Games and Social Networks: A workshop on multiplayers games

Short notes taken at the workshop “Games and social networks” on multiplayers games, prior to the British HCI Conference. Nicolas and I position paper to enter the workshop was “Analysis of a Location-Based Multi-Player Game Position paper“.

[The others position papers].
[Nicolas running notes]

Children and education

Road Rager
Liselott Brunnberg & Oskar Juhlin, Mobility Studio, The Interactive Institute
- mobile gaming experiences
- how can traffic encounters be used
- ad-hoc peer-to-peer multiplayer game (moglib?)
- tangible interface/the clutcher a PDA
- how is the interaction with other players observable in the video?
- short game events
- face-to-face gaming (interaction) – proximity and direction
- problem to find the interaction from a concept

Racing Academy (Richard Sandford)
MMOGs, learning and community
NESTA Futurelab (netsafuturelab.og)
Lateral Visions (lateralvisions.co.uk)
- peers educate each other
- learning engineering principles through experimentation and peer communication
- community of practice (share of practice)
- games and education
- not enclosed environment (the web is part of the game)
- can they exchange knowledge effectivly?
- result: no real dialogue (broadcast style communication). Talk first, think later
- themes: informal learning, distrubuted knowledge, community of practice
- future: encourage the future type of interaction

Audio, talk and technical issues

Virtual game spaces as third places (Greg Wadley)
University of Melbourne and Iron Monkey Studios
- how do users react to their first encounter with voice communication in XBL?
- how can we understand, and design, communication channel in online multiplayer videogames?
- long periods of silence, abuse of the channel
- no sence of community, directed communication, bad sounds (better to use text)
- text or voice is a better support for online community

The linked project (Nony Kamm)
- London computer interaction center
- product designer
- a place where bling people and seeing people are equal
- no dynamic game for bling people
- mapping spaces with audio
- sound and virtual places

Understanding “good” conversations (Darren J. Reed)
Department of Computer Science, University of York
- telephone group interaction
- having a good social chat
- conversation analysis
- analysing the content structure
- good call = flowing conversation
- flow test: a way of targeting further analysis
- Goffman and the focused gathering
– ceremonies of entrance and departure
– rules of irrevelence -> sturctures fo inattention
– frame of relevance

Analysis and replay

Recording and Reusing game play (Matthew Chalmers)
University of Glasgow
- there are gaps
- highlighting the breaks
- infrastrucre is coming part of the game (restricting environment). Concept of showing the seams
- observing and recording distrubuted multi-user systems
- system structure and user activity are interdependent
- observation and recording are part of user activity
- www.equator.ac.uk
- when is there enough data? (the good balance)

CatchBob
- Fallout (going back to)
- not understanding the game
- accounting and interviews
- narrow channel => working out interactions (interface rich)
- lack of governance in CatchBob
Other feedback received are on Nicolas’ blog Comments on CatchBob

Multiplayer Gaming with Voiceover IP
John Halloran (University of Sussex)
- what sor of sociabiliy do distrubuted online games support?
- what is the role of voice communications?
- how is the sociability affected by different sorts of people and different sorts fo games?
- 3-month study of XBox Live
- data analysis issues
- findings: talk is important for sociabillity,
war games make it hard for players to get to others players “beyond the avatar” (game talk, content-drivent, fast-moving)
race games make it easier (group ethos, group style)
- themes: games and sociability, new form of social technology
- how newbies learn from expert
- spatialize voices (crowd management in virtual environment)
- what does lose of fidelity impact the user interaction

Realtime Multiplayer Games over Mobile Networks (Eben Upton)
Intel Research Cambridge
- mobile phone multi-player gaming
- 3G -> not real-time multi-player games!!
- games which does not need real-time and fast interaction (building a game like risk)