Paper Abstract - Tony Manninen & Tomi Kujanpää

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ABSTRACT

Interaction Forms in Multi-player Games

Tony Manninen & Tomi Kujanpää

Limited interaction support in current multi-player games restricts the possibilities for rich interaction. The non-verbal communicative features are not fully exploited and the available interaction forms are often hard-coded in the game system. In order to enable rich interaction design, this work concentrates on two research questions:

What does the concept of interaction consist of in the context of multi-player games, and what forms of interaction can be explicitly classified?
How would the understanding of interaction forms help in the designing of multiplayer games?

Current multi-player games tend to follow the path of more or less straightforward action without any deeper creative sides. However, the related research conducted within the context of MUDs clearly demonstrates the potential for creative and communicative togetherness. Multi-player games offer enormous potential for collaborative activities and shared experiences. With the enhanced communicative features, the players would be able to express themselves, and to share their thoughts more naturally. Furthermore, the rich interaction support offers players a more flexible and creative set of actions.

The focus of this research is on interaction forms in multi-player games. Interaction forms are descriptions, illustrations, representations or manifestations of different actions targeted either at other players, or at the game environment. The work does not address interaction techniques or user interface issues, since the scope is 'inside' the virtual environments created by the game engines.

This work outlines the analysis of literature describing the concept of interaction in multi-player games. Based on this analysis, the concept model of interaction forms has been constructed. The model depicts the taxonomy of various manifestations of interactions between the player and the environment as well as between players. In addition to this, a further analysis of multi-player games has been conducted using the concept model as a framework. In the future, the design guidelines for rich interaction design will be constructed based on the analysis.

The answers to the research questions have been searched through the conceptual analysis and constructive approaches. The research methods are qualitative. The analysis is based on the findings of theoretical literature as well as from empirical data. During the data collection, the players were interviewed using semi-structured interviews, and game-playing sessions were observed using the ethnographical approach. Furthermore, heuristic evaluation was applied to a set of games. The main objective of this phase was to formulate a conceptual model of interaction. The resulting model was then used to analyse multi-player games, and to design and create an experimental Tuppi3D multi-player game environment.

The rich interaction concept model makes it easier for researchers and practitioners to analyse, design, and develop multi-player games by offering a framework that can be used as a basic guideline for the work. The multi-player experiment demonstrates the effects and implications of rich interaction. This indicates that there is a strong need for non-verbal communication channels and flexible user-directed interactions in networked gaming sessions. The results are applicable to multi-player game analysis and design.

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