Publications

You Have Earned a Trophy: Characterize In-Game Achievements and Their Completions

game analytics HCI user engagement

Achievement systems have been actively adopted in gaming platforms to maintain players’ interests. Among them, trophies in PlayStation games are one of the most successful achievement systems. While the importance of trophy design has been casually discussed in many game developers’ forums, there has been no systematic study of the historical dataset of trophies yet. In this work, we construct a complete dataset of PlayStation games and their trophies and investigate them from both the developers’ and players’ perspectives.

Haewoon Kwak

ACM WebSci, 2022

Imaginary People Representing Real Numbers: Generating Personas from Online Social Media Data

HCI

We develop a methodology to automate creating imaginary people, referred to as personas, by processing complex behavioral and demographic data of social media audiences. From a popular social media account containing more than 30 million interactions by viewers from 198 countries engaging with more than 4,200 online videos produced by a global media corporation, we demonstrate that our methodology has several novel accomplishments.

Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Soon-gyo Jung, Joni Salminen, M. Admad, Bernard J. Jansen

ACM Transactions on the Web, 12(4), 2018

110+ papers citing this work (Google scholar)

Identifying Regional Trends in Avatar Customization

computational social science game analytics HCI

We manually label 5,143 hateful expressions posted to YouTube and Facebook videos among a dataset of 137,098 comments from an online news media. We then create a granular taxonomy of different types and targets of online hate and train machine learning models to automatically detect and classify the hateful comments in the full dataset.

Peter Mawhorter, Sercan Şengün, Haewoon Kwak, D. Fox Harrell

IEEE Transactions on Games, 10(2), 2018

“Is More Better?”: Impact of Multiple Photos on Perception of Persona Profiles

HCI

We investigate if and how more photos than a single headshot can heighten the level of information provided by persona profiles. We conduct eye-tracking experiments and qualitative interviews with variations in the photos-a single headshot, a headshot and images of the persona in different contexts, and a headshot with pictures of different people representing key persona attributes.

Joni Salminen, Lene Nielsen, Soon-Gyo Jung, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Bernard J. Jansen

Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2018

Exploring Cyberbullying and Other Toxic Behavior in Team Competition Online Games

game analytics HCI online harm

In this work we explore cyberbullying and other toxic behavior in team competition online games. Using a dataset of over 10 million player reports on 1.46 million toxic players along with corresponding crowdsourced decisions, we test several hypotheses drawn from theories explaining toxic behavior. Besides providing large-scale, empirical based understanding of toxic behavior, our work can be used as a basis for building systems to detect, prevent, and counter-act toxic behavior.

Haewoon Kwak, Jeremy Blackburn, Seungyeop Han

Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2015

310+ papers citing this work (Google scholar)

Fragile Online Relationship: a First Look at Unfollow Dynamics in Twitter

computational social science network science social media HCI

We analyze the dynamics of the behavior known as ‘unfollow’ in Twitter. We collected daily snapshots of the online relationships of 1.2 million Korean-speaking users for 51 days as well as all of their tweets. We found that Twitter users frequently unfollow. We then discover the major factors, including the reciprocity of the relationships, the duration of a relationship, the followees’ informativeness, and the overlap of the relationships, which affect the decision to unfollow. We conduct interview with 22 Korean respondents to supplement the quantitative results.

Haewoon Kwak, Hyunwoo Chun, Sue Moon

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2011.

Press coverage - Kyunghyang Shinmun

150+ papers citing this work (Google scholar)