [PDF]
  9. Nacke, L. E., Kalyn, M., Lough, C. and Mandryk, R. L. (2011) Biofeedback game design: using direct and indirect physiological control to enhance game interaction. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 103-112. DOI: 10.1145/1978942.1978958 [PDF]
  10. Nacke, L. and Lindley, C.A. (2008). Flow and immersion in First-Person Shooters: Measuring the player’s gameplay experience. In: Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Future Play: Research, Play, Share (Future Play ’08). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 81–88. DOI: 10.1145/1496984.1496998

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