Game Studies and Decision Quality
Recent peer-reviewed work develops decision quality as a portable analytic method — a way to evaluate whether the structure of a decision environment lets agents see clearly enough to act well. The originating context is games; the wager is portability.
In recent peer-reviewed work, my collaborators and I have been developing decision quality as a portable analytic method — a way to evaluate not just whether a decision-maker reached a particular outcome, but whether the structure of the decision environment they were operating in was good or bad. The originating context is games: many games have been formally studied as outcome-machines, where the question of interest is whether the optimal move was found. Decision quality reframes that question. It asks whether the decision environment itself — the available information, the visibility of alternatives, the cost structure of error — let a reasonable agent see clearly enough to act well.
The portability is the wager. If decision quality is a useful frame in games, it should also be useful in the much broader class of decision environments that designers and policymakers actually build: dashboards, urban planning tools, public health communications, environmental displays. Most of those environments are evaluated, when they are evaluated at all, by user satisfaction or task completion rates. Neither tells us whether the environment let people decide well.
This strand connects directly to my work on visualization as a humanistic medium and on urban computing. A decision environment is a designed artifact. Its quality — the legibility of its information, the shape of the alternatives it admits, the presence or absence of feedback — is partially the responsibility of the people who design it. Treating that responsibility seriously is the move I want decision quality to enable.
The strand is currently active, with a peer-reviewed paper in publication and follow-on work in development on applications outside game contexts.