People, Places, and Play: A research framework for digital game experience in a socio-spatial context

---

de Kort Yvonne A. W. IJsselsteijn Wijnand A. Gajadhar Brian J.
2007 DiGRA '07 - Proceedings of the 2007 DiGRA International Conference: Situated Play

Electronic games frequently give rise to engaging and meaningful social interactions, both over the internet and in the real and tangible world of the gamer. This is the focus of the present paper, which explores digital gaming as a situated experience, shaped by socio-spatial contingencies. In particular we discuss how co-players, audience, and their spatial organization shape play and player experience. We present a framework describing social processes underlying situated social play experience and how these are shaped by the game’s socio-spatial context. The core of this framework describes various 'sociality characteristics', and discusses these both in terms of co-located and mediated social game settings.

 

Playability and Player Experience Research [Panel Abstracts]

---

Nacke Lennart E. Drachen Anders Kuikkaniemi Kai Niesenhaus Joerg Korhonen Hannu Hoogen Wouter M. van den Poels Karolien IJsselsteijn Wijnand A. IJsselsteijn
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

As the game industry matures and games become more and more complex, there is an increasing need to develop scientific methodologies for analyzing and measuring player experience, in order to develop a better understanding of the relationship and interactions between players and games. This panel gathers distinguished European playability and user experience experts to discuss current findings and methodological advancements within player experience and playability research.

 

Patterns of Play: Play-Personas in User-Centred Game Development

---

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

In recent years certain trends from User-Centered design have been seeping into the practice of designing computer games. The balance of power between game designers and players is being renegotiated in order to find a more active role for players and provide them with control in shaping the experiences that games are meant to evoke. A growing player agency can turn both into an increased sense of player immersion and potentially improve the chances of critical acclaim. This paper presents a possible solution to the challenge of involving the user in the design of interactive entertainment by adopting and adapting the "persona" framework introduced by Alan Cooper in the field of Human Computer Interaction. The original method is improved by complementing the traditional ethnographic descriptions of personas with parametric, quantitative, data-oriented models of patterns of user behaviour for computer games.

 

World of Warcraft, the Aftermath How game elements transfer into real life perceptions and experiences [Abstract]

---

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

Most research on player experience has focused on in-game experiences. The question remains whether game-related player experiences do only occur while gaming, and, consequently stop when the player turns off the gaming device. Or, do they linger and transfer into real life? This paper proposes and tackles long term post game experiences or experiences that arise after repeatedly and intensively playing a particular game or game genre. Examples are association of real life objects with game elements, sounds or songs heard in real life that trigger lively memories of a game world, or slang typical to the game world that shows up in everyday vocabulary. These long term post game experiences presumably originate from the way people perceive and process their environment. To explain this, we rely on basic human perception theory (Boring, 1930). When processing their environment, people use prior knowledge to recognize objects, words, or sounds. The prior knowledge that is used as a reference point can be shaped by any perceptual stimulation that is repeated frequently and over long periods of time. Consequently, this prior knowledge biases human perception by creating a mental predisposition to perceive a stimulus in a certain way (Boring, 1930; Bruner & Potter, 1964). If we apply this reasoning to digital gaming as one particular kind of perceptual stimulation, we could assume that for habitual players of digital games, real world perceptions, cognitions, and actions will be partly structured by their repeated exposure to the game environment. We expect that long term post game experiences can be established through this process. These post game experiences can relate to all kinds of game stimuli, such as environments, actors and objects as well as sounds and words. We expect the concrete manifestation of these long term post game experiences to depend on the type of game or game genre one is repeatedly engaged in. This means, frequent players of First Person Shooter games will probably experience different things, make other associations, and use other game related slang, compared to habitual players of MMORPGs. To the best of our knowledge, there is not yet any research available that investigates the existence and conditions of these specific kind of post game experiences.

 

Review on psychophysiological methods in game research

---

Ekman Inger Chanel Guillaume Järvelä Simo Cowley Ben Salminen Mikko Henttonen Pentti Ravaja Niklas
2010 DiGRA Nordic '10: Proceedings of the 2010 International DiGRA Nordic Conference: Experiencing Games: Games, Play, and Players

This paper reviews the psychophysiological method in game research. The use of psychophysiological measurements provides an objective, continuous, real-time, non-invasive, precise, and sensitive way to assess the game experience, but for best results it requires carefully controlled experiments, large participant samples and specialized equipment. We briefly explain the theory behind the method and present the most useful measures. We review previous studies that have used psychophysiological measures in game research, and provide future directions.