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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ItemMore Than a Gimmick - Digital Tools for Boardgame Play(Association of Computing Machinery, 2021-09-01)Despite increasing interest in the use of digital tools in boardgames for both commercial and research purposes, little research has to date explored how and why these tools are used. We interviewed 18 professionals working in the boardgame industry to explore the combination of digital tools and tabletop play, which affords new experiences and opportunities for both players and designers. We generated five key themes from the interview data. Participants engaged with ontological questions about the fundamental nature of games; they showed strong opinions about the use of digital tools; they discussed the impacts of digital tools for game design as well as in their design practice; they raised concerns about the costs to develop and maintain such tools; and they considered how they affect the in-game player experience. From these themes, we generate five design principles for digital tools for boardgame play: traceability, completeness, integration, privacy, and materiality. Grounded in empirical data, these design principles guide game designers and researchers seeking to explore this novel design space. Our research focuses attention on the role of digital components in play and on the need for thoughtful implementation that considers the entire lifecycle of the game, from development through publication and, ultimately, archival access.
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Item"What are you Bringing to the Table?": The Something Awful Let's Play Community as a Serious Leisure Subculture(SAGE PUBLICATIONS INC, 2023-05-01)Within the last decade, Let’s Plays, recordings of gameplay with commentary by the person playing, have grown in popularity and attention. The current research examining Let’s Plays has focused on the contemporary popularity of the phenomenon on YouTube. However, the origins of Let’s Plays as an influential media practice have not been fully investigated. In order to address this gap, we conducted a series of interviews with 34 creators from the Something Awful LP subforum—commonly identified to have originated the media form. Transcripts of these interviews were analyzed using concepts of serious leisure studies and cultural/subcultural capital. As a form of serious leisure culture, the members of the Something Awful LP community displayed motivations related to extrinsic and intrinsic rewards, such as increased sense of self-worth and recognition. The analysis of this Serious leisure culture highlights how this subculture was subsequently adopted by larger YouTube communities.
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ItemLet's play something awful: a historical analysis of 14 years of threads(TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2023-04-03)The Something Awful Let’s Play subforum is widely acknowledged as the birthplace of the Let’s Play (LP) media phenomenon. LPs typically involve people recording themselves playing games while providing commentary. LPs are an important media form in themselves as well as being an important antecedent to many contemporary and popular media forms such as live streaming, esports and speed-running. An examination of the Something Awful LP subforum can contribute to an understanding of the origins of LPs and the community that created them. In this paper, we report on a study of the Something Awful LP subforum and describe the kinds of engagement the community participates in the top threads, as well as looking to see if there are specific individuals responsible for guiding the subforum overall. We collected data from the thousands of public threads posted in the LP subforum, from its inception in 2007 to the end of 2020. The analysis of these postings presented in this paper draws on previous understandings of the behavioral roles, forms of engagement, and policing of practices that often occur on internet forums as part of the regulation and organization of associated online communities. Our results show that the LP subforum was not dominated by a small minority of users that dictated the community’s LP posting, recording and commentary practices, and that the content of the specific threads was much more important in determining what forms of LPs became popular.
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ItemUnpacking “Boardgames with Apps”: The Hybrid Digital Boardgame Model(ACM, 2021-05)Increasingly, modern boardgames incorporate digital apps and tools to deliver content in novel ways. Despite disparate approaches to incorporating digital tools in otherwise non-digital boardgames, there has to date been no detailed classification of the different roles that these tools play in supporting gameplay. In this paper, we present a model for understanding hybrid boardgame play as performing a set of discrete functions. Through a mixed-methods approach incorporating critical play sessions, a survey of 237 boardgame players, and interviews with 18 boardgame designers and publishers, we identified the key functions performed by the digital tools in these games. Using affinity mapping, we grouped these functions into eight core categories, which were tested and refined using a survey of 44 boardgame players and designers. This model defines and classifies the diverse functions that digital tools perform in hybrid digital boardgames, demonstrating their range and potential application for researchers and game designers.
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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)