Achievement

Trainee Shawn Nikkila is a Ph.D. student studying Computer Science at ASU, and his research examines how HCI technologies and games can be used to connect people in varying locations and contexts. To help realize this goal, he is currently developing Taskville which is a social game for the workplace. It addresses a modern workplace where teams are continuing to be more diverse and geographically distributed, which may result in individual workers feeling disconnected and unaware of the activities occurring outside of his group. Taskville's use of semi-public displays and a city building metaphor where each enterprise group owns a city which grows over time as individuals complete tasks allows workers to understand their contributions and see what other groups are doing at a glance. Light competitive elements are also present which encourages continued play. This work will be presented at the Gamification and Social Games Studies workshops at CHI 2011.