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

- 139 articles or papers

 

DATAPLAY: Mapping Game Mechanics to Traditional Data Visualization

Macklin Colleen Wargaski Julia Edwards Michael Li Kan Yang
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

In William Playfair's 1786 book, The Commercial and Political Atlas, he states that information, “imperfectly acquired, is generally as imperfectly retained.” [6] Playfair is commenting on the failure of tables to represent comparative data in way that was useful to the reader. Since Playfair, many different forms of media have arisen beyond ink and paper. Yet printed charts (or their digital representations) remain, by far, the most commonly used tools of data visualization. Their evolution over many centuries has allowed them to achieve a degree of sophistication that time-based and interactive representations have yet to achieve. Is the supremacy of printed (or print-like) data visualization to remain unchallenged? Would it even need to be? The authors contend that new approaches may be possible, and even necessary, but would require tapping into a different way of learning that was not strictly about managing the short term visual and auditory memory of the readers [3]. This learning would involve less the experience of reading and more that of direct experience through play and games. Jesper Juul contends that all games are learning systems [2]. That is, to play a game and become good at it, the player must learn the necessary skills and strategies to overcome their opposition. If the goal of data visualization is educational, it may be possible to use specific types of games as ways of representing specific types of data. It may be possible for a player to learn the system of the game and the system of the information together. The authors have built three game prototypes that illustrate the ways in which different forms of data can be represented in the form of digital games. The first prototype, Kimono Colors, is based on data from a cross-referenced table that describes the types of ingredients used to create traditional Japanese dyes in the production of kimonos. The core mechanic [4] of the game has the player “fishing” for colors using one of several dyes the player has collected. By fishing for these colors, players learn the relationships between materials and the manufacture of dye. The second prototype, Mannahatta: The Game, asks players literally to walk around Manhattan and connect the living and non-living elements of a directed graph representing the ecology of the island 400 years ago. Played over an iPhone, users place themselves in the middle of the dataset they are piecing back together. The third prototype, Trees of Trade, uses data from two directed graphs of relationships, ecological and commercial, in a Brazilian Atlantic rain-forest ecosystem. The game involves the players re-establishing the trophic levels of the forest by navigating through the relationships and inserting the missing species on an idealized map. Through play, the user will better understand the elements of a system that is typically illustrated in a static, two dimensional directed graph illustration. Two questions stem from these prototypes: can data create play and can play enlighten data? To answer the first question affirmatively, we need to find evidence that a system created by data has the ability to produce “choice molecules” [4]. That is, in the form of a game, does the structure of data allow the player to make interesting choices about how to proceed as he or she navigates and elaborates the data? If so, then the data in question can create play, which in turn can drive the development of a full-fledged game. As for the second question, if the first answer holds, then the player is, in the course of a game, playing with the data. If the choices made available to a player are established in such a way that the player “levels up” through the information, then the achievement of the games goals will be coincident with the understanding of the data itself. By actively manipulating and using the data to win the game, the player will need to understand the facts and relationships inherent in the data itself, thus producing the desired educational outcome and a greater sensitivity to the systems that data represents.

 

Genre in Genre: The Role of Music in Music Games

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

The first academic researchers of music and dance games focused their primary attentions on ethnographic observations of game play, how the shift from arcade to console play affects game play strategies, defining embodied aesthetics, and analyzing the rise of a competitive play circuit in Dance Dance Revolution fan culture [Chan; Demers, 2006; Smith, 2004; Behrenshausen, 2007]. The Dance Dance Revolution franchise has attracted the attention of both academic researchers and members of the education and medical establishments, who wish to harness the power of exergaming in physical education classes to combat rising levels of childhood obesity. Less attention has been by academic researchers to the economics of the production of these games or the ways that the management of track lists, genres, and artists in music games affects gamers’ opinions of these titles and their evaluation of the relationship between a game’s core mechanics and in-game outcomes. This paper analyzes the ways that game publishers and developers create and license the music for games such as Flow: Urban Dance Uprising, Band Mashups, the Guitar Hero, Rock Band and Dance Dance Revolution franchises, and the forthcoming titles Scratch and DJ Hero. Critics’ and gamers’ complaints about the use of “soundalikes” to replace the master recordings by original artists along with recent attempts from Warner Music to push for increased licensing fees point to ongoing controversies over in-game music and the industrial relationships between the gaming industry, the recording industry, and performance rights organizations such as ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. This paper also examines how particular genres of music create difficulties for game design, constructing the relationship between on-screen content, the player, and game peripherals, and for players working to make sense of the relationship between their musical and gaming tastes. Examples I discuss include blog reactions to the introduction of country music as downloadable content in Rock Band, the lukewarm reception given THQ’s Band Mashups, fan and critical ruminations over the potential success or failure of the turntable peripheral in Scratch and DJ Hero, and the difficulties of mapping hip hop into the dance game in Flow! Urban Dance Uprising. Reactions to the introduction of country music in Rock Band ran the gamut, with many bloggers and online fans expressing frustration that the visual culture of the game and its embrace of rock culture militated against the inclusion of country music. Likewise, many gamers and critics were bewildered by Band Mashups, a game that simulated a battle of the bands and a battle of musical genres. Even the deceptively simple Dance Dance Revolution franchise illustrates the difficulty of managing the track list for each title. The need for genre diversity and for a range of songs with varying numbers of beats per minute to satisfy inexperienced, intermediate, and advanced players illustrates the need for designers to have at least an elementary knowledge of musicology and/or musical form. Perhaps the most interesting example of a music game’s failure is Flow! Urban Dance Uprising. This game, developed by Artificial Mind and Movement and published by Ubisoft, illustrates the difficulty of mapping hip hop onto a DDR style game. The biggest problem with Flow wasn’t the paucity of A-list artists and a track list that privileged lesser known songs that were hard to groove to, but the ways that game designers made few significant modifications to the core mechanic of the dancing game. In Flow, it is a stretch to think that the diegetic operator acts of the player bear any “realistic” relationship to the “machinic embodiments” of the onscreen avatar’s breakdancing moves [Galloway, 2006]. Players seem willing to suspend disbelief that the scrolling arrows in DDR match up exactly to the movements of the player on the pad and the movements of the onscreen avatar, but the complicated breakdancing moves performed by the avatar in Flow substantively challenge the relationship of action and outcome that Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman [2004] posit as critical to designing meaningful play.

 

Let Me Entertain You: Designing for Surveillance and Online Gaming

Devers Deirdre Wilson Stephanie
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

Multi-player online gaming environments are designed with the intent of providing entertaining experiences to players that not only foster re-playability but also to cultivate an ongoing allegiance or loyalty to the game publishers’/developers’ brand or various assets (e.g. Master Chief, Grand Theft Auto etc.). Design elements such as webcams, activity monitoring between players, and online presence cues make possible player practices within online game-based environments that, though surveillance-oriented, become the key ingredients that work to construct entertaining online encounters. Yet when similar features are transposed to other less playcentric spaces (e.g. workplace), whether online or offline, they can be perceived as threatening or unwanted. The surveillance networks created by the online games themselves and associated ‘meeting places’ [9] (e.g. Facebook) as well as surveillance activities in these digital spaces are vehicles for creating and sustaining entertaining experiences. The presence of surveillance-oriented design features and their subsequent and on-going use by individuals, create a more entrenched level of engagement and intimacy through repetitive contact. . The aim of this paper is the analysis of various online games and meeting places that comprise a surveillance network in order to identify the various design features and the player activities they give rise to which can constitute various types of surveillance (e.g. participatory, mutual). Building on the idea of surveillance having an entertainment function, I argue that in terms of the expression of a user experience (UX) in these particular digital spaces, surveillance-oriented mechanisms and practices are fundamental to the creation of enduring entertainment experiences which would not be possible without the reliance on the necessity of exposure in both places and of individuals.

 

Experiential Narrative in Game Environments

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

This paper explores the contentious notion of experiential narrative and proposes the first step in a narrative framework for game environment. It argues for a shift in emphasis from story-telling, the dominant mode of narrative in literature and cinema, to story generation. To this effect the paper forwards a perspective on experiential narrative that is grounded in the specific qualities of the game. This avoids the over-generalization that tends to accompany discussions of experiential narrative while retaining the cognitive dimension in play.

 

Exploring Game Aesthetics

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

This paper explores an approach to understanding player experience and immersion through aesthetic theory. It should be noted that the paper limits itself to a consideration of singleplayer, avatarbased games with a narrative element. This paper will argue that the experience of immersion is intrinsically tied in with the body and its spatiotemporal positioning within a fictional or constructed space. Seeing immersion from the point of view of the body makes it possible to see a dichotomous relationship between textbased and audiovisual media. When a reader is immersed in fiction, the 'transportation' from one space to another is purely cognitive the readers body is still and the construction of the fictional world takes place in the readers mind. For a player of games to experience immersion, various technologies exist that act directly upon the player's perceptive systems in order to create an experience.

 

Textual Analysis, Digital Games, Zombies

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

This paper is a contribution to ongoing debates about the value and limitations of textual analysis in digital games research. It is argued that due to the particular nature of digital games, both structural analysis and textual analysis are relevant to game studies. Unfortunately they tend to be conflated. Neither structural nor textual factors will fully determine meaning, but they are aspects of the cycle through which meaning is produced during play. Meaning in games is emergent, and play is a situated practice. Undertaking the textual analysis of a game does not necessarily involve ignoring these points. Textual analysis, like any methodology, does have limitations. The specifics of these limitations, however, will depend on the particular model of textuality employed. These issues are explored through an analysis of the survival horror game, Resident Evil 4.

 

Beyond Adversarial: The Case for Game AI as Storytelling

Roberts David L. Riedl Mark O. Isbell Charles L.
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

As a field, artificial intelligence (AI) has been applied to games for more than 50 years, beginning with traditional two-player adversarial games like tic-tac-toe and chess and extending to modern strategy games, first-person shooters, and social simulations. AI practitionershave become adept at designing algorithms that enable computers to play games at or beyond human levels in many cases. In this paper, we argue that the traditional goal of AI in games—to win the game—is not the only, nor the most interesting goal. An alternative goal for game AI is to make the human player’s play experience “better.”AI systems in games should reason about how to deliver the best possible experience within the context of the game. The key insight of this paper is that approaching AI reasoning for games as storytelling reasoning makes this goal much more attainable. We present an overview of traditional game AI techniques as well as a few more recentAI storytelling techniques. We also provide afoundation for describing and reasoning about games as stories, citing a number of examples. We conclude by discussingthe implications forfuture directions.

 

Defining Operational Logics

Wardrip-Fruin Noah Mateas Michael
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

Much analysis of games focuses, understandably, on their mechanics and the resulting audience experiences. Similarly, many genres of games are understood at the level of mechanics. But there is also the persistent sense that a deeper level of analysis would be useful, and a number of proposals have been made that attempt to look toward a level that undergirds mechanics. This paper focuses on a particular approach of this sort—operational logics—first proposed by Noah Wardrip-Fruin (2005) and since then discussed by authors such as Michael Mateas (2006) and Ian Bogost (2007). Operational logics connect fundamental abstract operations, which determine the state evolution of a system, with how they are understood at a human level. In this paper we expand on the concept of operational logics, offering a more detailed and rigorous discussion than provided in earlier accounts, setting the stage for more effective future use of logics as an analytical tool. In particular, we clarify that an operational logic defines an authoring (representational) strategy, supported by abstract processes or lower-level logics, for specifying the behaviors a system must exhibit in order to be understood as representing a specified domain to a specified audience. We provide detailed discussion of graphical and resource management logics, as well as explaining problems with certain earlier expansions of the term (e.g., to file handling and interactive fiction’s riddles).

 

Better Game Studies Education the Carcassonne Way

Hullett Kenneth Kurniawan Sri Wardrip-Fruin Noah
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

As game design programs become more common, educators are faced with challenges in bringing the formal study of games to students. In particular, educators must find ways to help students transition from viewing games purely as entertainment to a field worthy of critical study. One aspect of this transition is to view games on the level of mechanics rather than purely in terms of aesthetics. The study described in this paper was conducted to test the hypothesis that exposing students in an introductory game studies class to German-style board games would lead to improved understanding of game mechanics. The data gathered shows that the students who were exposed to these types of games did exhibit a greater understanding of game mechanics at the end of the course.

 

Playful User Interfaces: Literature Review and Model for Analysis

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

great potential to improve user experience, as it can be both an effective instrument for the design and a significant addition to current formal user interfaces. Playfulness increases users’ motivation to use the product, and learn new features and technologies of the device. Thereby it opens additional capabilities for designers and developers to introduce new functionality. On basis of a literature review, this paper provides an overview of user interface characteristics that can affect playfulness. We present a set of user interface components with playful interaction possibilities and define a general methodology for analyzing playfulness in user interfaces. Game industry has a tremendous long-term experience in creating attractive interfaces with the best balance of fun and functionality. This paper shows possibilities how it can be effectively generalized to non-playful applications through playful attributes.