SWaGUR: Saskatchewan-Waterloo Games User Research

加拿大的电脑游戏产业是世界第三大产业，仅次于美国和日本。该行业每年为加拿大国内生产总值贡献23亿美元，雇佣了16,500名员工，对创意和技术角色的熟练人才的需求正在增加：40%的加拿大游戏公司预计未来两年增长超过25%。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，但没有专注于游戏用户研究(GUR)这一基本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从理论基础中得出影响玩家享受和沉浸的设计原则，并应用评估方法、数据分析、统计分析、预测建模和可视化来评估玩家的敬业度。萨斯喀彻温省-滑铁卢游戏用户研究(SWaGUR)计划将汇集来自萨斯喀彻温省和滑铁卢大学7个系的11名研究人员，长期目标是与我们的行业合作伙伴合作，在跨学科环境下培训85名GUR 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人员团队将利用他们跨越科学、工程、社会科学和人文学科的跨学科视角，在与行业相关的背景下应用学术学习(课程)和经验学习(项目)，以培训HQP在研究和专业技能方面的能力。 SWaGUR Create倡议涉及信息和通信技术(ICT)目标领域内的人与数字信息交互研究主题。随着许多计算应用(先进的游戏技术)的发展，拟议的计划将产生技术并提供培训，这些技术的部署改变了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.