Amanda Nicole Curtis

Playing for Meaning: What Games Reveal About User Experience

Video games are more than entertainment: they’re systems people use to learn, reflect, and make meaning in their everyday lives. Drawing on research explore player experiences with three popular video games (Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Skyrim, and Stardew Valley), this talk considers what UX research can learn from how people play. Amanda will also share some of the methods (including diary studies, in-game walkthroughs, and streams) that open up new ways of understanding users and emerging technologies more broadly.

Amanda Nicole Curtis is a UX researcher and digital ethnographer whose work investigates how games and emerging technologies shape the ways people think, learn, and make meaning. With experience at Adobe, Sony, and through international fellowships in Japan, the UK, and the US, she now co-leads Parasol Research while completing her PhD at Oxford. She develops creative methods to study players, tools, and digital cultures worldwide.