Computing and Information Systems - Research Publications
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ItemCooperating to compete: The mutuality of cooperation and competition in boardgame play(Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2018-04-20)This paper examines the complex relationship between competition and cooperation in boardgame play. We understand boardgaming as distributed cognition, where people work together in a shared activity to accomplish the game. Although players typically compete against each other, this competition is only possible through ongoing cooperation to negotiate, enact and maintain the rules of play. In this paper, we report on a study of people playing modern boardgames. We analyse how knowledge of the game's state is distributed amongst the players and the game components, and examine the different forms of cooperation and collaboration that occur during play. Further, we show how players use the material elements of the game to support articulation work and to improve their awareness and understanding of the game's state. Our goal is to examine the coordinative practices that the players use during play and explicate the ways in which these enable competition.
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ItemFinding Time for Tabletop: Board Game Play and Parenting(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2018)Hobby board gaming is a serious leisure pastime that entails large commitments of time and energy. When serious hobby board gamers become parents, their opportunities for engaging in the pastime are constrained by their new family responsibilities. Based on an ethnographic study of serious hobby board gamers, we investigate how play is constrained by parenting and how serious board gamers with these responsibilities create opportunities to continue to play board games by negotiating the context, time, location, and medium of play. We also examine how these changes influence the enjoyment players derive from board games across the key dimensions of sociality, intellectual challenge, variety, and materiality.
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ItemDesign Patterns for Voice Interaction in Games(ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY, 2018)Voice interaction is increasingly common in digital games, but it remains a notoriously difficult modality to design a satisfying experience for. This is partly due to limitations of speech recognition technology, and partly due to the inherent awkwardness we feel when performing some voice actions. We present a pattern language for voice interaction elements in games, to help game makers explore and describe common approaches to this design challenge. We define 25 design patterns, based on a survey of 449 videogames and 22 audiogames that use the player’s voice as an input to affect the game state. The patterns express how games frame and structure voice input, and how voice input is used for selection, navigation, control and performance actions. Finally, we argue that academic research has been overly concentrated on a single one of these design patterns, due to an instrumental research focus and a lack of interest in the fictive dimension of videogames.
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ItemIntroduction to the Special Issue: Selected Articles from the 2017 International DIGRA Conference(The Digital Games Research Association, 2018-11-01)
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ItemDeath and the Internet: Consumer issues for planning and managing digital legacies (2nd edition)(Australian Communications Consumer Action Network, 2017-12-01)
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ItemEsports Spectatorship in Australia(Networked Society Institute, 2018)Esports – the organised, professional and spectated play of competitive digital games – has evolved into a massive global industry in the past decade. Boasting significant market value and broad global audience reach, esports is driven by modern highspeed internet infrastructure and live-streaming platforms like Twitch.tv. However, esports has yet to take hold as an industry in Australia, largely due to geographical isolation from major esports regions compounded by Australia’s traditionally lacklustre network infrastructure. Although the esports industry relies on various revenue streams, sponsorship and advertising deals provide the industry’s main source of funding. Teams, tournaments and esports organisations of various sizes are sponsored by major international companies like Intel, Samsung and Mercedes-Benz. This is unsurprising considering the global reach of esports. According to the ‘market intelligence’ firm Newzoo (2017), the esports audience in 2017 is estimated to be 385 million, with rough half of those being ‘enthusiasts’ and the other half ‘occasional viewers’. Furthermore, they estimate that the esports industry generated roughly US $696 million in revenue through ticket sales, media rights, game publisher fees, advertising and merchandise, sponsorship, media rights, in-game microtransactions, and betting in 2017. Newzoo estimates this amount to grow to US $906 million in 2018. Revenue growth for the esports industry has been significant, with current estimates pointing to a year-over-year growth of 41% in 2017, of which US$517 million is in advertising, sponsorship, and media rights (Newzoo 2017). While global industry reports are optimistic about the future of esports, the Australian esports scene is limited in comparison to overseas markets. In this report, we start by approximating the size of the esports market in Australia by comparing publicly available statistics and collecting a list of major global and Australian esports events. Secondly, we provide an overview of key Australian esports titles, explaining how they’re played as esports and their place within the Australian esports landscape. Thirdly, we explore the practice of spectating esports and discuss motivations behind esports spectatorship. We then present a preliminary study consisting of 18 semi-structured interviews with esports spectators regarding their engagement with and consumption of esports content. From our findings, we identify and detail three salient categories of non-exclusive esports spectator types: players, fans and recruits. We conclude with a summary of key changes in the Australia esports landscape during 2018 and important upcoming developments.
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ItemResearching Death Online(Routledge, 2017)Death now knocks in a digital age. When the time is nigh, whether from natural causes at a ripe age, or from accidents or illness when young, the word goes out through a range of technologies and then various communities gather offline and online. Digital ethnography in this “death” sphere has been growing in form and possibility over the past two decades as various platforms are designed and become occupied with the desires of the living and dying. Online funerals and commemorative activities are now often arranged alongside the perhaps more somber rites of burial or cremation (Boellstorff 2008, 128). Services such as LivesOn promise that we shall be able to “tweet” beyond the grave; members of online communities encounter each other on commemorative online sites where they grieve for a shared friend but never meet each other “in person”; and it is predicted that soon there will be more Facebook profiles of the dead than of the living.
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ItemExploring the Digital Hinterland: Internet Practices Surrounding the Pursuit of "Offline" Hobbies(Association of Internet Researchers, 2017)The practice of boardgaming is thoroughly material, with abundant pawns, cubes, cards, dice, tiles and other game components contained within the box. However, this rich material engagement is surrounded by a “digital hinterland” of online practices that sits behind and frames the way that boardgamers experience games and gaming. Although boardgames are, increasingly, playable in digital form, in this paper we focus on the digital practices that surround offline play but are not themselves play. Using the example of BoardGameGeek.com, we demonstrate that these practices provide an environment for knowledge-sharing, collaboration and co-operation in which participants accrue a form of gaming capital. We extend these findings to show that similar practices exist for other offline hobbies, notably reading (Goodreads.com) and yarn crafting (Ravelry.com).
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ItemWhat can We Learn from Eye Tracking Boardgame Play?(ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY, 2017)
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ItemUnderstanding eSports in Australia: Players, Fans, Recruits(Association of Internet Researchers, 2017-10-19)