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Documents
Project Massive 1.0: Organizational Commitment, Sociability and Extraversion in Massively Multiplayer Online Games
Project Massive 1.0 investigates the dynamics of player commitment, sociability, and extraversion within Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMP), with a particular focus on the role of player organizations, or guilds.
- Guild commitment is closely tied to engagement: highly committed members (mean Organizational Commitment Questionnaire score of 5.3 out of 7) played 18 to 24 hours per week, versus 10 to 12 hours for uncommitted players.
- Committed members were also more likely to use email and message boards and to plan guild activities in advance, though the cross-sectional design means the direction of causality cannot be established.
- The authors argue that cultivating guild commitment could deepen players' attachment to a game and thereby support longer subscriptions and greater developer revenue.
Encounters With Consumption During Computer-Mediated Play: The Development of Digital Games as Marketing Communication Media
This analysis examines the evolving role of digital games as a marketing communication medium, focusing on how brand integration within game environments influences player perception and consumer behavior.
- Exploratory focus groups with 24 experienced video game players across four sessions found that players generally view in-game brand placement as a source of realism and as a way to fund lower-priced games.
- Players also voiced concern that brand placement can be invasive and that advertising revenue could distort game design.
- Brand placement is presented as potentially effective: it can strengthen brand recall, and players may show shifts in attitude or purchase intention.
WADs, Bots and Mods: Multiplayer FPS Games as Co-creative Media
This paper examines multiplayer First-Person Shooter (FPS) games as "co-creative media," arguing that the final game product is a collaborative assemblage resulting from the input of both developers and players.
- The paper argues that multiplayer FPS games such as Quake, Half-Life and Counter-Strike are 'co-creative media,' shaped jointly by developers and players rather than by either alone, extending beyond the participatory-media framing common in fan studies.
- Wolfenstein 3-D (1992) and Doom (1993) set the foundation for the genre, and Doom's source-code release and multiplayer capabilities enabled a durable mod scene.
- Player contributions materially influenced development: early public betas and leaked alphas produced bug reports and patches, volunteer-built anti-cheat tool PunkBuster was later adopted by publishers, and mod authors behind ThreeWave CTF and Counter-Strike were hired or commercially acquired.
Tiny Patches of Peace: Signs of Agency in Digital Games
Cindy Poremba's study examines how player-created modifications function as a form of authorship in digital games, with particular attention to peace-themed works produced after September 11, 2001.
- Player-created modifications are framed as an independent form of authorship that both expresses and reinforces the player's legitimacy as an author, with the study focusing on peace-themed mods made after September 11, 2001.
- Cindy Poremba's analysis centers on two cases: the anti-war Counter-Strike modification "Velvet-Strike" and the anti-war posters "Tiny Signs of Hope" created for The Sims.
- Velvet-Strike adopts a "gamer" persona to gain credibility within the combative first-person shooter community while aiming its message at an outside audience of artists and activists.
A Multidimensional Typology of Games
Aarseth, Smedstad, and Sunnanå propose a multidimensional typology for classifying games set in simulated virtual environments, aiming to replace the ad hoc genre labels used by the gaming industry and popular press with a more rigorous analytical framework.
- Aarseth, Smedstad, and Sunnanå propose a multidimensional typology of virtual-environment games to replace ad hoc industry and press genre labels with a more rigorous analytical framework.
- The typology comprises fifteen dimensions grouped under Space, Time, Player-structure, Control, and Rules, including perspective (omni-present vs. vagrant), pace (realtime vs. turnbased), and teleology (finite vs. infinite).
- The dimensions were derived by comparing pairs of similar games, such as Morrowind and Diablo, and extracting principles intended to apply broadly across games.
The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness
"The Game, the Player, the World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness" posits a comprehensive definition of games, arguing they are fundamentally rule-based systems with variable and quantifiable outcomes, where these outcomes are assigned different values, requiring player effort and attachment, and possessing negotiable…
- Juul's classic game model defines a game as any activity carrying six formal features: fixed rules, variable and quantifiable outcomes, valorized outcomes, player effort, player attachment to the outcome, and negotiable real-world consequences.
- Games are best understood as a transmedial family rather than a single medium, with board games, card games, sports, and digital systems all sharing the same core features.
- The unifying element across game media is computation: rules must be upheld by some process, whether performed by humans, computers, or physical laws.
Making and Breaking Games: A Typology of Rules
The document, "Making and Breaking Games: A Typology of Rules," proposes a novel framework for understanding the fundamental structure of games by analyzing their constituent rules.
- Järvinen's framework treats games as state machines, where rules define the possible states of play, the transitions between them, and the conduct permitted to players, with rules rather than theme forming the fundamental structure of games.
- Rules are organized around five game elements: components, procedures, environments, themes, and interfaces, of which components and procedures are mandatory for any game while environment, theme, and interface rules are optional layers built on that core.
- The Chess-with-Star-Wars-characters example illustrates that theme sits on a separate layer from the underlying ruleset, so changing the theme does not change the game's rules.
The Gaming Landscape: A Taxonomy for Classifying Games and Simulations
The document establishes a comprehensive taxonomy for classifying games and simulations, positing that understanding the "play element of culture" is fundamental to analyzing their diverse applications in education, training, and research.
- The paper argues that existing game classifications, which emphasize function and format, miss the underlying architecture of games, and proposes treating games as socially constructed systems built from actors, rules, and resources.
- It contrasts an acquisition metaphor of learning (knowledge as a commodity transferred to learners) with an interaction metaphor (learning as participation within a system), grounding the latter in the paper's framing of how learning occurs through play.
- Games are proposed to be distinguished as allopoietic (steered by external control) or autopoietic (capable of reproducing and sustaining themselves), a basis the author claims is more coherent than genre- or medium-based classifications for separating gaming from simulation.
Game Design Patterns
"Game Design Patterns" by Björk, Lundgren, and Holopainen addresses a gap between games research and industry practice: the absence of a shared language for describing and designing games.
- The report proposes an interaction-centered model for describing and designing games, addressing the lack of a shared vocabulary between games research and industry practice, rather than framing games around narrative.
- The model pairs a structural framework (game instances, sessions, and components grouped into bounding, temporal, and objective categories) with a collection of reusable interaction patterns.
- The patterns were derived from interviews with nine professional designers and a five-step harvesting method that produced over 200 pattern candidates.
Uncle Roy All Around You: Mixing Games and Theatre on the City Streets
The document describes "Uncle Roy All Around You," an experimental pervasive game that blends elements of games and live theatre.
- The 2003 London production of 'Uncle Roy All Around You' ran in May and June 2003 as a pervasive game blending street performance with online play, involving 272 street players and over 200 online players.
- Street players searched the city for an elusive character named Uncle Roy using handheld computers and wireless networking, while online players tracked them through a parallel 3D model of London and could help or hinder them via text, audio and chat.
- Street participation was capped at ten simultaneous players due to technical and human resource constraints, and the production required more than ten actors and crew to support just twenty players at a time.
Textuality and Videogames: Interactivity, Narrative Space and Role Play
"Textuality and Videogames: Interactivity, Narrative Space and Role Play" explores the multifaceted nature of textuality within video games, focusing on how interactivity, narrative structures, and role-playing elements shape player experience and meaning-making.
- Games incorporate narrative elements players genuinely value, but the authors argue they are not inherently narrative media, since real-time play unfolds as events rather than fixed sequences.
- Player agency disrupts the linear structures that narratological theorists such as Chatman describe, challenging the application of traditional narrative theory to games.
- Based on a two-year research project (2001–2003) at the Institute of Education, University of London, the study combines textual analysis, video recordings of players in domestic settings, and interviews with players and developers.
Together We Brand: America's Army
"Together We Brand: America's Army" examines the "America's Army: Operations" (AA:O) video game as a highly effective "advergame" designed to serve the US Army's recruitment and branding objectives.
- America's Army: Operations functioned simultaneously as an advergame, recruiting tool, training simulation, and branding vehicle, with the authors calling this blend "advertainment" and arguing the Army deliberately fused commercial, entertainment, and participatory online objectives into one brand experience.
- Rather than collecting explicit personal data, the game built the Army's identity through aesthetic and sensory immersion, positioning it as a central expression of the Army brand during its "Together We Stand" rebranding campaign.
- By November 2002 the free game had attracted over one million registered accounts and 32 million completed missions, and Army recruiting website traffic reportedly rose 28 percent after launch.