Janne Paavilainen

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.

Expert review method in game evaluations: comparison of two playability heuristic sets

The expert review method is not yet widely adopted in game evaluations, although it has been used successfully in productivity software evaluations for years. In order to use the method effectively, there need to be playability heuristics that take into account the characteristics of the videogames. There are a few playability heuristic sets available, but they have several differences, and they have not been compared to discover their strengths and weaknesses in game evaluations. In this paper, we report on a first study comparing two playability heuristic sets when evaluating the playability of a videogame. The results indicate that the heuristics can assist the evaluators in evaluating both the user interface and the gameplay aspects of the game. However, playability heuristics need to be developed further before they can be utilized by the practitioners. Especially, the clarity and comprehensibility of the heuristics need to be improved, and the optimal number of heuristics is still open.

Critical review on video game evaluation heuristics: social games perspective

This paper presents the first step in creating design and evaluation heuristics for social games which emerge from the domain of social media. Initial high level heuristics for social games are offered by reviewing four existing video game heuristic models and analyzing two social games design frameworks.

Designing game idea generation games

This paper introduces idea generation games designed for the use of game designers. Three games designed especially for generating new game ideas were developed in the GameSpace project that studies methods for design and evaluation of casual mobile multiplayer games. GameSpace idea generation games have been developed through an iterative process and in close cooperation with the end users, game industry professionals. According to our workshop experiences and tentative results from a pilot study, idea generation games can be successful devices for creative work of game designers. Game-based idea generation techniques provide an easily facilitated, focused but playful setting for coming up with new ideas. However, our experiences indicate that idea generation games feature special challenges which must be taken into consideration when designing such games.

Pervasive Mobile Games --- A New Mindset for Players and Developers

Pervasive games are an emerging new game genre, which includes context information as an integral part of the game. These games differ from traditional games in that they expand spatio-temporal and social aspects of gaming. Mobile devices support this by enabling players to choose when and where a game is played. Designing pervasive games can be a challenging task, since it is not only limited to the virtual game world, but designers must consider information flow from the real world into the game world and vice versa. In this paper, we describe a user study with an experimental pervasive multiplayer mobile game. The objective was to understand how the players perceive pervasiveness in the game and what the crucial factors are in the design. Based on the results, we propose initial design guidelines and compare them to other design guidelines for the pervasive 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.

Why do players buy in-game content? An empirical study on concrete purchase motivations

Selling in-game content has become a popular revenue model for game publishers. While prior research has investigated latent motivations as determinants of in-game content purchases, the prior literature has not focused on more concrete reasons to purchase in-game content that stem from how the games are being designed. We form an inventory of reasons (19) to buy in-game content via triangulating from analyses of top-grossing free-to-play games, from a review of existing research, and from industry expert input. These reasons were operationalized into a survey (N=519). Firstly, we explored how these motivations converged into categories. The results indicated that the purchasing reasons converged into six dimensions: 1) Unobstructed play, 2) Social interaction, 3) Competition, 4) Economical rationale, 5) Indulging the children, and 6) Unlocking content. Secondly, we investigated the relationship between these factors and how much players spend money on in-game content. The results revealed that the purchase motivations of unobstructed play, social interaction, and economical rationale were positively associated with how much money players spend on in-game content. The results imply that the way designers implement artificial limitations and obstacles as well as social interaction affects how much players spend money on in-game content. Inventory/questionnaire of in-game purchase motivations (19) was formed.Motivational dimensions of in-game purchases were investigated via survey (N=519).Nineteen motivations converged onto six main dimensions:Unobstructing, Social, Competition, Economical, Children, and Unlocking content.Unobstructing, Social and Economical motivations predicted in-game purchases.

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.

Exploring playability of social network games

Social network games in Facebook are played by millions of players on daily basis. Due to their design characteristics, new challenges for game design and playability evaluations arise. We present a study where 18 novice inspectors evaluated a social game using playability heuristics. The objective is to explore possible domain-specific playability problems and to examine how the established heuristics suit for evaluating social games. The results from this study show that some implementations of the social games design characteristics can cause playability problems and that the established heuristics are suitable for evaluating social games. The study also revealed that inspectors had problems in interpreting cause and effect of the found problems.