Computing and Information Systems - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 4 of 4
-
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.
-
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.
-
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).
-
ItemWhat can We Learn from Eye Tracking Boardgame Play?(ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY, 2017)