Games & Performances
Session chair - 25 April 2006
11:30 - 13:00
Papers
Games and Performances

Alone Together? Exploring the Social Dynamics of Massively Multiplayer Online Games [Best of CHI Nominee]
Nicolas Ducheneaut, Nicholas Yee, Eric Nickell, Robert J. Moore

Nicolas Ducheneaut from PARC is presenting.

MMOs
Most in room have played MMOs
Players can login at anytime and interact with other players
Estimated that players spend 20 hours/week
Fees have generated $5 billion in annual revenue

Why are these games so popular?

MMOs offer a “social factor” that others don’t
The people are addictive, not necessarily the games themselves

Studied WoW (World of Warcraft)
Players control an avatar in a beautiful fantasy game
Players type text to each other like IRC or chat

Game is broken down into parallel universes (different servers)
Players can select factions, races, and character classes of their characters

XP – experience points, accomplished through completing missions, move up levels

Solo
Quest groups – 4 to 5 players
Raid – 10 to 40 players

Players can craft items for one another
They can harvest natural resources in the game

How they studied the game
Played the game since day 1
Offered a qualitative background
June 2005 – large scale automated data collection
There is a public API – offers a “/who” command
Developed a WoW add-on for basic census of the entire game world

130,000 characters over four months

General play patterns in the game
“WoW is my second home”
To reach level 60 – spent 2 months
15% of players had reached level 60

People who choose to play a priest, spend more time together – makes sense because they’re healing other players

Solo classes are most popular

Close to 18% of characters create their own one-person guilds, “vanity guild”
Largest guild – 257 members but average guild size is 14.5 and median is 6

Social networks in guilds
Two types – co-presence network (opportunities for interaction)
Co-location network (joint activities)

On average, online with 1 out of 4 members, play with 1 out of 10

Guild is the place where players talk to one another but not necessarily a place where they play together

Sociability in WoW
Many players are “alone together” – preference for solo classes, players are surrounded by other players, not gaming with them

Being surrounded by other players offers an audience
MMOs are reputation games, allows players to showcase their accomplishments, offers a sense of achievement
Analogy: the crowded pinball arcade

A sense of social presence - “World of Chatcraft”

Designing not only for playing with others but in front of others

Questions:

Did you get a sense that people prefer solo characters? Are they easier to play or stronger?
There is a correlation between new players picking solo characters are easier to play

Do these findings generalize to other MMOs?
Even though there are differences, these results do generalize. Warcraft is setting a trend.

Have you seen trends in the economics of the game?
This is an area of future research.

Interweaving Mobile Games With Everyday Life [Best of CHI Nominee]

Marek Bell, Matthew Chalmers, Louise Barkhuus, Malcolm Hall, Scott Sherwood, Barry Brown, Duncan Rowland, Steve Benford, Alastair Hampshire, Mauricio Capra

Malcolm Hall is speaking

WiFi has seams (seamful design).
Made a game that was implemented on PDAs, based on wireless communications
Feeding Yoshi
Players feed the Yoshis for points, Yoshi is a critter that eats fruit

Players can visit the plantations to sew the seeds
Players can pick the fruits from the plantations

Yoshis and plantations are 802.11 access points

Yoshis are secure APs
Plantations are unsecure APs

More points for feeding Yoshis multiple fruits
Game play can take over weeks or months

Trial of four teams of four people for seven days in three cities
Collected data through diaries, interviews, and system logs of game

Players overall found the game enjoyable

50% of play sessions were less than 20 minutes

“drive-by Yoshi” – drive around town and rack up points

Work was a resource/constraint
Because they could use work’s wifi access
Different jobs allow breaks/being late
Time spent at work was not a good predictor of success in game

Location played an important factor – “rich areas” (more wifi)

Questions:
You didn’t require transfer of data over wireless network?
No

Have you thought to consider information such as weather to reward players?
Have you thought about introducing another character that would be a predator?
Both are very good ideas and possible in the future

How much did people walk outside of their normal routine?
Based on interview data, a lot of them did say that they walked outside of their normal routine

How long does it take for the plantations to grow?
It is immediate

Have you considered making it so that it takes a few days for the fruit to grow?
This is an issue of game consistency since information among players is not shared.

Yoshigame.com

Designing for the Opportunities and Risks of Staging Digital Experiences in Public Settings
Steve Benford, Andy Crabtree, Stuart Reeves, Jennifer Sheridan, Alan Dix

Steve Benford is presenting

Name change of paper -- The Frame of the Game: Blurring the Boundary Between Fiction and Reality in Mobile Experiences

You can draw on psychical world, playing in public (rich content)

Introduces new risks – not attending to world around them

“happy slapping” – people assault others on the street in the UK, film it onto mobile games

Game – Uncle Roy All Around You

An atypical mobile game
Online players with street players
Virtual model of same area of city
Audio and text messages
Online players guide street players to find Uncle Roy’s office

Uncle Roy is subjective for different players
The clues are ambiguous
Imply that other people are part of game
Players liked the feeling that almost everyone in the city is also playing the game

Crosses the boundaries of public behavior (getting into car with a stranger)
Players have to trust the people organizing the game (“suspend disbelieve and engage in these activities”)

Performers have to deliver on player’s trust

Extensive orchestration crew of Uncle Roy

Standing room only!

Getting lost is part of Uncle Roy but performers had to keep in mind if someone is too lost (outside of game play), being disconnected (major concern)

Uncle roy blurres the performance frame

Questions:
How can you establish trust?
It comes from other places, trusting the venue and artist, trust by the way the game is setup and orchestrated

What about the bystanders who are not playing the game? Did they notice that others were playing the game?
It really depends on the context – more likely to get noticed in the suburbs than in the city.
Some players did ask others If they were Uncle Roy or knew where his office is?

This seems like a thin narrative structure. Have you considered a richer narrative structure?
It really depends on the framing.