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Proceedings of DiGRA23

Fun

- 6 articles or papers

Designing Fun: A Method to Identify Experiential Elements in Analog Abstract Games

Dhamelia Malay Dalvi Girish
2022 DiGRA ’22 – Proceedings of the 2022 DiGRA International Conference: Bringing Worlds Together

To play a game, players interact with the game system by following rules. Upon interaction, different properties emerge. The experience of fun is one of the fundamental emergent properties that players seek from a game. There are many conceptual viewpoints of fun; yet, little research on how a rule system’s qualities help create fun. We present a qualitative empirical method that connects the players’ fun experience in context to the rule system. We describe the protocol for the method and its rationales. Two case studies employing our method on abstract analog (non-digital) games are presented. Our method helps researchers identify experiential elements of games and design-attributes to modulate them. The design-attributes also aid in interpreting the conditions generated by the rule system for fun to emerge. Lastly, we discuss the method’s strengths in terms of findings and potential applications in research and practice.

Albert Goes Narrative Contracting

Newman Ken Grigg Robert
2005 DiGRA '05 - Proceedings of the 2005 DiGRA International Conference: Changing Views: Worlds in Play

RPG’s (Role Playing Games) and improvisational theatre have some obvious similarities. Both require the participants to work together in real-time to construct dynamic narrative elements. Seeing communication in terms of ongoing narrative contracts is a well-accepted principle of improvisational theatre (Johnstone 1981). The recipient of an offered narrative element can accept the offer, block it, or make a counter-offer. This paper describes a methodology for studying subjects engaging in a controlled online role-playing ‘encounter’. The encounter is titled ‘Albert in Africa’ and the study draws on the previously described Fun Unification Model (Newman 2004). In this study, subjects’ individual responses were correlated with the number of acceptances, blocks and counter-offers they make during their encounter. Comparisons are then made with observations of the massively multiplayer game World of WarCraft. From this emerges a methodology for analyzing the complex interactions of RPG encounters.

Albert Goes Narrative Contracting

Newman Ken Grigg Robert
2002 Computer Games and Digital Cultures Conference Proceedings

Vertigo and verticality in Super Monkey Ball

Johansson Troels Degn
2003 DiGRA '03 - Proceedings of the 2003 DiGRA International Conference: Level Up

The vertical dimension is crucial to Super Monkey Ball on all levels1, and invites us to meditate on vertigo and verticality, falling and failing in the construction of space and game-play in this game and in computer- games as such. In Super Monkey Ball, the vertical dimension should be mastered (landing on tiny islands with the ball glider), avoided (off golf courses, off race tracks, or off fight arenas elevated almost astronomically above the ground), although it may also invite to dangerous downslide acceleration or short-cuts that will give your baby monkey ball a lead in the race (descending tilting planes, falling from one level to another while staying on the course). But most notably, verticality is emphasized by falling and failing. Slipping off the race-track or shooting oneself off the golf course by mistake always means dropping into a spectacular free fall; losing the poor baby monkey in dark swamps, sparkling oceans, or void, endless desertlike spaces. Meditating on this aesthetization of falling and failing in Super Monkey Ball, this brief study outlines the peculiar allegorical, albeit funny and social character of this game, which seems just as important as the playing of the game as such.

“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.

What Makes Online Collectible Card Games Fun to Play?

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

Online Collectible Card Games is a relatively new genre of games that allow the players to collect cards, combine them into decks, and play the decks against opponents through the Internet. Players get engaged in all these three levels of the game, and we relate these levels to the theories of what makes a computer game fun to play. The Eye of Judgment (EoJ) is taken as an example of such a game, and we compare the theoretical study to the results of interviews with former EoJ players to validate the models.