New article on videogames and economic game theory

chicken

The Christmas issue of Game Studies has hit the streets. This implies that my own article The Games Economists Play – Implications of Economic Game Theory for the Study of Computer Games has now been revealed.

Here’s the abstract:

It is a source of confusion that economists for decades have worked on “game theory” while studying economic behaviour. However, while not focused on games in the recreational sense this perspective does provide a highly meticulous complementary framework for the understanding of computer game structure and player behaviour. This article attempts to extract useful analytic concepts and insights from economic game theory and to give suggestions for how these might be put to concrete use in the study of computer games. A non-technical introduction is given, the framework is applied to computer games, a brief case study is performed and finally ideas for future research are presented.

What more can you ask for?

And hey, merry Christmas out there.

Fear of reptiles



Billede039, originally uploaded by Agent Smith.

You can’t really tell from the picture, but you must believe me. In this very moment there is an angry green robot dinosaur clawing at my office door and roaring ominously. That’s when you just know that it’s Wednesday. (If you don’t believe me, drop by and check it out).

PhD defense completed – get ready

Dr Schmith

This Thursday I succesfully defended my PhD thesis entitled Plans and Purposes: How Videogame Goals Shape Player Behaviour (slides / preliminary dissertation final dissertation).

The opponents asked reasonable questions, the technical equipment worked flawlessly, the post-defense red wine was half-decent, and any post-defence tension was relieved through honorable Guitar Hero combat. Thanks to everyone who showed up.

And a warm congratulations to ex-roomie Miguel Sicart who defended his thesis on games and ethics yesterday (Miguel’s preliminary thesis).

I’ll be uploading the final version of my thesis as soon as it’s ready.

Mission completed.

(oh and I love the Germanification of my name on the ITU posters. It has a nice academic ring).

PhD defense
– “Look, players ARE rational. End of story”.

Study results



Study results, originally uploaded by Agent Smith.

Very roughly, this graph shows the prevalence of various types of verbal statements in my dataset.
The data is verbal communication during multiplayer console play.