Interaction Forms, Agents and Tellable Events in EverQuest


Klastrup Lisbeth
2002 Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference Proceedings

This paper focuses on forms of interaction and agents in a virtual world and how one may apply an understanding of these to an actual analysis of a virtual world. First, it proposes a distinction between 4 basic agents in a world: players, NPCs, objects and world rules. These agents are involved in 4 basic forms of interaction: navigating, manipulating, social interaction and information retrieval. Looking more closely at how these different forms of agents and actions forms are employed can help us think more closely about the construction of tellable events (emergent narratives) in a multiuser environment.

 

“You can’t help shouting and yelling”: fun and social interaction in Super Monkey Ball


Klastrup Lisbeth
2003 DiGRA '03 - Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up

This paper examines the relation between social interaction and fun in multi-player console gaming contexts. It points to the fruitfullness of integrating game studies and game sociology with cultural studies of television and video use in order to explain both the framing and (social) use of console games and the fun of playing them. A prestudy of the relation between social interaction and fun in the playing of the game Super Monkey Ball reveals that there is a close relation between gaming skills, the gaming situation as a pleasurable and relieving social activity and the experience of fun.

 

MMOGs and the Ecology of Fiction: Understanding LOTRO as Transmedial World [Abstract]


Klastrup Lisbeth Tosca Susana
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

The aim of this paper is to examine the (medium-related) particular strengths and weaknesses of computer games that are part of a wider ecology of fictions previously described by us as transmedial worlds.