A Game to Support Children’s Participation in Urban Planning

Urban planning is a complex process that involves many different stakeholders and has a very long time frame. The United Nations' Declaration of the Rights of the Child states that children should be given the opportunity to express their views and that these should be respected. The complexity of the urban planning process poses challenges on how to involve children. This article presents Stadsbyggarna - a board game designed with the explicit goal to help children understand the nature of urban planning. It has been used in citizen dialog in the development of a new 30-year city plan in a mid-sized Swedish city. Nineteen school classes in the municipality have played the game. The result shows that the gameplay encourage urban planning discussions. Role-playing is identified as a key element of the game. The digital component initially planned to be included in the gameplay was however found to be superfluous.

Impacts of Tabletop Role-playing Games on Interpersonal Communication: in Perspective of Communication Accommodation Theory

Larp Typology

Markers of Subjective Perception in Larp

Based on J.-N. Thon's (2016) framework for analysing representations of character's subjective perception in film, video games and comic books, this paper studies representations of subjectivity in live-action role-playing. This is a direct continuation of two previous papers, one positioning larp as a narrative medium in the context of transmedia narratology, the other researching storyworld representation / interpretation by larp participants. The hereby presented text focuses on markers of subjectivity, their three types (narratorial, content, and representational) defined by Thon and the fourth (metasymbolic) by myself. The discussion is organised in three parts, corresponding with Thon's types of subjectivity: (quasi-)perceptual point of view, (quasi-)perceptual overlay, and internal worlds. The analysis confirms Thon's observations about the transmediality of some of the markers (e.g. the use of narratorial markers in larp is very similar to their use in (audio)visual media), and reveals the larp-specific nature and/or larp-specific usage of other markers.

Early Computer Game Genre Preferences (1980-1984)

This paper addresses the lack of solid historical information concerning early computer game sales and preferences. Two consistent data series from the magazines Softalk and Computer Gaming World (CGW) are analyzed to give an overview of the best selling and best rated games by players for the period of 1980-1984. A “genre palette” is inferred from the sources, giving a snapshot of how contemporaries framed and interpreted the offer in computer games. A comparison of the series reveals the CGW readership constitutes a distinct “hardcore” play community amongst general computer game players. It is also observed that genre preferences vary in time: arcade games peak in 1982 and then recede in favor of computer-native genres. A brief comparison with Atari 2600 best sellers reveal the inadequacy of the computer game genre palette to describe home console games. The historical and constructed nature of genres as “horizons of expectations” is discussed.

Designing Goals for Online Role-Players

The increasing popularity of persistent worlds and the predicted rise of pervasive gaming, both having a strong inherent potential for role-playing, stress a classical challenge of persistent world industry: in addition to the regular gamer audience, the role-player audience is growing. Catering to role-players requires re-thinking in the design of game structures and narrative structures. The most fundamental conceptual differences between role-player and regular gamer playing styles regard goals, game worlds and the idea of meaningful play.

The Positive Negative Experience in Extreme Role-Playing

Fun is often seen a necessary gratification for recreational games. This paper studies two freeform role-playing games aiming to create extremely intense experiences of tragedy, horror, disgust, powerlessness and self-loathing, in order to gratify the self-selected group of experienced role-players. Almost all of the 15 interviewed players appreciated their experiences, despite crying, experiencing physiological stress reactions and feeling generally ―bad‖ during the play.

Undercurrents: A Computer-Based Gameplay Tool to Support Tabletop Roleplaying

This paper introduces Undercurrents, a computer-based gameplay tool for providing additional communication and media streams during tabletop roleplaying sessions. Based upon a client-server architecture, the system is intended to unobtrusively support secret communication, timing of audio and visual presentations to game events, and real-time documentation of the game session. Potential end users have been involved in the development and the paper provides details on the full design process.

‘Can’t Stop The Signal?’ The Design of the Dutch Firefly LARP

In this paper, I analyze the design of a Dutch live-action role-playing game (LARP), based on the television series Firefly. I discuss it as part of the recent participatory culture in which fans mediate existing fiction into other products such as games. Game studies have often bypassed types of gaming that are initiated by players themselves by taking professional and digital games as their starting points. By focussing on a local example of a fan game, I hope to provide new insights in game design and play. After disseminating between fan and game practices, and sketching some of the previous research thereof, I shall elaborate upon the design of the game in four ways by focussing on the designer, the context, the participants and its construction of meaningful play. I argue that the fan LARP displays a particular design perspective based on the co-creative ethos of role-playing and fandom itself. Whereas existing research isolates the actors that are relevant in game practices, designer, player and fan modes clearly interrelate here.

Players and the Love Game: Conceptualizing Cheating with Erotic Role Players in World of Warcraft

Using data complied over 9 months of fieldwork, this paper aims to explore how erotic role play in World of Warcraft (Blizzard, 2004) has, in some cases challenged and in other cases reinforced, traditional Western concepts of monogamy and fidelity. Data was collected through the use of in-game interviews with self-identified erotic role players on a heavily populated role play server located in the United States. Discussions and analysis aim to revisit and redefine old diametric binaries; from what constitutes cheating and what constitutes fidelity, to when erotic play leaves the screen and enters the biological body. Particularly, the themes to be discussed relate to how players negotiate real life romantic relationships alongside ones in game and how engaging in sex online conflates traditional notions of fidelity.