Cookie Clicker: Gamification

Incremental games like Cookie Clicker are a perfect exemplar of gamification, using progress mechanics and other game features to make the rote act of clicking compelling. Hence, this chapter reads the game Cookie Clicker for its motivating features to illustrate the logic and limits of gamification

Affective level design for a role-playing videogame evaluated by a brain\u2013computer interface and machine learning methods

Game science has become a research field, which attracts industry attention due to a worldwide rich sell-market. To understand the player experience, concepts like flow or boredom mental states require formalization and empirical investigation, taking advantage of the objective data that psychophysiological methods like electroencephalography (EEG) can provide. This work studies the affective ludology and shows two different game levels for Neverwinter Nights 2 developed with the aim to manipulate emotions; two sets of affective design guidelines are presented, with a rigorous formalization that considers the characteristics of role-playing genre and its specific gameplay. An empirical investigation with a brain\u2013computer interface headset has been conducted: by extracting numerical data features, machine learning techniques classify the different activities of the gaming sessions (task and events) to verify if their design differentiation coincides with the affective one. The observed results, also supported by subjective questionnaires data, confirm the goodness of the proposed guidelines, suggesting that this evaluation methodology could be extended to other evaluation tasks

Playing at a Distance

An essential exploration of video game aesthetic that decenters the human player and challenges what it means to play. Do we play video games or do video games play us? Is nonhuman play a mere paradox or the future of gaming? And what do video games have to do with quantum theory? In Playing at a Distance, Sonia Fizek engages with these and many more daunting questions, forging new ways to think and talk about games and play that decenter the human player and explore a variety of play formats and practices that require surprisingly little human action. Idling in clicker games, wandering in walking simulators, automating gameplay with bots, or simply watching games rather than playing them—Fizek shows how these seemingly marginal cases are central to understanding how we play in the digital age. Introducing the concept of distance, Fizek reorients our view of computer-mediated play. To “play at a distance,” she says, is to delegate the immediate action to the machine and to become participants in an algorithmic spectacle. Distance as a media aesthetic framework enables the reader to come to terms with the ambiguity and aesthetic diversity of play. Drawing on concepts from philosophy, media theory, and posthumanism, as well as cultural and film studies, Playing at a Distance invites a wider understanding of what digital games and gaming are in all their diverse experiences and forms. In challenging the common perception of video games as inherently interactive, the book contributes to our understanding of the computer's influence on practices of play—and prods us to think more broadly about what it means to play

Using Topic Models to Study the History of a Video Game Genre: Towards a Non-Periodic Representation of Changes in the Textual Content of Computer Role-Playing Games between 1992 and 2017

peer reviewedCet article propose de montrer comment des outils mathématiques encore peu employés par les historiens (topic models, classification hiérarchique, carte auto-orga- nisatrice) peuvent être combinés et exploités pour l’étude d’un corpus historique daté, mais hétérogène, afin d’en caractériser les évolutions temporelles. Le fil conducteur de l’étude sera d’examiner l’évolution du vocabulaire employé par un ensemble de 21 jeux vidéo de rôle occidentaux à forte audience, publiés entre 1992 et 2017, pour un total de 17,5 millions de mots. Nous nous efforcerons, au travers de cette analyse, d’apporter un nouvel éclairage à l’histoire canonique du genre et de proposer un modèle alternatif à la périodisation afin de mettre au jour les tensions et influences avec lesquelles chaque jeu particulier doit négocier.This paper shows how researchers can combine and exploit mathematical tools still rarely used by historians (topic models, hierarchical classification, self-organizing maps) to study a dated but heterogeneous historical corpus and to characterize its evolution over time. The analysis focuses on changes in the vocabulary used by a set of 21 popular western role-playing video games published between 1992 and 2017 and comprising a total of 17.5 million words. Through this example, we aim to shed new light on the canonical history of the genre and to propose an alternative model to periodization for uncovering the trade-offs and influences underlying the development of each particular game must negotiate with

Busy doing nothing? What do players do in idle games?

Idle games – games where waiting for extended periods is an important dynamic – are increasing in popularity. The game Neko Atsume, a mobile game about collecting cats, is an extreme example of this genre where progress can only be achieved when the game is switched off (so-called "progress while gone"). Do such waiting games engage players? To answer this, we conducted a large survey (N=1972) to understand what players are doing when they play Neko Atsume. Players are highly “engaged” in Neko Atsume as they interact with and around the game in four distinct ways: Time spent playing, Direct sociability; Social media sociability and Checking frequency. However, these characteristics of engagement in Neko Atsume do not fit well with existing models of engagement. We propose that, in future studies, game engagement in idle games could be considered as a habit which players acquire and maintain

Definitions of Role-Playing Games

Many de nitions of “role-play” and “role-playing games” have been suggested, but there is no broad consensus. People disagree because they often have an unclear idea of what kind of phenomena they are talking about and, therefore, what kind of definition is appropriate. Existing definitions often assume games and, with them, RPGs to be a natural kind with some unchanging essence. However, because “role-playing games” is a social category created by humans, it has no unchanging, context-independent essence. Hence, if we ask for a definition of “role-playing games”, we can only refer to either how particular groups at particular points in time empirically use the word and organize actions and the material world around it or how we, as a scientific observer, choose to use the word to foreground and understand a particular perspective: viewing RPGs as a performance or as a virtual economy, etc. RPGs can be traced to a shared historical ancestor: the TRPG D&D. From there, RPGs and their communities evolved increasingly idiosyncratic forms and styles, afforded by their material under-determinations. Commonly recognized forms are TRPGs, larps, CRPGs, and MORPGs. Common styles – ideas of what experience one hopes to achieve through play – are achieving goals and making progress according to rules, acting out and immersing oneself in a role, creating an interesting story, or simulating a world. Every local community, form, or style captures only a subset of the phenomena people call “role-playing games” and carries with it some implicit or explicit normative ideas about what makes an RPG “good”. Thus, people often disagree on the definition of “role-playing games” because they are usually only familiar with and/or aesthetically prefer a subset of RPG forms, styles, and communities: “this is not a role-playing game” often means “this is not something I am familiar with calling and/or like in RPGs”. Still, across forms and styles of RPGs, some characteristics commonly reoccur: they are play activities and objects revolving around the rule-structured creation and enactment of characters in a fictional world. Players create, enact, and govern the actions of characters, defining and pursuing their own goals, with great choice in what actions they can attempt. The game world, including characters not governed by individual players, usually follows some fantastic genre action theme, and there are often rules for character progression and combat resolution. Forms diverge in the structure of the play situation, the constitution and governance of the fictional world, and the form and importance of rules. Play situations range from a single player and computer to small face-to-face groups to large co-located or online mediated populations that organize into smaller groups. The fictional world may be constituted through joint talk and inscriptions; physical locales, props, and player bodies; or computer models and user interfaces. It can be governed by one or more human referees or a computer. Rules may be extensive or minimal, resolving the outcome of actions by player negotiation, a model and testing of probabilities, physical abilities of players, or combinations of all three. Given the social constitution of RPGs and the diversity of their forms and styles, we argue that it is pointless to capture an “essential nature” in a definition. Instead, as the following chapter begins to do, it is more fruitful to empirically describe this diversity and analyze it through a multitude of explicit disciplinary perspectives: not asking what something RPGs are but what we can learn when we view them as a particular something

Réquiem por un género. La difícil definición del rol en el videojuego actual

El presente trabajo de investigación tiene como finalidad realizar un recorrido a lo largo de la historia del videojuego, identificando los hitos más destacados en los que elementos propios del clásico juego de rol han pasado a hibridarse con otros géneros a priori muy distantes. Empezando con la adaptación del rol de tablero al formato videolúdico, con el paso de los años ha podido observarse una enorme proliferación de elementos roleros en títulos de conducción, deportes, lucha, shooters... hasta el punto de volverse prácticamente imposible identificar un “RPG (Role Playing Game) puro” a día de hoy. Esto se debe a la dificultad de identificar con precisión cuáles son estos “elementos roleros”, y en qué cantidad deben darse para que el juego pase a ser considerado un RPG por delante de otro género. A pesar de esto, las principales revistas especializadas del medio siguen pareciendo eludir este hecho, evidenciando una notoria dificultad para establecer una taxonomía del videojuego y realizando clasificaciones que a todas luces resultan inconcretas para el momento actual. Esto abre una brecha enorme entre los principales estudios académicos relacionados con la categorización de los videojuegos y la clasificación simplificada que recibe el consumidor por parte de estas revistas.Universidad de Sevilla. Grado en Comunicación Audiovisual, Publicidad y Literatur

正規外国語教育における教育媒体としてのシングルプレイヤーRPG

京都大学新制・課程博士博士(人間・環境学)甲第24301号人博第1057号新制||人||248(附属図書館)2022||人博||1057(吉田南総合図書館)京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科共生人間学専攻(主査)准教授 PETERSON Mark, 准教授 中森 誉之, 教授 勝又 直也, 教授 FIELD Malcolm Henry学位規則第4条第1項該当Doctor of Human and Environmental StudiesKyoto UniversityDFA

Agency in and around videogames

This thesis conceptualises player agency in avatar-based videogames as an affordance of game design (Gibson 1979). By examining how agency is discussed in different discourses surrounding videogames, such as those of game studies and game design, it puts forward a multidimensional heuristic framework for conceptualising agency in avatar-based games. Game studios with a particular design focus that draw on ‘game design lineages’ (Bateman and Zagal 2018) feature as case studies to demonstrate the analytical power of this framework, examining how agency is designed, and how developers discuss how it is designed. The combined methods of textual and paratextual analysis provides insight not only into how game designers think about agency but also into how design intentions can translate into features of the released game. Such an approach facilitates a way of looking at agency as designed, which is informed by the vocabularies of academic discussions concerning videogames, as well as the language used to refer to these phenomena by industry practitioners, thereby grounding abstract theory in production practices and discourses