Player agency in interactive narrative: audience, actor & author

The question motivating this review paper is, how can computer-based interactive narrative be used as a constructivist learn- ing activity? The paper proposes that player agency can be used to link interactive narrative to learner agency in constructivist theory, and to classify approaches to interactive narrative. The traditional question driving research in interactive narrative is, ‘how can an in- teractive narrative deal with a high degree of player agency, while maintaining a coherent and well-formed narrative?’ This question derives from an Aristotelian approach to interactive narrative that, as the question shows, is inherently antagonistic to player agency. Within this approach, player agency must be restricted and manip- ulated to maintain the narrative. Two alternative approaches based on Brecht’s Epic Theatre and Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed are reviewed. If a Boalian approach to interactive narrative is taken the conflict between narrative and player agency dissolves. The question that emerges from this approach is quite different from the traditional question above, and presents a more useful approach to applying in- teractive narrative as a constructivist learning activity

Towards general models of player experience : a study within genres

This project has received funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme under grant agreement No 951911, and from the University of Malta internal research grants programme Research Excellence Fund under grant agreement No 202003.To which degree can abstract gameplay metrics capture the player experience in a general fashion within a game genre? In this comprehensive study we address this question across three different videogame genres: racing, shooter, and platformer games. Using high-level gameplay features that feed preference learning models we are able to predict arousal accurately across different games of the same genre in a largescale dataset of over 1, 000 arousal-annotated play sessions. Our genre models predict changes in arousal with up to 74% accuracy on average across all genres and 86% in the best cases. We also examine the feature importance during the modelling process and find that time-related features largely contribute to the performance of both game and genre models. The prominence of these game-agnostic features show the importance of the temporal dynamics of the play experience in modelling, but also highlight some of the challenges for the future of general affect modelling in games and beyond.peer-reviewe

The systematic observation of teacher behaviour in physical education : the design of an instrument

Compared with research in classrooms, the teaching of physical education has not proved to be a popular research topic. The reasons for this apparent neglect can be seen in the lack of suitable research instruments to describe the teaching of physical education and the complex technical problems of recording lessons which take place out of doors in large, open spaces. This study set out to design an instrument which could be used to describe the teaching of physical education in any setting (indoors and outdoors). The investigation consisted of three studies. The first was the production of an instrument (BOS 1) with 42 categories which recorded every item of teacher behaviour in a lesson. The system was difficult to learn, required a great deal of time to analyse and was found to be unsuitable for live coding....cont'

Youth, friendship, play: a communication-scientific inquiry into the game-related practices of young people

This dissertation deals with the question how and why digital games are important in in the lives of young people. It does so by focusing on three main topics: game choice, gamer identity and the relation between friendship and digital games. On account of game choice, three studies are presented. The first study elaborates on the conceptual foundations regarding motives, environment and behavior related to play. The second study operationalizes the relevant concepts developed in the first study by means of a measurement instrument. Using this measurement instrument, the third study explores the relation between conscious motives, habit and the social structure in which players are embedded on the one hand and behaviors in terms of frequency and duration of play and the content that is played on the other hand. Results show that the importance of conscious motives, habit and social structure in explaining behavior varies depending on how behavior is conceptualized. The study on gamer identity asks which determinants are relevant in understanding why people categorize themselves or others as gamers. Results suggest a dialogue between how being a gamer is culturally constructed and the status of digital games in one’s friendship group. A gamer identity is first and foremost constructed through the performance of behaviors and characteristics linked to a prototypical gamer. The social structure, however, can create an environment in which a gamer identity can become relevant and valued. In other words, the social structure in which players are embedded contributes to a gamer identity over and above prototypical behaviors and characteristics. In our final study, we focus on the relation between friendship and digital games. The central question asks whether game and game-related practices are present in friendship networks and to what extent they are associated with the quality of those friendships. Findings indicate that talking about games within friendship networks is a widespread practice. To a lesser extent, the same is true for people playing digital games together. Similarly, talking about games and playing games together is associated with stronger friendship ties. In other words, digital games are a part of rather than separate to the everyday life of young people. What is more, it is also a part that significantly contributes to the quality of friendships. Taken together, these studies show how and why digital games can be important in the lives of young people. Digital games are a part of young people’s lives because they provide several ways in which players can enjoy their free time. More importantly, however, they are important to young people because they allow them to share. They provide a means for young people to find a place where they belong and through their shared, game-related practices, games allow for friendship relations to be maintained or strengthened. Underlying these studies is a framework that aims to explore how the relation between behaviors, the individual and social structure can be conceptualized and operationalized. Hence, in addition to understanding how and why digital games are important, this dissertation presents a pragmatic excursion into the question of agency and social structure. It does so by considering how network measures coincide with and relate to individual measures. Considering that social networks play a significant role for each of our topics, we believe that social network analysis can provide a promising addition to the toolbox of communication scientists

Atmosphere & Challenge: An Exploration of Dissonant Player Experiences

Dissonance means an unusual combination of any two things. Two dissonant experiences in video games which could lead to undesirable player states are thematic dissonance and difficulty dissonance. Thematic dissonance potentially annoys players by breaking the atmosphere, and difficulty dissonance by preventing players with low skill from progressing past unbalanced challenges, resulting in rage-quits. This thesis seeks to deepen the understanding of dissonant experiences in video games through two experiments measuring the player experience as affected by different audio and practice conditions respectively. Results indicate that the experience colloquially referred to as a rage-quit is directly affected by avatar death events and game-specific skill and is related to lower levels of heart rate variability (HRV) and higher levels of electrodermal activity (EDA), which implicates feelings of stress. This project successfully advances the definition of video game atmosphere as the level of subjective thematic fit or association between the audio and visual components of a game’s setting, and indicates that musical thematic dissonance may lead to higher intensity negative valence facial events