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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."