A three person poncho and a set of maracas:designing Ola De La Vida, a co-located social play computer game

Events that bring people together to play video games as a social experience are growing in popularity across the western world. Amongst these events are ‘play parties,’ temporary social play environments which create unique shared play experiences for attendees unlike anything they could experience elsewhere. This paper explores co-located play experience design and proposes that social play games can lead to the formation of temporary play communities. These communities may last for a single gameplay session, for a whole event, or beyond the event. The paper analyses games designed or enhanced by social play contexts and evaluates a social play game, Ola de la Vida. The research findings suggest that social play games can foster community through the design of game play within the game itself, through curation which enhances their social potential, and through design for ‘semi-spectatorship’, which blurs the boundaries between player and spectator thus widening the game’s magic circle

Surveillant assemblages of governance in massively multiplayer online games:a comparative analysis

This paper explores governance in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), one sub-sector of the digital games industry. Informed by media governance studies, Surveillance Studies, and game studies, this paper identifies five elements which form part of the system of governance in MMOGs. These elements are: game code and rules; game policies; company community management practices; player participatory practices; and paratexts. Together these governance elements function as a surveillant assemblage, which relies to varying degrees on lateral and hierarchical forms of surveillance, and the assembly of human and nonhuman elements.Using qualitative mixed methods we examine and compare how these elements operate in three commercial MMOGs: Eve Online, World of Warcraft and Tibia. While peer and participatory surveillance elements are important, we identified two major trends in the governance of disruptive behaviours by the game companies in our case studies. Firstly, an increasing reliance on automated forms of dataveillance to control and punish game players, and secondly, increasing recourse to contract law and diminishing user privacy rights. Game players found it difficult to appeal the changing terms and conditions and they turned to creating paratexts outside of the game in an attempt to negotiate the boundaries of the surveillant assemblage. In the wider context of self-regulated governance systems these trends highlight the relevance of consumer rights, privacy, and data protection legislation to online games and the usefulness of bringing game studies and Surveillance Studies into dialogue

Mobile exergaming in adolescents’ everyday life—contextual design of where, when, with whom, and how: the SmartLife case

Exergames, more specifically console-based exergames, are generally enjoyed by adolescents and known to increase physical activity. Nevertheless, they have a reduced usage over time and demonstrate little effectiveness over the long term. In order to increase playing time, mobile exergames may increase potential playing time, but need to be engaging and integrated in everyday life. The goal of the present study was to examine the context of gameplay for mobile exergaming in adolescents’ everyday life to inform game design and the integration of gameplay into everyday life. Eight focus groups were conducted with 49 Flemish adolescents (11 to 17 years of age). The focus groups were audiotaped, transcribed, and analyzed by means of thematic analysis via Nvivo 11 software (QSR International Pty Ltd., Victoria, Australia). The adolescents indicated leisure time and travel time to and from school as suitable timeframes for playing a mobile exergame. Outdoor gameplay should be restricted to the personal living environment of adolescents. Besides outdoor locations, the game should also be adaptable to at-home activities. Activities could vary from running outside to fitness exercises inside. Furthermore, the social context of the game was important, e.g., playing in teams or meeting at (virtual) meeting points. Physical activity tracking via smart clothing was identified as a motivator for gameplay. By means of this study, game developers may be better equipped to develop mobile exergames that embed gameplay in adolescents’ everyday life

Learning and Games

Part of the Volume on the Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning In this chapter, I argue that good video games recruit good learning and that a game's design is inherently connected to designing good learning for players. I start with a perspective on learning now common in the Learning Sciences that argues that people primarily think and learn through experiences they have had, not through abstract calculations and generalizations. People store these experiences in memory -- and human long-term memory is now viewed as nearly limitless -- and use them to run simulations in their minds to prepare for problem solving in new situations. These simulations help them to form hypotheses about how to proceed in the new situation based on past experiences. The chapter also discusses the conditions experience must meet if it is to be optimal for learning and shows how good video games can deliver such optimal learning experiences. Some of the issues covered include: identity and learning; models and model-based thinking; the control of avatars and "empathy for a complex system"; distributed intelligence and cross-functional teams for learning; motivation, and ownership; emotion in learning; and situated meaning, that is, the ways in which games represent verbal meaning through images, actions, and dialogue, not just other words and definitions

Automated state of play: rethinking anthropocentric rules of the game

Automation of play has become an ever more noticeable phenomenon in the domain of video games, expressed by self-playing game worlds, self-acting characters, and non-human agents traversing multiplayer spaces. This article proposes to look at AI-driven non-human play and, what follows, rethink digital games, taking into consideration their cybernetic nature, thus departing from the anthropocentric perspectives dominating the field of Game Studies. A decentralised post-humanist reading, as the author argues, not only allows to rethink digital games and play, but is a necessary condition to critically reflect AI, which due to the fictional character of video games, often plays by very different rules than the so-called “true” AI

Virtual Reality Games for Motor Rehabilitation

This paper presents a fuzzy logic based method to track user satisfaction without the need for devices to monitor users physiological conditions. User satisfaction is the key to any product’s acceptance; computer applications and video games provide a unique opportunity to provide a tailored environment for each user to better suit their needs. We have implemented a non-adaptive fuzzy logic model of emotion, based on the emotional component of the Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotion (FLAME) proposed by El-Nasr, to estimate player emotion in UnrealTournament 2004. In this paper we describe the implementation of this system and present the results of one of several play tests. Our research contradicts the current literature that suggests physiological measurements are needed. We show that it is possible to use a software only method to estimate user emotion

Mobile Online Gaming via Resource Sharing

Mobile gaming presents a number of main issues which remain open. These are concerned mainly with connectivity, computational capacities, memory and battery constraints. In this paper, we discuss the design of a fully distributed approach for the support of mobile Multiplayer Online Games (MOGs). In mobile environments, several features might be exploited to enable resource sharing among multiple devices / game consoles owned by different mobile users. We show the advantages of trading computing / networking facilities among mobile players. This operation mode opens a wide number of interesting sharing scenarios, thus promoting the deployment of novel mobile online games. In particular, once mobile nodes make their resource available for the community, it becomes possible to distribute the software modules that compose the game engine. This allows to distribute the workload for the game advancement management. We claim that resource sharing is in unison with the idea of ludic activity that is behind MOGs. Hence, such schemes can be profitably employed in these contexts.Comment: Proceedings of 3nd ICST/CREATE-NET Workshop on DIstributed SImulation and Online gaming (DISIO 2012). In conjunction with SIMUTools 2012. Desenzano, Italy, March 2012. ISBN: 978-1-936968-47-

Toward an Ecology of Gaming

In her introduction to the Ecology of Games, Salen argues for the need for an increasingly complex and informed awareness of the meaning, significance, and practicalities of games in young people's lives. The language of the media is replete with references to the devil (and heavy metal) when it comes to the ill-found virtues of videogames, while a growing movement in K-12 education casts them as a Holy Grail in the uphill battle to keep kids learning. Her essay explores the different ways the volume's contributors add shades of grey to this often black-and-white mix, pointing toward a more sophisticated understanding of the myriad ways in which gaming could and should matter to those considering the future of learning