My Mindtrek 2018 coverage

Now that Mindtrek is over it's time to share my experiences of the event. I did participate on both days trying to attend most of the game related topics (although second day didn't really have any).

Day 1:

In the morning there was an interesting presentation about improving the Chinese education structure. It was mainly targeting kids who attend primary schools since there is massive differences in the quality of teaching. What needs to be improved is the Chinese society as whole since the family structure is very attached to schools. Their solutions were creating more open study structures and trying to keep parents involved in education process by utilizing online communities.

After the first presentation ended I headed to a much smaller room that held the academic presentations about game related topics. The first 3 topics were about utilizing gamification to make chores more bearable.

First one of these research topics was about letting the players decide what kind of game they want. They then analyzed the game elements players chose and tried to come up with the "best" set of elements. The interesting part was that even if the elements are widely accepted as good, they might become worse if combined with others and vice versa. That makes it relatively difficult to determine "one-size-fits-all" kind of element set.

Second research was done with an online store. Their goal was to gamify a storefront and test the difference between tangible (physical) versus intangible (virtual) rewards. The results did show that the tangible rewards were increasing the user activity by around 25% whereas the intangible ones had almost no effect. It was interesting to see that the results with intangible rewards we so bad but I feel like they just didn't implement it correctly. Making a good virtual reward system would require a pretty large upfront investment and I don't think they had that.

Third research was about motivating people to move by making a game out of it and displaying the results in a public place. The game itself didn't seem to have much effect but when it was displayed for others to see people did start moving more. I felt like the sample size was a bit too small for this study and the target group was already moving so it was something that would motivate people who already move to move more.


After these, there was a small analysis on how Game Jam design process was different from a normal design. That felt kind of pointless because the sample size was 1 group and the presentation didn't really show any results of the research.

We also had a guy that had done analysis of the players reaction to The Division -game (7 people) and how / why their opinions changed during the gameplay. It was nice to see that someone can actually pull of an academic research about a topic like this. Personally I felt like the guy doing this just wanted a 60$ game for free.

Analyzing F2P games from paying players perspective was an interesting topic. However, this research was done in 2015 and their target audience barely had any mobile game experience so it kind of misses the point of "whales". There were certain good points like the difference between value of cosmetics and progress but it barely scratched the topic of P2W and big spenders.

The same group who did the analysis of game elements also made analysis on user preferred elements in live streams. The elements itself were well analyzed and their ratings recorded. I think this research could be used as a baseline when trying to understand what kind of elements are available for streamers but none of the elements are actually needed for having a successful stream.

And at last for day 1 we had a small study done to analyze the abuse targeted to minors in DotA 2. In this research, it was found out that the minors are less affected by the abuse than what was hypothesized and that the minors do tend to end up in the punishment queue more than older players. I feel like this research could have had more interesting outcomes if their target group was larger than 30 people and if they analyzed the data on more angles than just the age. For example players skill, country, gender and voice chat usage were not considered at all.


Day 2:

I was in early, figured out that it would be nice to go and listen the discussion about data analysis. The speaker did nail quite a few good points about how companies are utilizing data and how everything collects it but not many people know how to utilize it. It was a pretty straightforward presentation and the main giveaway was that they had developed an add-on (global consent manager) for browsers that automatically tells the websites how the users data can be used. Not really my favorite topic but I feel like it would be nice if it was possible to just tick "no" everywhere by default.

After a short break, in the same hall, we had a completely different kind of presentation. This one was about a country called Liberland. It's about 2 square kilometer large piece of land between Croatia and Serbia. Their goal is to create a tax heaven that uses bitcoins as their main currency and has an open source government. Currently there is over 500 000 applied citizens for the country.

That presentation really felt like an advertisement for bitcoin millionaires who just want to launder their money. It's an interesting idea by itself but it just feels like the "people in power" are spending their times visiting different lunch parties.

And that was the end of Day 2 for me. I wanted to visit the Internet OS presentation but it got cancelled 15 minutes before the start and that meant another 90 minutes of just standing around before the next presentations.

By far the best part was the food, it was very good on both days (and free). It was nice to get an insight on what kind of papers qualify as research on game related topics. I think the even itself felt pretty empty, might be due to the ticket prices being quite ridiculous for everyone except students. The topics themselves were also mostly targeted to people who are in the education field.