Worlds of Games Research and Creative Collaboration

Perth.
The second session here at PerthDAC starts with Torill Mortensen, who is also the leader of the World of Warcraft Research Guild and begins with an overview of games studies itself - an area which has experienced considerable turf wars in the past decade. She outlines a number of approaches: immersive studies (ethnological and anthropological studies of games and gamers), structuralist studies (including the bitter battle between ludologists and narratologists), and contextual studies (examining for example the economic and legal aspects of gaming). Immersive studies mean that researchers also need to play the game they study, resulting potentially in a loss of critical distance; structuralists examine the structure of the game and its rules; contextual studies also point towards the wider impact of gaming, especially also examining the rise of 'serious gaming'. There are also some other research approaches, of course - data mining and quantitative research, psychologically inflected studies, and many others.

Gaming culture is a culture of intertextuality; games are promiscuous in their use of material from literature, films, and scientific research (in World of Warcraft, for example, there is a quest called Arzeth's Demise which clearly appears to allude to the work of Espen Arseth, a major games researcher). Key research problems for games researchers include the question of reflexivity (how does research affect the researcher, the community, the object of research - and how frail is the online culture being researched?); and of anonymity (how many layers of concealment are important and useful for the researcher, how important is it for the researcher to build a consistent online identity?), and of overcrowding (to what extent are games now flooded with researchers unwittingly examining one another's gaming practices rather than those of 'real' gamers?). Further problems also include the loss of access to technology as older systems grow obsolete, and the problematic status of data mining and of the data so mined.

It may be important, then, to connect games studies with a wider context of research (leisure studies, sports and media research) and to embrace cross-disciplinary thinking; additionally, there is also an opportunity to use the object of study as more than this - as a tool for human communication. This, then, enables the integration of games research into a wider range of existing disciplines, but also highlights the focal points of specialised games studies. Overall, then, perhaps there is a need to combine immersive action research, structuralist reception theory, and a focus on channel and medium (including data mining) in a process of methodological triangulation which leads to a new range of integrated research methods. What this points to is also the development of new ways to ask questions, through games research but well beyond the realm of computer games themselves.

The next presenter is Anders Tychsen, presenting a paper co-authored with Michael Hitchens. Their interest is in the concept and perception of time in computer gaming - a common issue in gamer experience is how time is transfigured in the process of playing. Gameplay is interactive and non-linear, and interaction causes changes in the game state; additionally, in-game time and real-world time may pass in vastly different ways: there is real-world time, game-world time (which may be difficult to establish for some games - e.g. offline vs. single-player vs. multi-player games), and game engine time; these can be viewed as separate but related layers of time.

Anders and Michael developed a model of game time through an iterative research process: they identified seven layers - playing time, engine time, server time, progress time, story time, world time, and perceived time (the last four can be perceived as non-linear, non-chronological time); not all of these exist in each game experience, however. They mapped player experiences into separate segments and identified the player state (active, passive - that is, observing other developments -, and inactive - not playing). Playing time, then, includes all such states, and remains linear, it includes loading time, engagement with information, and actual interaction. Engine time is the time from the perspective of the game engine itself, and is chronological and linear; the difference here is that the engine is unaware of when it is not running (that is, of breaks in play time), it is personal (e.g. in turn-based games). Server time is important especially in multi-player games; it is a chronological, linear viewpoint of the server on which the game code executes.

Non-linear game times, on the other hand, are different: progress time is a logical and abstract measure of time which allows events in the game to be related in order of occurrence; it is non-linear and branches each time a player reloads an earlier saved game, for example. It divides into a number of forms (for example, mechanical progress which measures changes in the game state, and task progress which measures advancement in terms of completing in-games missions). Story time is the logical or chronological time of the dramatic story of a game; it models the sequence of events which make up the game story, and like other story lines may include ellipsis, foreshadowing, flashbacks, and other narrative tools. World time is the time as it occurs in the game world, and is linear and complete within its own frame, but can be perceived as non-linear by individual players (and it may be non-existent in some games). Perceived time highlights the subjectivity of what a player experiences during a game; it is game time from the perspective of the individual player, and is a compound layer of world, progress, and story time (which may be perceived differently by players). It is a cognitive layer whose perception depends on the individual player. Such time layers, then, can be mapped onto one another - and this model for different time layers works at different levels of granularity. What may be important as a next step, then, is to examine how time is signified in different games, and how these layers operate in different types of games...

Finally, then, to a rather different topic - a presentation by Lone Malmborg, Bo Peterson, and Mårten Pettersson on creative collaboration in design education through the augmentation of pen and paper through computing technologies. Their project acknowledges the continuing importance of a paper-based sketching practice while exploring possibilities for collaborative approaches by using mixed traditional and digital materials in an interleaved fashion. Sketches are at the heart of visual communication, and the use of pen and paper remains crucial in this context. The group looked at a number of case studies using its and other technologies. One such case was the e-Scape booklet, a project exam paper for students in design and technology which allows for the assessment of design, sketching, and collaboration skills (and Bo now takes us through the features of this paper, and its evolution).

Eventually, what was used here were digital pens and papers in combination with mobile phones and cameras, which allowed for the digital capture of participants' sketches and writing, and of their contributions over time. This allowed the researchers to identify how links between paper-based and digital information were created by participants in a dynamic, in situ fashion; it also provided insight into collaborative processes (between students, and between students and teachers). What emerges from this is a need to support synchronous cooperation (co-sketching, commenting); paper is a useful component in this as it makes it easy to see what others are doing, but as a medium it also makes it difficult to separate core content from comments and other elements. Digital augmentation may be able to solve some such problems.

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