{"id":110,"date":"2008-08-10T14:56:57","date_gmt":"2008-08-10T14:56:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/?p=110"},"modified":"2008-08-10T14:56:57","modified_gmt":"2008-08-10T14:56:57","slug":"papers-from-gaming-2008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/papers-from-gaming-2008\/","title":{"rendered":"Papers from Gaming 2008"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Although overall I wasn&#8217;t too impressed with Gaming 2008 (mainly due to the poor organisation and lack of session chairs with any notion of timekeeping) I saw several interesting and insightful papers. These are two that particularly appealed to me.<\/p>\n<p>In the first, Kolo and Baur (2008) looked at the mobile gaming market &#8211; concentrating on mobile phone games &#8211; and highlights that it has not reached its expected potential (outside of Asia, anyway). They present a typology of mobile phone gaming applications:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>messaging-based games &#8211; simple text-based games like quizzes or puzzles;<\/li>\n<li>browser-based games &#8211; that run in mobile web browsers and require continuous connectivity;<\/li>\n<li>downloadable games &#8211; to be installed on the phone and played offline;<\/li>\n<li>interactive games (they note that this is a misleading name) &#8211; a combination of a downloadable game with additional services such as high-score submission, real-time multi-player modes, or downloading new levels.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>They make the point that mobile phone games cannot compete in terms of user-interface, graphics, processing power or memory but instead need to focus on what they do best: &#8220;new ideas that exploit the unique properties of mobility, time, location-awareness and instant connectivity, along with the ability to deliver on-demand content to a device profoundly linked to a single person and usually being carried at all times&#8221; (p29).<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Kolo, C. &amp; Baur, T. 2008. Homo Ludens going mobile? Perspectives on mobile gaming. In Proceedings of<em> Gaming 2008: Designing for engaging experience and social interaction<\/em>, Amsterdam, July 22-27.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>For the second paper, Dormans (2008) gave what I thought was a really thought-provoking talk on the importance of realism (or <em>iconic simulation<\/em> as he calls it) in games.  He argues that it is not the function for games to be as realistic as real-life (if you had to spend five years learning how to drive an accurately-simulated racing car where would be the fun in that?). He suggests that there are two other forms of simulation that are useful to game designers: indexical and symbolic. Indexical simulation is where there is a relationship between the real world and the item represented but this may be simplified (e.g. the inventory system in <em>Diabolo<\/em> that uses visual object size as a single limiting factor that represents all the limiting characteristics). Symbolic simulation is where the link between the real world and the game environment is &#8220;arbitrary and based on convention&#8221; (p54); the example given is the convention in platform games that walking into an enemy will kill you, jumping on it will kill the enemy.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Dormans, J. 2008. Beyond iconic simulation. In Proceedings of<em> Gaming 2008: Designing for engaging experience and social interaction<\/em>, Amsterdam, July 22-27.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Although overall I wasn&#8217;t too impressed with Gaming 2008 (mainly due to the poor organisation and lack of session chairs with any notion of timekeeping) I saw several interesting and insightful papers. These are two that particularly appealed to me&#8230;.<br \/><a class=\"read-more-button\" href=\"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/papers-from-gaming-2008\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20],"tags":[71,4,72],"class_list":["post-110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-resources","tag-mobile-gaming","tag-papers","tag-representation"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p71sY0-1M","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playthinklearn.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}