SWaGUR: Saskatchewan-Waterloo Games User Research

加拿大的电脑游戏产业是世界第三大，仅次于美国和日本。该行业每年为加拿大的GDP贡献23亿美元，雇佣了16500名员工，对创意和技术人才的需求也在不断增长：40%的加拿大游戏公司预计未来两年将有超过25%的增长。尽管加拿大的研究生培训计划为该行业提供了软件开发人员，但却没有针对游戏用户研究（GUR）这一核心领域的研究生培训计划。GUR专注于理解、测量、分析和设计游戏中的用户体验。GUR从理论基础出发，为影响玩家乐趣和沉浸感的设计原则提供信息，并运用评估方法、数据分析、统计分析、预测建模和可视化来评估玩家粘性。萨斯喀彻温-滑铁卢运动会用户研究（SWaGUR）项目将汇集来自萨斯喀彻温大学和滑铁卢大学7个院系的11名研究人员，其长期目标是与我们的工业伙伴合作，在跨学科的环境中培养85名GUR中的HQP，以满足加拿大信息技术部门重要部分的需求。世界领先的游戏研究团队将利用他们在科学、工程、社会科学和人文科学领域的跨学科视角，将学术学习（课程）和体验学习（项目）应用于与工业相关的环境中，以培养HQP的研究和专业技能。世伟格的CREATE计划解决了信息和通信技术（ICT）目标领域中与数字信息的人类交互研究课题。随着许多计算应用（推动游戏技术）的发展，该计划将产生技术，并提供技术部署方面的培训，这些技术将改变人们与数字信息的互动方式，无论是娱乐游戏还是快速增长的严肃游戏部门。

The Canadian computer game industry is the third largest in the world, behind the USA and Japan. The sector contributes $2.3 billion annually to Canada's GDP, it employs 16,500 people, and the demand for skilled talent in creative and technical roles is increasing: 40% of Canadian game companies expect over 25% growth in the next 2 years. Although Canadian graduate training programs provide the industry with software developers, there is no graduate training program focused on the essential area of games user research (GUR). GUR focuses on understanding, measuring, analyzing, and designing the user experience in games. GUR draws from theoretical foundations to inform design principles that affect player enjoyment and immersion, and applies evaluation methods, data analytics, statistical analysis, predictive modeling, and visualization to assess player engagement. The Saskatchewan-Waterloo Games User Research (SWaGUR) program will bring together 11 researchers from 7 departments at the Universities of Saskatchewan and Waterloo with the long-term goal of training 85 HQP in GUR in an interdisciplinary environment in collaboration with our industrial partners to serve the needs of an important part of Canada's information technology sector. The team of world-leading games researchers will draw upon their interdisciplinary perspectives across science, engineering, social science, and humanities to apply academic learning (courses) and experiential learning (projects) in an industrially-relevant context to train HQP in both research and professional skills.The SWaGUR CREATE initiative addresses the Human Interaction with Digital Information research topic within the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) target area. With many computing applications (advancing game technology), the proposed program will generate technologies and provide training in the deployment of technologies that change how people interact with digital information, both for entertainment games and for the rapidly growing serious games sector.