Only a Game

The Ten Player Motives

Starting on ihobo.com today, a twelve part series examining the ten player motives. This model for play is one we've been using at my consultancy, International Hobo Ltd, for nearly six years now, and it has served us very well indeed. I've given talks about it all over the world, but I have still not written anything about it outside of some academic papers in awkward to acquire volumes. I felt it was time to share these ideas more widely.

You can read the first part of Ten Player Motives over at ihobo.com today, and the following parts will come up week-by-week each Wednesday. I'll also cross-post the bookend (with links to all parts) here at Only a Game after it's finished.

Playing with Money (3): Arms Dealers

Over at ihobo today, the final part of the Playing with Money serial, looking at how gun games acquired shops in various ways. Here’s an extract:

Resident Evil 4 is one of several notable examples of shopping making its way into gun games, which had long resisted the player practices of currency and shops. This is ironic, since the first person shooter was itself an offshoot of the CRPG lineage. Catacomb 3-D, John Carmack’s project immediately prior to Wolfenstein 3D, was a straightforward dungeon crawler of the form popularised by Dungeon Master in 1987. Those dungeon crawlers, however, had differentiated themselves from other CRPGs by being interested solely in the dungeon, and discarding the village and overworld (wilderness in the tabletop precursors) that had structured the play of non-dungeon crawlers.

You can read the entirety of Playing with Money (3): Arms Dealers over at ihobo.com.

Playing with Money (2): Space Trading

Over on ihobo today, part two of the serial looking at shops in videogames, this time looking at the 1984 classic Elite, and its relationship with tabletop role-playing games. Here’s an extract:

These two sci-fi games, Traveller and Space Opera, were to go on to inspire one of the most influential videogames of all time: 1984’s Elite, created by Cambridge University students David Braben and Ian Bell. A space trading game, its play consisted primarily of buying goods at one space station, and flying them to another station while enduring pirate attacks en route. It offered the player tremendous freedom of choice within its world, supporting everything from asteroid mining to bounty hunting with little more than a tight and flexible design – a design that descends directly from the early science fiction tabletop RPGs. This connection is frequently overlooked, most likely because of the tendency to ignore the relationship between early videogames and the tabletop games that lead to them…

You can read the entirety of Playing with Money (2): Space Trading over at ihobo.com.

Playing with Money (1): The Adventurer Shop

Over on ihobo today, the first of a short serial looking at the game design lineages of money and shops – or rather, looking at what this research method reveals about shopping in videogames. Here’s an extract:

The two key lineages in the early days of videogames are the arcade games and the descendants of TSR’s hugely influential Dungeons & Dragons. The player practices of the arcade, however, being based around fast-paced play that ended suddenly to encourage further coin drops, rarely involved shopping – although Atari’s 1986 top-down racer Super Sprint is a notable exception. Tracing the lineages of money and shops in games always suffers from the general problem that the imaginative practices of money are something we are all embedded within every day, and thus game shops could appear anywhere, in any kind of game, with no clear influence of a preceding game. Nonetheless, even with game money and shops, the conservation of player practices remains the norm, even if our everyday money is not considered a game (which could certainly be argued).

You can read the entirety of Playing with Money (1): The Adventurer Shop, over at ihobo.com.

Game Design Lineages

Over on ihobo today, a brief summary of what I mean by ‘game design lineages’, and how I got to here from my earlier research. Here’s an extract:

The game design lineages method is the most viable historical research tool I’ve yet encountered for examining games and videogames, although it is only a part of the wider research project into player practices that I have been pursuing for much of the last decade. It began with Imaginary Games, applying Walton’s concept of props that prescribe certain imaginings to games, and then asking about the key props for videogames – such as inventories, maps, and save games, all of which condition the play of videogames in highly significant ways. This also brought out how videogames were dominated by two particular props – guns and goals – leading me to suggest (back in 2011) that authentic artistic innovation in these media would have to subvert the player practices surrounding these props, as Dear Esther, Proteus, and everything by Tale of Tales does to great effect.

You can read the entirety of Game Design Lineages over at ihobo.com.

The Aesthetic Motives of Play

Sunrise, sunset… one paper falls as another rises. My piece The Aesthetic Motives of Play will appear later this year in Springer’s Emotion in Games: Theory and Praxis, edited by Dr Kostas Karpouzis and an old colleague of mine, Professor Georgios Yannakakis. Here’s my abstract:

Why do people enjoy playing games? The answer, in its most general form, is that there are aesthetic pleasures offered by games and other play experiences that meet powerful and profound human and animal needs. As such, we can identify specific aesthetic motives of play, and one of the clearest ways of characterizing these motives is in terms of the emotional experiences associated with them.

This was a super-easy paper for me to write as I’m only summarising work I’ve already done, but it is an excellent précis of where I’m up to and I hope will complement the other chapters in this collection.

Yee Rides Again

Great to see Nick Yee getting back into player modelling over at Quantic Foundry. However, it seems he hasn’t looked into the similar work International Hobo was doing with BrainHex five years ago. In a recent post, Gaming Motivations Align with Personality Traits, he states:

Action-Social isn’t hinted at in any Existing Model: When we first saw the Action-Social cluster emerge, we were a little stumped. This grouping is unintuitive and hasn’t been proposed by any existing model or taxonomy.

That’s not true! In fact, if you look at the subclass distribution for BrainHex you’ll see that the third most popular is Conqueror-Socialiser (6.1% of sample), which is what maps most closely onto Yee’s Action-Social.

To be fair, I haven’t written much about BrainHex recently because my primary take away from that research effort was that this isn’t how we should be proceeding in this area if we want to get to anything like a science of player modelling. To see why, check out my 2011 DiGRA paper with Lennart Nacke and Rebecca Lowenhaupt, Player Typology in Theory and Practice.

Looking forward to seeing what else Nick turns up in his current round of research.

Cross-posted from ihobo.com.

The Original Game Studies Scholar?

Over on ihobo this morning, check out my horde battle against the first wave game studies scholars! Thanks to everyone on Twitter who paid attention to the original tweets, particularly James Wallis.

Survey on Collecting Imaginary Objects

Zachary O. Toups, Lennart E. Nacke, and Nicole Crenshaw are investigating players’ attitudes towards collecting ‘virtual objects’, that is, things that exist only in the fictional worlds of games. They would welcome your help with their survey, linked above.

Cross-posted from ihobo.com.

The Player Experience Conference

Pleased to announce that I’m part of the team behind a new conference provisionally entitled The Player Experience: The Emotions and Worlds of Digital Games, due to launch in the Summer of 2016. An inter-disciplinary event, we are intending to sit at the intersection between Game Studies and Cyberpsychology, but will accept submissions from philosophy, narratology, neurobiology, or any other field with connections to the subject. We also welcome delegates from the games industry who’d like to give a presentation, or who’d just like to attend.

The theme for the first conference in the series is Avatars: Presence and Immersion, looking at the representation of identity in and around the fictional worlds of games, and how these lead to presence (high fidelity of experience) and immersion (deep engagement) within those imagined worlds.

The conference will be hosted at the University of Bolton in Greater Manchester UK, and we expect the Call for Participation to begin in February 2015 and close around 30 May 2015. The conference organisers are myself, Dr. Angela Tinwell, and Dr. Julie Prescott. At the moment, we are asking for Expressions of Interest consisting of an email stating that you would like to take part and your academic field and institution, or your company.

Please email px [at] ihobo [dot] com - or click this Email Robot – to let us know this event interests you. Hope to hear from you soon!

Cross-posted from ihobo.com.