Spatial Reasoning: Re-Coding Spaces for Inclusive Informal Game Making

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Kerr Aphra Savage Joshua D.
2019 DiGRA '19 - Abstract Proceedings of the 2019 DiGRA International Conference: Game, Play and the Emerging Ludo-Mix

 

Representing Users in the Design of Digital Games

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Kerr Aphra
2002 Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference Proceedings

While economic and sociological studies have generally recognised the important explicit role that users play in shaping a technological artefact - through feedback channels after launch and market trials and studies before launch - there has been less exploration into the more implicit strategies by which designers attempt to pre-figure users prior to launch. Given that design involves making choices, and framing the choices made by users, this paper suggests that Madeline Akrich's approach (1992, 1995) may provide a constructive tool for exploring more implicit strategies of representing users in the early stages of the design process. It may also prove useful in exploring how users can be excluded or alienated through design. While acknowledging that users may actively negotiate designers' representations this paper will explore the usefulness of the Akrich approach in relation to understanding the design of digital games. A study in 2001 of production in digital games companies in Ireland found that various macro, meso and micro level factors play a role in limiting the games developed and the user groups developed for. This paper will present findings from ongoing research conducted in 2002 into the reasons why and how one start-up company decided to design a multiplayer online game for males aged 25-40.

 

Women just want to have fun – a study of adult female players of digital games

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Kerr Aphra
2003 DiGRA '03 - Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up

In the past twenty-five years, the production of digital games has become a global media industry stretching from Japan, to the UK, France and the US. Despite this growth playing digital games, particularly computer games, is still seen by many as a boy’s pastime and part of boy’s bedroom culture. While these perceptions may serve to exclude, this paper set out to explore the experiences of women who game despite these perceptions. This paper addresses the topic of gender and games from two perspectives: the producer’s and the consumer’s. The first part of the paper explores how Sony represented the PS2 in advertisements in Ireland and how adult female game players interpreted these representations. The second part goes on to chart the gaming biographies of these women and how this leisure activity is incorporated into their adult everyday life. It also discuses their views about the gendered nature of game culture, public game spaces and game content; and how these influence their enjoyment of game playing and their views of themselves as women. These research findings are based on semi-structured interviews with two marketing professionals and ten female game players aged 18 and over. The paper concludes that the construction of both gender and digital games are highly contested and even when access is difficult, and representations in the media, in console design and in games are strongly masculine these interviewees were able to contest and appropriate the technology for their own means. Indeed ‘social networks’ were important in relation to their recruitment into, and sustained playing of, digital games. At the same time, the paper found that these interviewees were largely ‘invisible’ to the wider gaming community and producers, an issue raised by Bryce and Rutter (2002:244) in an earlier paper, which has important implications for the development of the games industry.

 

The Cheating Assemblage in MMORPGs: Toward a sociotechnical description of cheating

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Paoli Stefano De Kerr Aphra
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

This paper theoretically and empirically explores cheating in MMORPGs. This paper conceptualises cheating in MMORPGs as a sociotechnical practice which draws upon a non-linear assemblage of human actors and non-human artefacts, in which the practice of cheating is the result or the outcome of an assemblage. We draw upon the assemblage conceptualizations proposed in [16] and [8] and on empirical data taken from a pilot study we have conducted during the period September-November 2008 and from an ethnography we are conducting in the MMORPG Tibia (http://www.tibia.com) since January 2009. This game in particular was chosen because CipSoft, the company that develops the game, launched an anticheating campaign at the beginning of 2009.

 

Levels of Complexity: Cultural Diversity, Politics and Digital Games [Abstract]

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Kerr Aphra
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

In Europe in the recent past public interest and cultural arguments have been used to achieve exceptions for cultural products from free trade agreements and have led to the development of funding programmes at national and European level to support the production and distribution of certain types of media products. This has been given added impetus by a shift in cultural policy towards ‘cultural diversity’, epitomised by UNESCO’s Declaration of Cultural Diversity. Under pressure from the growth of the Canadian, South Korean and Chinese game development industries policy makers and industry associations in many European countries are starting to consider the cultural role of digital games and funding game production. This trend is epitomized by the French tax credit system for games production and the establishment of funding schemes in France, the UK, Germany and Scandinavia. This paper explores the issue of cultural diversity and digital games and assesses the degree to which you can take a concept, which has a strong legacy in traditional media and national policy regimes, and use it in the context of digital games. The paper starts by assessing the methodological, conceptual and historical issues raised for scholars and policy makers who wish to examine cultural diversity and digital media in the context of global production networks, transnational audiences and user generated content. This is followed by an analysis of secondary data (etc. reports, statistics) in relation to the flow and cultural diversity of digital game production, content and players. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the analysis for cultural policies which tend to focus and operate at the national level.