Journal of Gaming & Virtual Worlds - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2015

This article explores how Facebook as a game platform influences players’ gameplay, arguing that platforms shape play as well as cheating behaviours. Based on a player survey and follow-up qualitative interviews, it asks how players theorize cheating in such games relative to their existing social networks, Facebook’s Terms of Service, and the specific types of games prevalent on Facebook. It explores how these features shape players’ understandings of what constitutes cheating. It finds that platforms do influence how players define or imagine cheating in several ways, including the normalization of new payment models and gameplay mechanics, differences in how cheating is conceptualized by strangers versus friends and family, and how different terms of service can frame what counts as cheating.

Video game playing has been associated with improvements in cognitive abilities that predict success in STEM fields, and therefore understanding this relationship is important. In two experiments, we used a virtual Morris Water Maze (VMWM) with and without proximal cues to measure spatial learning as a total of 82 video game experts and novices completed a search task across several trials. We measured the participants’ path lengths and tested their mental rotation abilities. The results showed that proximal cues improved overall performance. With no visible cues, experts exhibited better performance than novices when their memory for the general location of the platform was probed. With visible cues, video game experts travelled shorter path lengths than novices to the exact location of the hidden platform. Mental rotation ability correlated with overall maze performance only when no cues were visible, and only novices’ scores correlated with path length in this condition. These studies showed that the VMWM is a useful paradigm in examining how past video game experience influences human spatial cognition.

This research examines relationships regarding moral foundations and moral decisions in the Mass Effect video game series. The findings suggest that moral foundation predicts what type of moral decisions a player will make during play. This research reports an online survey (N=138) that asked participants the salience of their moral foundations, along with the moral path, either traditionally heroic (paragon) or traditionally antiheroic (renegade), they chose in their first time playing through the Mass Effect series. The results indicate that moral foundations predict the extent to which game path players choose, but only with regard to the harm/care moral foundation. These findings are discussed in light of game design and the potential for game designers to use morality as a game mechanic beyond the harm foundation and into realms of more nuanced moral situations in game narratives.

DayZ is a zombie-themed survival first-person shooter (FPS) game with persistence similar to games in the massively multiplayer online game genre. Released on the 16 December 2013 by surprise, DayZ adopts an ‘alpha’ release model; though playable, DayZ is unfinished, and will continue to be developed over the coming years. In 24 hours, the game sold over 172,500 copies, and reached over 800,000 sales within three weeks. In this article, I examine the experience of DayZ between 16 December and 23 December 2013. Through examining the experience of the game over such a short time frame, I highlight how patches, paratexts and changing literacy about the game can rapidly change its experience and culture. I argue that this emphasizes the importance of acknowledging a game’s temporality when analysing the relationships between player experiences, cultures and a game’s design.

This article sets out a new analytic framework for the systematic analysis of character creation interfaces (CCIs) in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) and Virtual Worlds (VWs), the Avatar Affordances Framework. To model this framework, we present an analysis of the CCIs from Rift (Trion Worlds 2011) and explore the pragmatics of avatar customization through a micro-ethnographic user study involving 39 participants. Our motivation is to highlight the agency of interfaces; to make visible their participation, via affordances, in self-representational practices that have hitherto been taken as a kind of direct relationship: one is as one represents oneself online.

In this article we describe an investigation of player expertise deployed as part of a mixed-methods longitudinal, multi-site study that examined whether and how players’ offline characteristics are recognizable in their online interactions in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). After detailing our methodology and analytical toolkit, we narrow our focus to a case study that examines three players with previous experience in First-Person Shooter (FPS) games playing Rift (Trion Worlds 2011) (a fantasy-themed MMOG) for the very first time. This case study illuminates how interpretation of data can be inadvertently influenced by the researcher’s choice of technologies and methods employed in their study design. In particular, we demonstrate that initial research assessments of a player’s level of skill may be inaccurate and how the use of multiple data sources acts as a means for triangulating observations and analyses providing a richer – yet more complicated – view of player expertise.

Life’s a bitch and then you die Banished, Shining Rock Software (2014) Version 1.02, 19.99 (USD) (available via direct download or through the Steam distribution service)