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Documents
Whitepaper8 pages
Bringing New HOPE to Networked Games: Using Optimistic Execution to Improve Quality of Service
This paper introduces "New HOPE" (Hopefully Optimistic Programming Environment), a framework designed to mitigate the effects of latency in networked multiplayer games through optimistic execution.
- New HOPE adapts optimistic execution, a framework originally built for transaction-oriented systems, to let predictable game actions proceed without waiting for remote confirmation, hiding synchronization delay from players.
- Unlike original HOPE, which relied on full rollback when predictions failed, New HOPE substitutes controlled recovery procedures that restore a consistent state while keeping gameplay moving forward.
- New HOPE introduces padding (distracting animation that masks latency) and synchronization points (limits on how far speculative execution can proceed) as core primitives.
DiGRAJan 2005
Whitepaper9 pages
Frame and Metaphor in Political Games
This paper explores how political rhetoric, particularly ideological bias, is conveyed in videogames through the lens of cognitive linguist George Lakoff's concepts of metaphor and frame.
- Ian Bogost's 2005 DiGRA paper argues that videogames can carry ideological bias through procedural rhetoric, operating via rules and systems rather than verbal argument, drawing on George Lakoff's cognitive linguistics and Frank Luntz's message-development work for conservatives.
- Bogost classifies games' relation to ideological frames into three modes: reinforcing them, contesting them, or exposing them.
- The paper's reinforcement example is the Republican National Committee's Tax Invaders, a Space Invaders variant in which a Bush head fires at tax increases framed as invaders, turning the metaphor of taxation as theft into a playable form.
DiGRAJan 2005
Whitepaper16 pages
Interactive Story Writing in the Classroom: Using Computer Games
The document explores the pedagogical application of computer games for interactive story writing, focusing on ScriptEase, a tool designed to empower non-programmers to create narratives within role-playing game environments such as Neverwinter Nights.
- ScriptEase is a pattern-based authoring tool for Neverwinter Nights that lets non-programmers build interactive stories without writing NWScript, using menu-driven, customizable story patterns that generate the underlying script automatically.
- The authors motivate the tool with the volume of scripting-related help requests in the game's community forums, which reached nearly 150,000 posts, arguing that manual scripting is slow, error-prone, and a barrier to wider participation.
- A pilot with 21 Grade 10 English students in Alberta produced graded interactive stories; participants were highly motivated, spontaneously collaborated in ways resembling pair programming, and lower-achieving students became notably engaged.
DiGRAJan 2005
Whitepaper10 pages
Digital Games: A Motivational Perspective
This literature review explores the motivational differences and similarities between commercial and educational digital games, aiming to inform the design of more effective learning tools.
- Commercial digital games have grown steadily while educational games remain marginal, and the review argues that understanding the motivational differences between the two can help designers combine their strengths to build more effective learning tools.
- The review grounds its analysis in three frameworks: Mitchell's situational interest model (CATCH versus HOLD), intrinsic motivation theory (challenge, fantasy, curiosity, control), and self-determination theory (competence, autonomy, relatedness).
- Lepper and Cordova's arithmetic game experiments found that personalized fantasy and player choice improved intrinsic motivation, time on task, and learning, with personalized fantasy producing the strongest results.
DiGRAJan 2005
Whitepaper6 pages
Consumer Driven Computer Game Design
This research outlines a methodology for consumer-driven computer game design, aiming to increase player satisfaction by integrating user feedback into the development process.
- The paper proposes consumer-driven game design using the Critical Incident Technique, grounding development in players' reported satisfying and dissatisfying experiences rather than designers' assumptions, with player narratives handed to creative designers as a reference for new games.
- The study drew on 61 active players (about 70% male, 30% female, roughly 70% students, ages 13 to 29, average 22), each writing one best and one worst game experience account.
- Two trained analysts coded the incidents with a third checking reliability, reaching 88% inter-judge agreement for positive incidents and 86% for negative ones.
DiGRAJan 2005
Whitepaper6 pages
Configuring the Player: Subversive Behavior in Project Entropia
This paper analyzes "subversive behavior" in the Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) Project Entropia, focusing on how players attempt to circumvent the game's unique micro-payment business model.
- Project Entropia, developed by Swedish company MindArk, is free to download and earns revenue through a micro-payment model in which players buy its in-game currency, PED, at roughly 10 PED per US dollar, unlike most MMOs that rely on monthly subscriptions.
- The paper argues that the game's hidden rules make working as a hunter, miner, or crafter effectively costly, since tool upkeep and repairs often exceed earnings, which pushes players toward paying.
- Using the Science and Technology Studies concept of the 'black box,' the authors show how developers embed assumptions into the game to shape player behavior, and how players work to open that box and pursue roles the publisher did not intend.
DiGRAJan 2005
Whitepaper6 pages
Shadowplay: Simulated Illumination in Game Worlds
The document, "Shadowplay: Simulated Illumination in Game Worlds," argues for the development of a comprehensive vocabulary to discuss simulated illumination in game environments.
- Light in games is argued to be far more than decoration: illumination shapes narrative meaning, directs player attention, modulates mood and risk, and can directly drive gameplay and NPC behavior.
- Silent Hill 2 and Thief serve as the paper's primary case studies, with Silent Hill 2 examined through its pre-rendered cut scenes and low-key horror lighting, and Thief through its tuned sensory system governing AI visibility.
- The author builds a lighting vocabulary by adapting Sharon Callahan's five objectives of digital animation lighting, while noting that free navigation in games exceeds the fixed-frame assumptions of film.
DiGRAJan 2005
Whitepaper8 pages
Cognitive Callisthenics: Do FPS Computer Games Enhance the Player's Cognitive Abilities?
This study investigates whether playing First-Person Shooter (FPS) computer games enhances players' cognitive abilities, specifically multitasking.
- A 2005 DiGRA study by Paul Kearney (Unitec New Zealand) found that two hours of multiplayer Counter-Strike play raised the mean composite multitasking score of 14 participants by 110.2 points, a statistically significant gain (P < 0.05) measured with the SynWin synthetic work-environment software.
- The control group of eight largely non-gaming participants, tested three times without any intervention, showed only modest gains that were not statistically significant (P > 0.3), consistent with ordinary practice effects.
- The author attributes the gains to immersion, collaborative play, and realism, but the study had no control condition in which participants played a non-game activity, so the game itself cannot be isolated as the cause.
DiGRAJan 2005
Whitepaper9 pages
Authentic Learning Experiences Through Play: Games, Simulations and the Construction of Knowledge
The document "Authentic Learning Experiences Through Play: Games, Simulations and the Construction of Knowledge" examines the role of games and simulations in facilitating authentic learning experiences, particularly within vocational training and educational settings.
- Games and simulations are most valuable when designed around authentic learning experiences, not used as generic motivational wrappers; many 1990s 'edutainment' titles merely repackaged didactic content.
- The paper's core thesis is that learning is the formation of connections through experience, so the key design question is how to let learners experiment with knowledge in context and encounter a range of outcomes, including failure.
- The author proposes balancing three elements identified by Clark Aldrich (pedagogical structure, simulation mechanics, and game features), with the simulation element treated as central to providing realistic practice.
DiGRAJan 2005
Whitepaper10 pages
The GameCreator: Self-Created Mobile Games on the Internet
This paper introduces the GameCreator, an Internet platform designed to enable consumers to create and download their own mobile Java games without requiring programming skills.
- The GameCreator is a 2005 DiGRA-presented web platform that lets users with no programming skills build and download their own Java mobile games, either from scratch or by modifying templates, using a graphical wizard, live preview, server-side compilation into JAR files, and an embedded community for sharing and co-developing games.
- The paper argues that self-created games offer value beyond ready-made titles because the effort of creation is rewarded through hedonic enjoyment, personal utility, social recognition, and symbolic meaning, such as use as personalized gifts or messages.
- The platform targets three segments through easy, advanced, and master modes: Mobile Internet crossover users who have never downloaded mobile games, regular gamers aged roughly 9 to 18, and programming-literate users seeking top-tier games.
DiGRAJan 2005
Whitepaper9 pages
A Realistic Reaction System for Modern Video Games
The document introduces a Realistic Reaction System (RRS) designed to enhance player immersion and believability in modern video games by modeling dynamic, societal-like relationships between in-game characters and objects.
- The Realistic Reaction System (RRS) replaces scripted, event-driven reactions with a persistent relationship network in which characters, groups, and objects are nodes connected by typed, attributed edges that characters can query to shape behaviour and dialogue.
- Relationships are organized in a hierarchical taxonomy (emotional, familial, business, membership) and carry attributes such as origin, history, strength, polarity, and validity, and they decay toward neutrality over time unless reinforced.
- Game events affect the network directly, and their effects propagate indirectly through related entities, similar to reputation spreading through a community.
DiGRAJan 2005
Whitepaper6 pages
The Design of Narrative as an Immersive Simulation
The document proposes a novel concept of narrative in video games, defining it as the design of an immersive simulation experienced by the interactor.
- Narrative in video games is increasingly framed as the design of an immersive simulation, arising from the tension between character-oriented games (immersion through embodied presence in navigable 3D worlds) and simulation games (modeling complex systems over time).
- The paper treats agency, the satisfying power to take meaningful action and witness its consequences, as the foundational premise for games as a narrative form.
- Drawing on Gibson's affordances and the Umwelt concept of Jakob and Thure von Uexküll, the author argues that presence and agency depend on how well a player's virtual body can perform meaningful tasks, and that embodiment can enable alternative perceptions of reality.
DiGRAJan 2005