Abstract: "The collaborative nature of many modern multiplayer games
raises a lot of questions in cooperative game design. We address
one of them in this paper by analyzing cooperative game
patterns in remote gameplay in order to define benefits and
drawbacks for each one. With the help of a user experiment,
we analyzed player experience in a set of existing cooperative
patterns for games played remotely without communication.
By comparing patterns, supporting closely- and looselycoupled
collaboration, we discovered that the first type provided
a more enjoyable experience but introduced additional
challenges in case of a lack of communication. By analyzing
patterns for both closely- and loosely-coupled interaction,
we determined the most beneficial pattern within each type.
We concluded with the results of a pattern comparison in colocated
and remote setups."
Abstract: "Player coordination is a key element in many multi-player real-time digital games and cooperative real-time multi-player modes are now common in many digital-game genres. Coordination is an important part of the design of these games for several reasons: coordination can change the game balance and the level of difficulty as different types and degrees of coordination can make the game easier or more difficult; coordination is an important part of 'playing like a team' which affects the quality of play; and coordination as a shared activity is a key to sociality that can add to the sociability of the game. Being able to exercise control over the design of these coordination requirements is an important part of developing successful games. However, it is currently difficult to understand, describe, analyze or design coordination requirements in game situations, because current frameworks and theories do not mesh with the realities of video game design. I developed a new framework (called PLATO) that can help game designers to understand, describe, design and manipulate coordination episodes. The framework deals with five atomic aspects of coordinated activity: Players, Locations, Actions, Time, and Objects. PLATO provides a vocabulary, methodology and diagram notation for describing and analyzing coordination. I demonstrate the framework's utility by describing coordination situations from existing games, and by showing how PLATO can be used to understand and redesign coordination requirements."
Abstract: "In on-line role-playing games (RPG), each race holds some attributes and skills. Each skill contains several abilities such as physical damage, hit rate, etc. Parts of the attributes and all the abilities are a function of the character's level, which are called Ability-Increasing Functions (AIFs). A well-balanced on-line RPG is characterized by having a set of well-balanced AIFs. In this paper, we propose an evolutionary design method, including integration with an improved Probabilistic Incremental Program Evolution (PIPE) and a Cooperative Coevolutionary Algorithm (CCEA), for on-line RPGs to maintain the game balance. Moreover, we construct a simplest turn-based game model and perform a series of experiments based on it. The results indicate that the proposed method is able to obtain a set of well-balanced AIFs effi-ciently. They also show that in this case the CCEA outperforms the simple genetic algorithm, and that the capability of PIPE has been significantly improved through the improvement work."
"paper discusses the question of how game designers
can keep their games fair when adding collaborative content
and rewards. The paper presents findings from World of
Warcraft in-game chat transcripts and data gathered through
an online survey that was placed online for approximately 9
months during 2010. From the chat transcripts, we find that
players sometimes do abuse mechanisms for collaborative
content, which displeases the other players involved. We
also find that players believe that there needs to be some
kind of sanctioning mechanism to players that abuse
grouping mechanisms. Finally we present suggestions to
game designers on how to create sanctioning mechanisms
based on human cooperation research."
Abstract: "ARTigo
is a Game with a Purpose platform whose goal is
to collect tags for
artworks, which
can be used for retrieval.
The ARTigo gam
es form a tagging ecosystem, where the
games cooperate in order to gather a wide range of
information.
Description games
create initial tags, in order
to enable other games to be played and collect semantically
shallow surface tags.
Dissemination games
sp
read existing data to other
artworks or languages, and do not create new information.
Diversification games
feed
on data produced by other
games
and guide the players
to
entering
more specific tags.
Finally,
integration games
create higher
-
order tags with
deep semantic meanings, describing emotions for example.
All these different types of tags have different semantic
depths, and are present in different quantities. Together,
they create a pool of complementary tags accurately
describing
artworks, which
can
be processed for data
mining."
"Seth Cooper is the lead designer of Foldit, and one of the original creators of the game. He is currently the creative director for the Center for Game Science at the University of Washington. In a recent Science Observer, American Scientist associate editor Katie Burke discussed Foldit and other citizen science games. The following is an extended version of her conversation with Cooper"
Abstract: "Citizen science is a form of social computation where members of
the public are recruited to contribute to scientific investigations.
Citizen-science projects often use web-based systems to support
collaborative scientific activities, making them a form of
computer-supported cooperative work. However, finding ways to
attract participants and confirm the veracity of the data they
produce are key issues in making such systems successful. We
describe a series of web-based tools and games currently under
development to support taxonomic classification of organisms in
photographs collected by citizen-science projects. In the design
science tradition, the systems are purpose-built to test hypotheses
about participant motivation and techniques for ensuring data
quality. Findings from preliminary evaluation and the design
process itself are discussed."
"Players who became anonymous dictators in a simple online game showed unexpected benevolence toward their subjects, giving away more of their own money than previous, real-life experiments predicted. "This was supposed to be a simple replication, where we backed up the results of previous experiments, just in an online setting," said biologist Nichola Raihani of University College London."