Jaakko Stenros

Social Network Games: Players' Perspectives

This article presents the results of an interview study on how people perceive and play social network games on Facebook. During recent years, social games have become the biggest genre of games if measured by the number of registered users. These games are designed to cater for large audiences in their design principles and values, a free-to-play revenue model and social network integration that make them easily approachable and playable with friends. Although these games have made the headlines and have been seen to revolutionize the game industry, we still lack an understanding of how people perceive and play them. For this article, we interviewed 18 Finnish Facebook users from a larger questionnaire respondent pool of 134 people. This study focuses on a user-centric approach, highlighting the emergent experiences and the meaning-making of social games players. Our findings reveal that social games are usually regarded as single player games with a social twist, and as suffering partly from their design characteristics, while still providing a wide spectrum of playful experiences for different needs. The free-to-play revenue model provides an easy access to social games, but people disagreed with paying for additional content for several reasons.

The many faces of sociability and social play in games

In the past, social interaction has been discussed mostly in the context of multiplayer games, ignoring the implicit forms of sociability in single player games. This paper distinguishes between the sociability around the playing of a game and the social play mediated by the game, and looks at single player, two player, multiplayer and massively multiplayer games as arenas for social interaction. The paper does not view social interaction as a new feature or a genre, but as a group of different, yet related, phenomena.

The three-sixty illusion: designing for immersion in pervasive games

Pervasive games are staged in reality and their main attractiveness is generated by using reality as a resource in the game. Yet, most pervasive games that use mobile and location-based technology use reality only in a weak sense, as the location for a computerized game. In this article we analyze two game practices, Nordic style live action role-playing (larp) and alternate reality games (ARG), that instead use reality as their main game resource. We analyze how they go about creating a believable game world and encourage the players to actively take part in this world. We present two example games that do the same with the support of technology, effectively realizing an immersive game world through a combination of physical play and technology-supported play.

Pervasive games in ludic society

In this paper we chart how pervasive games emerge from the intersection of two long-standing cultural trends, the increasing blurring of fact and fiction in media culture, and the movements struggling over public space. During the past few decades a third trend has given a new meaning to media fabrication and street cultures: the rise of ludus in the society through maturation of the gamer generations. As more and more activities are perceived as games in the contemporary society, fabricated media expression and performative sports pave the way for a new way of gaming. Born in the junction of playful, ordinary and fabricated, pervasive games toy with conventions and configurations of contemporary media.

Studying the Elusive Experience in Pervasive Games

Studying pervasive games is inherently difficult and different from studying computer or board games. This article builds upon the experiences of staging and studying several playful pervasive technology prototypes. It discusses the challenges and pitfalls of evaluating pervasive game prototypes and charts methods that have proven useful in previous research. The aim is to open discussion on the situated methodology of qualitative study of evaluating and researching pervasive play.

Designing games for everyone: the expanded game experience model

In this paper, we introduce and discuss a theoretical framework that can be used for designing and understanding game experiences in their situated contexts. The framework illustrates the fact that the design process for casual games, which values acceptability, accessibility, simplicity, and flexibility in game design, has become relevant for more than just casual games. The framework specifically addresses such changes within digital games culture, changes that have been embodied in phenomena such as casual and social games.

Social interaction in games

Due to the popularity of social media networks and the games played on those platforms interest in the so-called social games has piqued. This article looks at those games in the context of general social aspects of game play. By approaching game play as an activity, it is possible to distinguish between different kinds of social interaction: the sociability players engage in around the game and the social play contained and mediated by the game. In charting the social space of playing, this article shows the inherent social aspects of singleplayer games – and the solitary aspects of social games.

Playing the system: using frame analysis to understand online play

This paper outlines the different ways in which people play in and with digital games, virtual worlds and social media. People engage in play individually, yet it is often social. This paper explores combining the personal with the social and the connections between playfulness on serious social media sites and seriousness when in a game world. Viewed from this angle, grief play, for instance, is not so much a form of deviant play behavior as it is an alternative way of framing the activity of playing, and Google bombs and edit warring can be recognized as the playful activities that they are.

The Pokémon GO Experience: A Location-Based Augmented Reality Mobile Game Goes Mainstream

Pokémon GO is a location-based augmented reality mobile game based on the Pokémon franchise. After the game was launched globally in July 2016, it quickly became the most successful mobile game in both popularity and revenue generation at the time, and the first location-based augmented reality game to reach a mainstream status. We explore the game experiences through a qualitative survey (n=1000) in Finland focusing on the positive and the negative aspects of Pokémon GO as told by the players. The positive experiences are related to movement, sociability, game mechanics, and brand while the negative experiences emerge from technical problems, unequal gaming opportunities, bad behavior of other players and non-players, and unpolished game design. Interestingly, the augmented reality features, safety issues or the free-to-play revenue model did not receive considerable feedback. The findings are useful for academics and industry practitioners for studying and designing location-based augmented reality game experiences.

The Game Definition Game A Review

In this article, over 60 definitions of games since the 1930s are reviewed in order to pinpoint what those definitions agree on and, more importantly, what they disagree on. This article is conceived of as a tool game scholars can use to better position themselves in regard to the concept of “game” by working out their answers to the 10 questions regarding game definition presented in here.