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What Makes Online Collectible Card Games Fun to Play?
Online collectible card games are fun for different reasons at different levels of play, and a case study of The Eye of Judgment, a PlayStation 3 title, shows that enjoyment is strongest during matches and weakest in the collection and deck-building phases.
- Enjoyment in online collectible card games is strongest during matches and weakest during collecting and deck building, according to a case study of The Eye of Judgment on PlayStation 3 that applied Malone's intrinsic motivation factors and the GameFlow model across three levels of play.
- Match level scored highest on the GameFlow evaluation, followed by deck building and then card collecting, with concentration and skill development less present during collecting and feedback weaker during deck building.
- Players who quit cited cost as the primary barrier, with a full Master set exceeding $1,000, alongside significant time and physical space demands.
Försäljning av dataspel 2008: Dataspelsbranschens Rapporter
The Swedish video game market experienced a record-breaking year in 2008, with total industry turnover surpassing three billion SEK.
- The Swedish video game market reached a record turnover exceeding 3 billion SEK in 2008, marking a 26 percent increase in total sales value despite the economic recession.
- Growth was primarily driven by major console platforms, specifically the Wii, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, which saw significant gains in both volume and revenue.
- While total sales volume remained stable at approximately 7.68 million units, the increase in total value reflects a consumer shift toward higher-priced titles and hardware-bundled software like Wii Fit and Guitar Hero.
Gamic Realism: Player, Perception and Action in Video Game Play
This paper argues that realism in video games rests on the player's embodied experience rather than on visual depiction or correspondence to an external reality.
- Realism in video games rests on the player's embodied, action-based experience rather than on graphical fidelity or resemblance to external reality, drawing on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology.
- The author argues the controller functions as an extension of the player's body, producing a body-subjective form of "gamic realism" grounded in action.
- The paper positions itself against Chris Crawford's view that games represent a "subset of reality" and Jesper Juul's view that games are "half-real," arguing both locate realism in formal rules or fictional settings instead of physical engagement.
The State of the Art: Western Modes of Videogame Production
Western videogame production has long been defined by a close entanglement between the making and the playing of games, and this study argues that the boundary between producer and consumer has grown increasingly porous over the industry's history.
- The study traces the producer-consumer boundary in Western videogame production from Atari's founding in 1972 through the UK home-computer boom of the early 1980s, arguing that the line between making and playing games has grown increasingly porous.
- Atari's loosely managed, Fordist-influenced production gave way to home consoles that moved play into private space, while Spectrum-era bedroom coding and cassette copying fostered a more integrated relationship between creators and players.
- Interviews with eleven industry professionals conducted in 2006 indicate that development is increasingly governed by market research, licensing arrangements, and consumer demand rather than purely creative or technical possibility, with long working hours and globally distributed teams common.
Controversies: Historicising the Computer Game
"Controversies: Historicising the Computer Game" examines the tensions that arise when video games represent real history, arguing that such representation is inherently problematic and frequently contested.
- The report argues that representing real history in games is inherently contested, and that games cannot faithfully reproduce the past but can convey the atmosphere and flavor of historical periods, with developers bearing an ethical responsibility when they use real events.
- Historical games warrant heavier scrutiny than other genres precisely because they engage with real events, and simplistic treatments risk reinforcing jingoistic mythologies.
- Exclusions carry political weight: Sid Meier's Colonization omits slavery and genocide mechanics, Call of Duty frequently dehumanizes its enemies, and Age of Empires III shifted its depiction of Native Americans from cautious neutrality to deliberate inversion in its expansion.
Exploring E-Sports: A Case Study of Gameplay in Counter-Strike
Counter-Strike, examined as a competitive e-sport, is the subject of this study, which argues that gameplay should be understood as a situated, distributed social and cultural practice rather than analyzed solely through formal game design.
- Counter-Strike competitive play is framed as a situated, distributed social and cultural practice, not just a product of formal game design, drawing on Kline et al.'s three circuits of interactivity model and embodied and situated cognition theory.
- The study's findings rest on 34 interviews with clan members at the 2007 World Cyber Games finals, supplemented by video recordings and forum analysis.
- Strong teams depend on a combination of individual proficiency and collective coordination, while equipment proves less decisive than commonly assumed.
Playing Another Game: Twinking in World of Warcraft
René Glas's study examines "twinking" in World of Warcraft, the practice of giving a character unearned advantages through borrowed gear, money, or assistance from high-level players, which produces unbalanced competition in the early stages of the game.
- Twinking is treated not as cheating to be judged but as a form of play, analyzed through four lenses: luxury, dominance, transformative, and standardized play.
- The study relies on participatory ethnography, in which the author created and played a twink for several months, combined with analysis of guides and forums.
- Twinking contributes to hyperinflation of in-game currency, a phenomenon intertwined with real-money trading and goldfarming.
Information Behavior and the Formation and Maintenance of Peer Cultures in Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games: A Case Study of City of Heroes
This paper offers a conceptual framework for a planned study of how players in Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) form and sustain small peer groups such as guilds, clans, and teams, using the massively multiplayer game City of Heroes as its case.
- The paper is an early-stage conceptual framework for a planned study, not a report of empirical results; its claims rest mainly on existing literature rather than new data.
- It proposes that play theory and information behavior theory (especially meaning-making) together can explain how MMORPG players form and sustain guilds, clans, and teams with their own rules and mores despite anonymity and missing offline social cues.
- The framework treats MMORPGs three ways: as games, as 'virtual sandbox' play spaces, and as cultures where knowledge, behavior, and artifacts are learned and negotiated.
Presence Experience in Mobile Gaming
A controlled experiment compared presence experienced while playing a rally game on a large PC screen versus a small PDA screen, asking whether mobile gaming is as immersive as PC gaming.
- Players experienced significantly higher presence on a large PC screen than on a small PDA screen, with spatial situation model scores of 3.31 versus 2.73 and self-location scores of 3.40 versus 2.10.
- Attentional engagement did not differ by device (4.23 on the PDA versus 4.20 on the PC), indicating that attention is necessary but not sufficient for presence: small-screen players can be highly engaged without feeling spatially immersed.
- Suspension of disbelief showed no significant device effect, and involvement approached but did not reach significance.
Consumer Driven Computer Game Design
This study, presented at the DiGRA 2005 conference, proposes a methodology for consumer-driven computer game design that uses the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) to ground game development in player experiences rather than designers' assumptions.
- 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.
Cognitive Callisthenics: Do FPS Computer Games Enhance the Player's Cognitive Abilities?
This study, a 2005 DiGRA conference paper by Paul Kearney of Unitec New Zealand, investigates whether playing the first-person shooter Counter-Strike can enhance cognitive abilities, particularly 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.
Game Fiction: Playing the Interface in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Asheron's Call
This paper argues that videogame play involves negotiating several simultaneous points of view, including cameras, avatars, interfaces, and cut-scenes, and that mastering these perspectives is central to completing a game's goals.
- Videogame play requires negotiating several simultaneous points of view (cameras, avatars, interfaces, and cut-scenes), and mastering these perspectives is central to completing a game's goals.
- The paper proposes "game fiction" as the imaginative devices games use as native rule elements, a framing that sidesteps the ludology-narratology debate and lets non-narrative games like Tetris or chess be analyzed for their fictional construction.
- In Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, the minimal on-screen interface (life bar, time circle, sand tanks, power tanks) functions like adjectives describing the Prince's state and location, with the time circle marking chronological position in the reversed-time narrative.