Playful Experiences with Games: Empirical Findings from the Playful Life Project

Playing A|part Together in Animal Crossing: New Horizons During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper explains how Animal Crossing: New Horizons allowed players to “play a|part together” during the COVID-19 pandemic. It describes how this life simulation game helped to fulfill the needs for sociability during the lockdown, based on the conclusions of a collective autoethnography and computer-assisted text analysis. It examines how the game’s affordances helped or prevented players in overcoming physical isolation when they were confined to their house or practicing social distancing. It also investigates the appropriations made by players to tailor the game to their social needs in this unprecedented context.

Intra-Active Play. Or What do Video Games have to do with Quantum Physics?

What the spectator expects in the game of watching: Twitch.tv, materiality, and game consumption through and beyond spectatorship

Understanding streaming platforms as capable of supporting and promoting new languages, trends, and online consumption practices, this article relates game media itself to cultural phenomena and social processes around play-watch activities in game streams on Twitch.tv. Analyzing the materiality (structure, affordances, socio-technical and economic aspects) of the leading platform in the live streaming market, we carry out a preliminary understanding of how these digital territories influence and harbor experiences of watching and playing games. Addressing the tools and uses of Twitch.tv, we present concepts that help us understand practices within the community that transcend watching and modify gaming – the sociability in participatory communities of play (Hamilton et al. 2014), the co-creation in multiplayer entertainment (Shear 2019), and the interactivity and agency in crossplay –, as well as the role of the industry and its neoliberal agenda on shaping game spectatorship and domesticating subversive conducts in the game of watching.

Towards a Model of the Design Process for Games

In this paper, we present an approach to studying the game design process by drawing upon general models of design to support research into the process of game design. Several general models of design exist to consider the processes through which designers work. Many of these fit within a structure of analysis, synthesis and evaluation that was first proposed by Christopher Jones in 1963 and later adapted by Bryan Lawson to account for the messy nature of design and the undertaking of these activities while negotiating between problem and solution. This paper proposes the adaptation of Lawson’s model of design to study the activities of game designers and to potentially find opportunities to improve and refine the process of game design. Specifically, the paper seeks to propose a model for facilitating the study of the game design process as it relates to the individual actions designers take when developing games.

“LET ALL PARTAKE IN THE SUFFERING”: MÖRK BORG as a Visual-Material Toolkit for Fan Remix

MÖRK BORG—an ENnie award-winning, heavy-metal, rules-lite tabletop roleplaying game (TRPG)—provides a unique case study into fan-creator and remix culture. Defying the reactionary ethos of other ‘old school revival’ games, MÖRK BORG reimagines the established dungeon crawler in politically subversive ways. Half rulebook, half artbook, MÖRK BORG has engendered an impressive response from fan-designers—eliciting hundreds of hacks, adventures, monsters, and zines. This article explores the MÖRK BORG fandom as an active zine culture and supportive community for new TRPG designers. I analyze how the visual and material design of the MÖRK BORG sourcebook—namely its visual layering, palette, typography, and deathpunk emphasis on illegibility—empowers even novice fan-creators. Pulling from game and feminist media scholars, I argue that MÖRK BORG extends ongoing discussions of punk zine culture to tabletop roleplaying games and serves as an exemplary toolkit for inclusive and remixable analog game design.

Control (2019) and Concrete: The Haunting Thingness of Digital Assets

Digital Gaming During the Early COVID-19 Pandemic: Healthy Escapism and Social Connectedness

The aim of the current study was to study and understand changes in digital gaming in response to the early COVID-19 pandemic and the related restrictions. A sample of 146 gamers from the US, Europe, and India participated in an online survey probing their gaming both quantitatively and qualitatively during the period of two months preceding any COVID-19 restrictions and during the first months of coronavirus restrictions. An increase in weekly gaming times was reported during the pandemic in overall gaming, online gaming, co-located gaming, gaming alone, and gaming on computers, consoles, and mobiles. The genres played significantly more included (action) adventures, role-playing games (RPGs), shooters, and puzzle/board/card/tabletop games. Qualitatively, the results suggested that much of the increased gaming during the pandemic was related to different forms of healthy escapism, for example, managing boredom and loneliness, coping from stress, seeking mental distraction, and fulfilling the need for social connectedness.

Now It’s Impersonal: On Player Decentered Design

This paper presents Player Decentered Design as a design approach that actively opposes and subverts Player Centered Design. Arguments against Player Centered Design are that it restricts the possibility space of videogames, through a focus on player needs and desires above all other concerns. These criticisms are explored through an experimental game design documented as autoethnographic text. Player Decentered Design is presented as deriving from a reflective design process in communication with the literature and personal play history of the author. The approach is determined by a set of constraints that can then be utilised in future exploratory game design.

Prosthetic Metaphors, Rejection, and Representation in Games