The strenuous task of maintaining and making friends: Tensions between play and friendship in MMOs


Eklund Lina Ask Kristine
2014 DiGRA '13 - Proceedings of the 2013 DiGRA International Conference: DeFragging Game Studies

This empirically driven study concerns the creation and maintenance of friendships in online gaming. Social interaction and community building are integral to online game-play, yet maintaining and making friends within a gaming context is not without its conflicts. Through analyses of interview data (n=52) combined from two research projects concerning MMO-gaming this study presents three ideal type portraits of gamers. The portraits illustrate different struggles of balancing friendships, a challenging game experience, and everyday-life. Specifically they look at the relationship between social design and social play; everyday-life and contexts of play; and ‘player burnout’, when players leave the game. Results emphasise how friendships and everyday-life constrains affect how we play, our preferences towards play, and who we play with online. The study concludes that maintaining and making friends in an online game can be a strenuous task limited by both a rational game structure and everyday-life.

 

Age Differences in Associations with Digital Gaming


Nap Henk Herman IJsselsteijn Wijnand A. Kort Yvonne A.W. de
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

Seniors are an underrepresented group as digital gamers, but also as a focus of study in digital gaming research. We know relatively little about senior gamers, in particular about their needs and motivations to engage in digital gaming. The current explorative study used a free association technique to gather seniors’ perceptions, experiences, and domain knowledge about digital gaming. For reasons of comparison, young adults were also included in the study to allow us to identify associations that are unique to the senior population. From the study new and interesting insights were gathered about seniors’ digital gaming knowledge, which appears to be more limited and less up-to-date than the knowledge of young adults. In addition, seniors seem to hold serious concerns about the negative effects of the digital gaming activity on gamers. These factors could create a barrier for seniors to engage in digital gaming. The findings presented in this paper provide potential directions for game design and marketing to overcome seniors’ obstacles to gaming.

 

Evolution and Digital Game Studies


Easterly Douglas Carnegie Dale Harper David
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

While a great variety of fields are addressed in the discussions concerning digital game studies, the natural sciences are rarely among them. We do see references to evolution and biology when we look at new directions in the technical structuring of games, as genetic programming bestows artificial characters with a greater impression of intelligence; but this domain is not discussed in the critical dissemination of player behaviour. If evolution and biology are valuable references for generating artificial intelligences within a digital game, perhaps it is time we consider the significance of such forces for the players engaging the game. As sociobiology pioneer Robert Trivers reminds us: “Natural selection has built us, and it is natural selection we must understand if we are to comprehend our own identities.” Why are the cognitive tools we have inherited for thriving in the Pleistocene era so good at engaging, and being drawn to achieving goals in the fictional pixilated world of digital games? This paper will argue that evolution can play an important role in digital game studies by offering a functionalist explanation to topics such as behaviour, gender, learning, development, and prediction under uncertainty. In building this case, we will examine the history of play research and discuss its dual-lineage: one largely informed by evolutionary biology, and another that is more concerned with play as a cultural artifact. From there, we will consider the potential for Evolutionary Psychology (EP) as a valuable interlocutor for digital game studies. In particular, this field’s approach to addressing judgement under uncertainty lends astonishing insight into how core features of digital gameplay may indeed be triggering innate behaviour. In conclusion, we will present our own experiments being conducted at Victoria University of Wellington, which will provide an example of how Evolutionary Psychology may inform research conducted in digital game studies.

 

The Sponsored Avatar: Examining the Present Reality and Future Possibilities of Advertising in Digital Games


Chambers Jason
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

This paper examines the practice of advertising within the space of digital games. Additionally it anticipates the future development of advertising within the interactive entertainment spaces. A future that holds possibilities as varied as actual game sponsorship, product placement and brand integration within games, or cross promotional opportunities between digital games and other forms of entertainment media. The author seeks neither to neither bury nor praise the practice, but to offer a careful and reasoned examination. Given the similarity between videogames and movies this research synthesis incorporates analysis of advertising placement within those genres with limited processing theory to propose a placement model for digital games. The analysis includes the perspective of advertisers, game publishers and designers, and end user consumers. This work finds that currently there are multiple approaches to in-game advertising, but that it is an accepted practice by end user consumers. An agenda for future approaches is also offered.