People, places, and play

By blurring the boundary between game fiction and reality, Pervasive Games impact the shared space of the city areas that they use as gaming platform. Drawing on notions of spatial theory and Pervasive Gaming practice, this paper discusses ways in which game designers can navigate the constraints and possibilities of gaming in social and physical spaces towards creating greater immersion for players and generating new associations for city spaces. This design challenge within Pervasive Gaming represents a broader shift in interest from representing spatial reality in gaming, to being a part of shaping it.

Mobile Media and Communications: Social, Political and Economic Implications, 2014

This chapter explores the opportunities of mobile games to critique and constitute the networks of which they are a part, attending particularly to location based games. It discusses how these kinds of mobile games reconfigure people’s relationship with other people and objects in their environment. In order to understand this reconfiguration, a model is put forward that clarifies the various ways in which people and objects are presented to the mobile game player. Using this model, examples are discussed of games that make interactions available that are disruptive of a social or political order, arguing that this disruption may be drafted into socio-political critique. Other examples demonstrate how mobile games bring everyday life within a capitalist logic, monetizing leisure and the mundane. This suggests that mobile gaming as a technology, practice or product is neither fundamentally emancipatory nor fundamentally regressive but rather can be employed in various ways.

Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 2014

As research on virtual worlds gains increasing attention in educational, commercial, and military domains, a consideration of how player populations are 'reassembled' through social scientific data is a timely matter for communication scholars. This paper describes a large-scale study of virtual worlds in which participants were recruited at public gaming events, as opposed to through online means, and explores the dynamic relationships between players and contexts of play that this approach makes visible. Challenging conventional approaches to quantitatively driven virtual worlds research, which categorizes players based on their involvement in an online game at a particular point in time, this account demonstrates how players' networked gaming activities are contingent on who they are playing with, where, and when.

2019

Playing digital games in the physical co-location of others elicits a different experience than solo play, with the experience of social play often being described as more immersive and fun. The current study investigated in a sample of 40 individuals (mean age=20.3 years), the effect of playing a competitive multiplayer game on gaming engagement, gamer identity and social competence; and whether this effect was influenced by the physical location of another player. Results showed that across all participants there was an increase in gamer identity, gaming engagement and social competence. The physical location of another player had a significantly greater effect on social competence than playing alone (p= 0.02). However, this was not the case for gamer identity or engagement (p>0.05). A significant positive relationship was found between engagement with identity (p<0.001) but not social competence (p>0.05); an association which held across game condition (i.e. solo and colocated gameplay). The results suggest that location of another player during competitive gameplay improves individuals' selfevaluation of social competence and gaming more generally has positive impacts for players' perceptions of identity.

This essay will attempt to show that Anglo-American culture research can make a significant contribution to a better understanding of digital games, their production contexts and acquisition processes. A close examination of a game's production context will shed light on structures, processes and ideologies which influence the development of a game on a conscious or unconscious level. The analysis of the game itself can reveal models of society presented in the game, intrinsic identification potentials and creative acquisition potentials. But the way the game is eventually adopted by the player can only be made clear by a close examination of its acquisition and the various forms of reception and enjoyment it induces.

2023

Modern society is mediated by social infrastructure. Basketball hoops tender play as social lubricant, playgrounds afford the respite of adult conversation among parents, while a park bench makes possible chance encounters. Eric Klinenburg in his book Palaces for the People defines "social infrastructure" as "the physical places and organizations that shape the way people interact" [Klinenburg 2018, p. 5]. Alongside our mores, social infrastructure not only supports our need to connect but inspires us to do so, providing a blueprint that helps shape the worlds we inhabit while shaping the people that we become within them. The advent of modern video games in the '70s and '80s created new avenues for play-infused infrastructure. Video arcades cultivated bonding and relationship building, giving rise to their own social norms and rites of inclusion. Though entertaining on their own, video games served as a "social MacGuffin" in the nexus of these arcades; like board games, they provided a reason to not just gather but linger. As a testament to this, one of the earliest home consoles, the Magnavox Odyssey, was envisioned partly as a board game, including a playmat and tokens along with the hardware. This early history helps highlight a critical transformation as we have moved online and increased the fidelity of gaming experiences. Today video games transcend physical distance, drawing people together around the promise of play and providing a shared purpose that helps in fostering bonds across cultures. Where once video games merely served as the toys of our social parlours, today these digital worlds now function directly as habitable infrastructure. In short, video games have become the very social parlour itself. The concept of video games as social infrastructure is profound. The shift necessitates a fundamental change in how we think about games as a society. It befits us to take greater responsibility in the games we create and their impact on players and communities. Building a game that others

Media Studies and Computer Games, 2004

This paper explores a broader spatial ecology of games that takes into account the dynamic nature of spatial engagement and the embodied perception of the player. It challenges models of space as only representation or material intervention into game rules. It argues that players inhabit space and engage in a range of spatial practices that are linked to the social. This notion of player sociability relates to the social networks formed inside the game world and the broader social interactions that take place within the private and public spaces of computer gaming. Using the work of Maurice Merleau Ponty (Merleau Ponty 1962) the paper suggests that playing the game is conditioned by the player’s lived in bodily experience as well as the player’s subjective viewpoint and the condition of the player’s on screen avatar body. The pre-eminence of spatiality can also be understood as arising from a shift away from narrative-based causality towards new models of communications emerging from the feedback-response loop of computer engagement and network culture.

2011

This paper describes a study aimed at gaining insight into the interactional accomplishment of collaborative game play. Mobile, location-based games are commonly believed to hold great potential for creating novel and immersive learning experiences, but little have been done to unravel the practical details of how such games are actually played. To address this issue, a mobile, location-based game for teaching and learning history have been designed, deployed and the participants’ activities were video taped. The focus of the study is how the participants make use of the resources available in the game space and how these resources, including the historical narrative, feature in the participants’ practical accomplishment of the game.

Social, Casual and Mobile Games

CHI'08 extended abstracts on …, 2008