Other Players Proceedings Posted

Proceedings have been posted for the Other Players Conference being held this week at the IT University of Copenhagen.

Looks like a stellar lineup. Speakers/papers include:

Richard Bartle
Newbie Induction: How Poor Design Triumphs

Ian Bogost
Asynchronous Multiplay: Futures for Casual Multiplayer Experience

Nathan Combs
The Intelligence in the MMOG: from scripts to stories to directorial AI

Nicolas Ducheneaut, Robert J. Moore, Eric Nickell
Designing for sociability in massively multiplayer games: an examination of the “third places” of SWG

Mirjam Eladhari, Craig Lindley
Story construction and expressive agents in virtual game worlds

Chek Yang Foo
Redefining Grief Play

Chek Yang Foo, Elina M. I. Koivisto
Grief Player Motivations

Sal Humphreys
Commodifying Culture - it's not just about the virtual sword

Faltin Karlsen
Thoughts on a taxonomy of users of multiuser online games

Julian Kuecklich
Other Playings - Cheating in Computer Games

Rikke Magnussen, Morten Misfeldt
Player Transformation of Educational Multiplayer Games

Torill Mortensen
Flow, seduction and mutual pleasures

Constance Steinkuehler
A Discourse Analysis of MMOG Talk

Melanie Swalwell
The History and Development of LAN groups: An Australasian Case Study

Peter Zackariasson, Timothy L. Wilson
Massively Multiplayer Online Games: A 21st Century Service?

This should keep us busy for a while.

Can't decide where to start? Browse the summaries of each paper at the official proceedings page.

Comments

[Chek]

1.

Mortensen's presentation was indeed interesting, and quite seductively packaged too.:)

There was also a comment made by Eric Zimmerman in the Q&A which I felt was really meaningful to myself as a game researcher. I hope I remembered his remark right; from his point of view of a game designer, are game researchers treating the impact on game design as a criteria for the submission of their scholarly work?

It was a thought provoking comment that lingered on in my mind as I left the conference venue back for the hotel.

Chek
(The Grief Play Guy)

[Richard Bartle]

2.

Chek>are game researchers treating the impact on game design as a criteria for the submission of their scholarly work?

Eric asked this question because Torill had put up a slide "For Richard's benefit" that explained how her research was useful to designers.

I don't see that someone studying gamers needs to make their research useful to those gamers or to games designers. An anthropologist looking at some tribe out in the wilds of Africa doesn't want their research to be of use to the tribe itself, because that would be a form of intervention. An anthropologist studying a virtual world would probably have similar views. They may need to justify their work to other anthropologists, but not to game designers.

That said, if you're at a games studies conference, there is a common link that involves games. Games are the interaction space between researchers: all inter-disciplinary communication must pass through that domain. Otherwise, the researchers have no common ground.

Now games designers occupy that common ground; it's their home territory. Therefore, if people want to talk about that common ground, it's reasonable to expect that designers should be able to find something useful in what they say. If designers don't find it useful, that means it probably didn't penetrate the field enough for anyone standing outside it to find it useful either. They may find it interesting, but does that mean they'll find it useful?

I'm with Eric in that I don't think "games studies" researchers should have to justify themselves to designers. As a designer, it's more useful when they do justify themselves, because it means I don't have to go scouring the literature for interesting stuff - it's already flagged for me. They shouldn't feel obliged to do that, though (especially if it reduces the chance of their getting published in their "home" field).

On the other hand, the less that something can be said to be useful to designers, the more distant it is from "game studies". People studying games from related disciplines may still be able to engage in dialogue (eg. a sociologist studying games may gain valuable insights from an anthropologist studying games, even if the anthropologist's work is of no utility for games designers); however, people studying games from some discipline that only intersects through the domain of games (eg. artificial intelligence) will not find the insights valuable to them. As a general rule, though, if designers find it interesting then the chances are that other games studies people will find it interesting, too. This is why being able to justify your studies in terms of benefit to games designers is helpful: it anchors your work such that other games studies researchers coming from different angles can make use of it too. It's a form of relevancy check, not a piece of "you don't deserve to be here if you can't justify yourself to me" arrogance on the part of games designers. You don't have to say what your work will do to help designers, you just need to have a sense that it probably will be of use to them somehow.

I think Torill herself put it quite well, when she said it would be a shame if the "why" were disconnected from the "how".

Richard

[torill]

3.

In my experience from fields other than gaming and game design, it's not the scholars who lack curiosity about the designers' "how", but the designers who have a problem with the scholarly "why". A large proportion of highly paid and respected designers and practitioners I have met are quite happy to answer "why" with "because it works", and couldn't care less about the mechanisms that make a particular practice successful. I don't think the lack of connection between "how" and "why" in any field, including game design, is the responsibility of only one group, and I think that is what Eric warned us of.

[Richard Bartle]

4.

Torill>it's not the scholars who lack curiosity about the designers' "how", but the designers who have a problem with the scholarly "why".

That's certainly a problem, I agree. With computer games in particular, designers have a traditional distrust of researchers (due in part, I feel, to researchers' insistence that their research applies in cases where designers can see it doesn't). I think this is a great shame: designers should look to work going on in academia, they just shouldn't let it dictate to them. Similarly, researchers should draw from the practical solutions that developers have engineered if this informs their work somehow.

>A large proportion of highly paid and respected designers and practitioners

Some designers may be respected, but I've yet to meet any that are highly paid!

>I don't think the lack of connection between "how" and "why" in any field, including game design, is the responsibility of only one group, and I think that is what Eric warned us of.

I certainly agree with your point, I'm just not sure that's what Eric was saying. He seemed to be suggesting that people looking at the "why" shouldn't have to demonstrate a definite use of their work to those looking at the "how". My own position is that yes, they shouldn't have to, but the less the are able to do so then the less relevant their work is to others looking at a different "why" whose only common ground with them is the shared "how". Forcing people to justify their work by making statements concerning how it can be applied isn't useful, nor even desirable.

Richard