VideoGames

Designing collaboration in FPS

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The Hunt for Collaborative War Gaming - CASE: Battlefield 1942 by Tony Manninen and Tomi Kujanpää, Game Studies, Vol. 5, No.1, October 2005. The paper addresses a phenomenon connected to our research, namely the all the cues that users loose when playing remotely. The lack of face-to-face interaction indeed has important limits in terms of gamers interactions; which leads to new behavior like various forms of non-verbal communication and perceivable actions to reduce communication difficulties. The article hence describes describes and analyses the interaction forms that exist in a contemporary multiplayer 3D game to provide game designers with a model of " perceivable and holistic manifestations of interaction that enable players to fully collaborate and cooperate in networked game settings". It seems that the game studies (Battlefield 1942) offers supports a larger set of interaction forms than previously analysed FPS like Counter Strike.

the issue of collaborative perception, i.e., the possibilities to achieve shared situational awareness among the team members, becomes critical within the context of both virtual spatiality (e.g., large game worlds) and physical isolation (e.g., players communicate only via computer mediation). This means that the limited peripheral perception possibilities offered by contemporary multiplayer games should be supported by efficient communication channels and representational rendition of player actions within the manifested context of that particular individual.

The model they designed can be represented as follows:

The design suggestions originating from the study encourage the use and application of the rich interaction framework and the corresponding model. The results of analysis direct the design and development to support the creation of rich interaction. The primary emphasis is to avoid purely technologically driven design, and to focus instead on the creative process and conceptual understanding of rich interaction. The art assets can be designed in a way that they truly support cooperation and collaboration.

Why do I blog this? I worked on a similar project during my masters; with a peculiar emphasis on studying group awareness in FPS. This issue is very interesting and the results they came up with are worthwhile, especially in terms of collaboration-design. However, I was a bit surprised to see that the author do not refer to all the body of work derived from pragmatic linguistics which already addresses this issue (from a different viewpoint of course). The work of Clark and Brennan for instance could have been useful to analyse what is lost in this kind of context when it comes to communication, grounding (shared understanding of the situation...).

ambx: augment game immersion with environmental perceptions

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ambx (pronounced am-bee-ex) is a technology to be released by Philips in May 2006 that aims at improving the user immersion in games.

amBX-enabled games will provide gamers with the ability to use light, colour, sound, heat and even airflow in the real world during gameplay.

Imagine the room of the future, where all electronic devices are amBX-enabled. The treacherous road to Saigon will turn your room jungle green, swimming with dolphins will splash it deep blue, ‘Halo’ jumps will turn your fans on full, lightning storms will strobe your white lighting, and attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion will blast on your heaters.

Incorporating a scripting language, software engine and architecture, amBX has been designed to deliver all-new player experiences through enabled devices such as LED colour-controlled lights, active furniture, fans, heaters, audio and video, which are all placed in the user’s room. amBX goes even further to provide the support framework for peripheral manufacturers to develop these enabled products, empowering both developers and publishers to amBX-enable and enhance their games. In the future, game players may even be able to author and share their own personal amBX experiences online.

The networked home is rapidly becoming a reality for many, through the introduction of low cost wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi and BlueTooth. amBX has embraced this changing future by allowing content authors a language in which to describe and recreate experiences in an Ambient Intelligent Environment. Within a location the devices controlled by the amBX language act as parts of a browser. Together they render the experience and the player’s room, in effect, becomes the browser

Why do I blog this? It's a relevant idea since the game experience is not only a matter of putting a DVD in a box connected to a TV, the context/environmental experience is also worthwile. I don't know whether it's a good way to implement it but it's a good step towards it.

Location awareness and World of Warcraft

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While walking is swiss snowy mountains, Mirweis pointed me on this World of Warcraft add-on called The Gatherer:

Gatherer is a WoW addon for herbalists, miners and treasure hunters. It's main purpose is to track the closest plants, deposits and treasure locations on you minimap. The addon does not track like a tracking ability does, rather it "remembers" where you have found various items in the past. It does this whenever you gather (perform herbalism, mining or opening) on an item, and records the specific map location in it's history. From then on, whenever the item comes into range of being one of the closest 1-25 (configurable) items to your present location, it will pop up on you minimap. (...) The usage of Gatherer is fairly straightforward. You simply use the game as normal, and the tracked items will appear in you minimap as soon as you gather them. On the minimap you see green circles to indicate if you're close by to a node (if there is data for the node - created from a previous harvest). On the zone maps you will start to see icons indicating an overall picture of the resource layout of a zone.

One of the use ask another requirement... a spatial annotation feature: "May I humbly request: the ability to toggle World Map notes on and off (ideally with a button provided on the world map itself)", others wants location awareness of others: "I would be really cool if it could track more stuff like NPC's. I often use much time on trying to remember where the Quest NPC is when I need to claim my reward.".

Why do I blog this? I am interested in location awareness and video games... This kind of thing is utterly crazy and might be interested for my research. There are tons of questions that could be relevant like why and how people keep track of things/people; how this help them achieving their goals (collaborating, working on a specific task...), ...

Video games and "the economics of fun"

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A relevant article about Edward Castranova's work in The Economist. Entitled "Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games", the book shows how the online game industry is an excellent way to study what the author calls "the economics of fun". Of course it deals with MMORPG economics but the review describes two other issues I am interested in:

The starting point of his thoughts is very insightful:

While scientists developed sensory-input devices to mimic the sensations of a virtual world, the games industry eschewed this hardware-based approach in favour of creating alternative realities through emotionally engaging software. “It turns out that the way humans are made, the softwarebased approach seems to have much more success,” writes Edward Castronova in an illuminating guide to these new synthetic worlds.

Indeed, what is important is less the super-3d realism (given the 'uncanny valley' phenomenon), but instead the social components (as what I blogged the other day with the Trip Hawkins interview).

Also the final point is important too:

As technology improves, players could make enough money to pay for the upkeep of their real-world bodies while they remain fully immersed in the virtual world. Mr Castronova is right when he concludes that “we should take a serious look at the game we have begun to play.”

Trip Hawkins about mobile games

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Via Stowe Boyd, this article in USA Today about the social side of video games. It's actually about Trips Hawkin's new company Digital Chocolate.

Hawkins started to feel that something about video games was lacking. (...) And that's connection and community. People want to go to Super Bowl parties or interact while playing fantasy football, Hawkins concludes. Fidelity is important to an elite segment of the market, but social connection is important to just about everyone. (...) That's Hawkins' epiphany: If you're going to make games, make them social and mobile. (...) Neither game tries to use all of a cellphone's processing power. The graphics are minimal. The allure is in the social connection, Hawkins says, not the on-screen experience

Why do I blog this? I think he definitely gets the point: not having super high-tech features (like 3D on mobile phones) but focusing on specific needs/human beings characteristics (social aspects) to design games on cell phones. I also have the same feeling, espeically when reading this paper about Neopets

Video games and libraries symposium

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What an interesting connection: gaming in libraries is a symposium about gaming, learning and libraries:

This exciting two-day event will bring together librarians, researchers, and educators from around the country to learn about and discuss the potential of and the issues related to the video-gaming generation and the use of gaming in public, academic, and school libraries. In particular we will focus on the learning aspect of gaming and how libraries can capitalize on it.

Les Gasser's talk seems to be compelling:

Both the content and the cultural roles of libraries are being re-stimulated by new media, new online cultural forms, and new trends in information economics. We'll look into how games, gamers, and game cultures provide a fascinating window on these provocations, and illustrate many of the challenges and opportunities emerging in a new landscape for libraries.

Constance Steinkuehler's talk about "The Gaming Generation and Libraries: Intersections", Beth Gallaway's "What Libraries Can Do for Gamers Other than Programming", or George Needham's "What Can Librarians Learn from Gamers?" seems also relevant to my interests. I hope there will be some proceedings.

Glucoboy: a glucose meter for gameboy

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Finally, I found a picture of the Glucoboy, a glucose meter that can be inserted into a Nintendo GAMEBOY.

The product operates independent of the video game system but downloads video game programs that are contained within its circuitry into the GAMEBOY as a reward for maintaining good blood sugar control. With the patient being responsible for so much of proper diabetes management the GLUCOBOY® carries an essential dual role, providing accurate medical diagnosis for the disease as well as an incentive delivery platform which serves as a key portal for obtaining patient-critical medical data; the foundation for fully automated, individualized, disease management program.

Comments about serious games

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What is crazy here is that the largest number of projects are based on false premises like what is good to extract from games is 3D environments, cool in-game features or (again) using 3D environments as real-world look-alike. Of course it's part of the experience but the most important thing in games is what the first speaker (jesper juul) explained: video games is a matter of having (or not) goals. Players then enjoy the challenge of working towards this goal (and if the challenge matches the player, he or she's gonna be in the state of flow). Also it can be about ignoring the goals and still getting an experience. What we see in lots of serious game projects is that there is an overemphasis on the environment, the game levels used to (re)create the real world. That's why there are tons of boring 3world in which participants have to play the role of firefighters/military/nurses... But hey! this is not a video game... Having little characters on a 3D levels and an in-game menu to move them is clearly not a good way to let people reach a state of flow so that they can learn how to fix the situation. Furthermore, from an educational technology point of view, the underlying pedagogical model (or even the pedagocial scenario) are clearly undefined. I am always amazed by the belief that a new media (like radio, tv, the web, video games) might be the solution to every problems. It's based on the assumption that the intrinsical properties of them media may support learning. The most important part is not those properties (3d rendering, cool features...) but instead what players/learners can do: their interaction between them or with the world, the activity they are engaged in, the pedagogical scenario they are involved in... For that matter, Jim Piggot's presentation about the game his company (TPLD) develops was interesting. They work on multi-users projects that aims at 'collaborative training': training people to collaborate achieving a common goal. In this case, the emphasis is put on collaborative dynamics and processes trough a very simple interface which engages players in simple activities. Caspian Learning's engine also has a good approach, trying to rely educational or cognitive psychology theories like Bloom's taxonomy of educational activities. They also stated their commitments towards attesting the validity of their products as well as their integration into existing settings (it's impossible to use Civilization in a 45minutes history lesson).

Anyway, I need to express that this is not so general, there is just a trend. There are however relevant applications that are based on interesting game features. Finally, I was really interested in how Ben Sawyer defined the serious games. He definitely expands them to all the applications that use video games in other context than just playing. Among what he said, here is a short list of pertinent serious game application, not so-tightly related to learning:

- consoles as low coast videoconf systems - pain distraction - LAN parties as team building exercises - general purpose GPU programming - machinima (game based movie marking) - game devs input on vheicle and interfaces - polling method: logging gameplay choices - economic research in online worlds (games as a petri dish for economics) - exergaming and rehabitainment (sony kinetic, using eyetoy for exercises) - PostTraumaticStressDisorder and AttentionDeficitD treatments - phobia treatments - unrealart.co.uk: artistes using game tools for artwork creation - Communication in various context (medicine, soldiers.....): VoIP chat via wifi for DS, web browser and RSS feeds to PSP, Xbox live with soldiers, in game chat in onlie games and worlds, eyetoy phonecam and xbox tv chat, p2p handwriting chat with DS

I played the party pooper here but this is really my feelings. What strikes me is that video games is taken as a miracle solution to do training or elearning by using platform that takes game aspects that are not really relevant to meet this end. I don't even mention the fact that serious game client wants packaged solution that may allow their learner/player to learn as fast as possible using the platform. This does not really work like that! To connect what Jesper Juul and Ben Sawyer said, I appreciated this comment by Ben: "beginning a news job is like beginning a new job in the sense that you have to figure out what you have to do".

Video Game settings

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(Via trendwatching) For people interested in what setting video game users are playing, there is this interesting resource that shows plenty of video games-related pictures: http://games.textamerica.com. The best are the video game settings:

Why do I blog this? when studying how people use video games, I've always found the game settings interesting and relevant: how people seat, which artefacts do they use (apart from the game pad, like notes on paper, a music player, a cell phone to communicate with remote players or just to chat...), whether there are friend or co-players (co-present person who has not the pad but help the main player completing the game...).

This is of particular interest, especially when doing 'user experience' research of mobile applications like location-based games or mobile game. Look for instance at this picture I took last week in Japan, it's a group of kids all participating in playing a DS game.

I do think there is a lot to learn of studying such settings and all the interactions that occur between participants/artefacts.

distellamap: visualizing goto instructions on atari 2600 code

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Via the excellent french blog gamism, Ben Fry's new project: distellamap: a computer generated visualization that depictes all the "goto" connections in Atari 2600 games.

Seeing the operation of code in Atari 2600 games. Like any other game console, Atari 2600 cartridges contained executable code also commingled with data. This lists the code as columns of assembly language. Most of it is math or conditional statements (if x is true, go to y), so each time there’s “go to” a curve is drawn from that point to its destination.

Why do I blog this? it's an interesting way to visualize a video-game 'space' with a different perspective.

Alternate Reality Games in Gamasutra

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It's very refreshing to see that Gamasutra is now giving more room to alternate reality game in this review by Adrian Hon (the article is dated from May 9, 2005). The author beings by stating that the first ARG was the marketing material for the movie A.I. (2001), with a credit for a "Sentient Machine Therapist" called "Jeanine Salla". People who googled this name found that she worked at a university. Bangalore World University in 2142... and all of this lead into a curious puzzle. The article also presents example such as "I love Bees" and "The Beast".

Alternate reality games shouldn't be seen as a panacea for developers. Like any other story or game, it's easy to create a bad ARG but difficult to create a great one. By treating ARGs simply as promotional bolt-ons to a game, to be developed by an entirely separate team, is a surefire route to disappointment. Though it may seem risky to invest such trust in something that seemingly has little to do with your main product other than perhaps being a special kind of advert, ARGs have the potential to become a fundamental part of a game's experience, growing the story and universe, and attracting and engaging players long before - and after - the game's release. This potential will only be realized if game developers take the leap of integrating ARGs fully into the development process and the game itself, and most importantly, use their imagination.

Why do I blog this? I like the fact that ARG is an interesting way to design games by using existing and simple situations (technosocial or not) to create a compelling game exeprience. However, I am not sure (video)game companies understood the potential of this (some says it's too 'far' from their core business).

MMOG communities study

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Cyril pointed me on this research project: Project Massive carried out at Carnegie Mellon University:

Previously, Project Massive has investigated player communication and organization in PC based, Massively Multiplayer games. While this work continues, the inquiry has been expanded to address the impact of online play on the players' real life activities, perceptions, and experiences. No longer is the study limited to PC based MMOs. A number of online genres including first-person shooters and real-time strategy games have been added. Further, both console and PC player populations are included in the sample. Below are just a few of the topics that Project Massive is currently concerned with:

  • Role of Player Motivation in Usage Outcomes
  • Genre and Platform Differences
  • Engagement, Commitment, and Habit Formation
  • Displacement of Real Life Activities

With the help of our thousands of respondents, this research will support the future design of better, more rewarding games for all of us. This research is not commercially sponsored in any way. Results and analysis of the continuing survey are published at ProjectMassive.com and are freely available for public use.

There is a pertinent research paper about it, presented at CHI 2004: Project massive:Â a study of online gaming communities by A. Fleming Seay, William J. Jerome, Kevin Sang Lee and Robert E. Kraut:

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) continue to be a popular and lucrative sector of the gaming market. Project Massive was created to assess MMOG players' social experiences both inside and outside of their gaming environments and the impact of these activities on their everyday lives. The focus of Project Massive has been on the persistent player groups or "guilds" that form in MMOGs. The survey has been completed online by 1836 players, who reported on their play patterns, commitment to their player organizations, and personality traits like sociability, extraversion and depression. Here we report our cross-sectional findings and describe our future longitudinal work as we track players and their guilds across the evolving landscape of the MMOG product space.

Why do I blog this? I need this kind of material/studies for a project about online communities creation and evolution.

Nokia Game Summit

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Thanks to Gamasutra, there is a good wrap up of the Nokia Game Summit. It's interesting to see what are their research avenue and what they think is relevant

one of the event's key themes: the march towards a more ‘immersive' visual experience on the mobile platform. “People live in a 3D world in their everyday life. They will want that same 3D world in their handsets", predicted Epting, and “…we want to bring the visual experience of the real world into a mobile device.”

uuh a bad start already, I don't get it: given the screen size, 3d on a mobile phone is a very weird idea. Of course there might be some niche but I could not help thinking that it won't be the next big thing.

There are others elements in the wrap-up, but overall it seems that their discussion was lively and leading to deate about marketing in which the user (uh the consumer sorry) is not really taken into account apart from being a "cash cow" who buys 2D games (the point would be to replicate this with 3D games...)

Besides Tom Hume has also a good rant about this, I like his comment:

most of the problems Greg [Costikyan: see here, the notes from Carlo Longino] has highlighted aren't problems with the mobile games industry, but problems with the mobile games industry if they want to sell the kinds of things the console games industry sells

Here we are: "if they want to sell the kinds of things the console games industry sells", I think the mistake is to undervalue the mobile phones as gaming platform and to develop games as lower quality version of console games. Which is wrong since lots of application can take advantage of mobile devices specific features (even though it's difficult as explained by Greg Costikyan).

SUN and MMORPG

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An article about how SUN's work with MMOG in Business Week. It tackles the versatile and scalable MMOG middleware they are working on. What's interesting is that it presents SUN's vision:

Sun's chief gaming officer, Chris Melissinos explains, "I argue that we've been the principle architect of the largest massively multiplayer online game in the world. It's Wall Street. If you took a look at all of the mechanics that go in to building an online trading system, they're almost one-for-one, the same functions needed to build an MMOG. Except we've done it with more redundancy, reliability and scalability than pretty much anyone else" (...) "The difference you see between a lot of the technologies today (say, for example, Big World) and ours is that not only do we offer the scalability that they do, but I can take multiple games of different types, running across different hardware clients and run them simultaneously on the same stack of hardware." (...) "So what you can do is rather than building an infrastructure to handle a particular game, I can go to an operator that has built an infrastructure to handle 5 million concurrent players. I don't care if it is one game running 5 million players or it's a 100 games handling 50,000 players each or 1,000 games running 5,000 players each. It's the first solution that's able to do this.

The added value is then:

"Because you don't have to invest in any of that [hardware], we now providing a viable business model for a small developer and allowing him to take advantage of economies of scale that a utility model can provide. Because I can now build a single infrastructure to handle millions of people, I can now leverage a utility model, exactly like power companies or water companies can.

Paper about MMORPG decline: Lineage versus WoW

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What’s Wrong With the Mighty Lord?: Empirical Study on the Decline of Lineage 2 by JunSok, Huhh is an interesting paper about the decline of a specific MMORPG: Lineage (versus others).

The purpose of this article is to take empirical tests for presumed causes of Linege 2 ’s declining trend. Using time usage data of Lineage 2(L2), Kart Riders(Kart) and World of Worldcraft(WoW) collected from PC-bangs, we take statistical tests on the rivalry hypothesis among games. Results show that there is no consistent evidence that L2 ’s falling down is caused by the success of Kart or WoW. Instead, it is clearly identified that the trend of RMT had a respectable impacts on L2 in comparison to L1. All the test result implies that in-game factors such as RMT played a more decisive role in L2 ’s decline than external factors like tougher competition.

Why do I blog this? this is an important dimension: how MMORPG will do in the long run, what would be the features game designers will work out to sustain the enthusiasm? The paper brings some elements but there are still left issues (for instance how do you make people from different levels playing altogether?).

From MUDs to MMORPG

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A lively debate has emerged in gameblog terra nova this week about the reinvention of the online game community research from MUD/MOO to current MMORPG. The article in Terra Nova offers a very clever summary of what has changed from MUD to MMORPG, here are some excerpts extracted from the post by Timothy Burke and the commenters):

Some old issues have become completely new in their implications:
  • simply for reasons of scale: secondary markets are obviously something radically different in current virtual worlds than they might have been
  • there are genuinely new issues--if nothing else, the perceptual and psychological issues posed by 3-D graphical engines in virtual worlds as compared to text-based or isomorphic designs.
  • one of the biggest things to have changed is [internet] penetration. (...) Adoption of whatever phenomenon by many millions of people has got to change the characteristics and nature of that space. It certainly did in the case of both the Web and the stock market. (stated by Mark Wallace)
  • Instancing is a major new trend that was never really explored in the text mud days. There has always been talk about "embedded experiences" but the idea of literally replicating single-player to limited multiplayer games wasn't one that had currency (stated by Raph)
  • What happened to intermud protocol? (stated by Raph)
  • computers now are more than 100x faster than they were in the mid-90s when I started on this; that has had significant impact on the kinds of things that virtual worlds can represent. (stated by Mike Sellers)

Why do I blog this? To me this topic is strikingly interesting since I am currently working on a research project about the creation and evolution of online games communities (for an R&D privately funded). Last week, I collected plenty of research about this topic in MUDs/MOO (which I use to play with few years ago) and I took for granted the fact that the studies made into the MUD field already tackled elements that would be of interests in MMORPG. I am actually in the process of selecting what would be new to study, drawing on these elements.

Serious Games Project Overview

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There is a good overview of current serious games projects on Gamasutra by Ben Sawyer (Mr Serious Games I would say :) ). It's tightly related to the nearly arrived Serious Games Summit. He also gives good insights about the state of the sector. Some relevant excerpts I found pertinent:

the diversity of content is growing and the quality of organizations, developers, and companies participating is also ratcheting up. (...) Much of what we can now make of the serious games sector does have to do with the branded aspect the moniker that ‘serious games' creates. It may not be perfect in all its glory, but it does the job. Serious games is now a branded aspect of the overall games space but it still means many different things to different people, and narrow views or opinions can sometimes poorly define the big picture. (...) We are still primarily fueled by the triumvirate of gaming's ascendancy as a media form, positive press coverage, and a willingness to experiment on the part of various individuals and organizations. The space is not driven by lots of proven results and sustainable business models. (...) the entire serious games space is still very supply-side driven in terms of visible activity. I'm beginning to see more customer-side activity, and we are truly starting to see the benefits of more seasoned projects, developers, and funding activity. (...) The activity in Europe is itself fueled by more direct grants through various government educational agencies, although some local media agencies and economic development agencies are also taking part.(...) a huge research gap in serious games, but so far it hasn't hurt things because people are still getting new projects online. At some point, however, the justification and design issues related to determining the return on investment and outcomes from game-based approaches may become too hard to overcome without more and better research(...)

The part about the connection with research is clever, I like this statement:

It is also important to note here, though, that there is a problem within the research community where some people expect us to find a so-called silver bullet - a piece of research that spans many major questions about games. We will never be so lucky. Instead, we must eat at the edges more, and be more specific to the traits successful projects share, versus finding the secret formula to Coke. (...) Thankfully, through efforts at DiGRA, FAS, Education Arcade, Future Play, and key institutions we are seeing research that is meaningful, More importantly, the systems through which the collective community can address research needs is getting better.

Why do I blog this? I think that serious games is an emerging field that sounds promising and that there will be plenty of things to work on with regards to user experience analysis + potential learning gains investigation as we do currently.