Psychology of Interactive Design Presentation
May 2017
Click here to access the full Google Slides presentation.
As an undergrad, I took a course titled Dust or Magic - Psychology of Interactive Design. Our semester project for that class was to create a comprehensive "cookbook" of several prolific psychologists and their studies and theories in relation to interactive media. I decided to focus my comparisons and analogies of these psychological theories to video games. Do games utilize these psychological theories in a positive light, making them magical? Or do they utilize them to exploit their users, making them dust? I explore that concept in this presentation.
The table of contents for the presentation.The course's professor was Warren Buckleitner, founder of Dust or Magic and editor of Children's Technology Review, both of which have a focus on the psychology of interactive design. Dr. Buckleitner reviews and examines technology and evaluates them based on the psychological theories they apply and how it affects children.
Although the presentation is short, I've made sure to succintly describe each psychologist's primary theory and how it applies to interactive media like video games. This took a lot of research to see which games best suit the example. For example, one topic talks about Seymour Papert's approach with his "Four P's" and how it relates to the game Fallout 4. Each topic discussed has a game play video accompanying their respective slides.