First European symposium on Computer Games and Emotions

… will be held at ITU on Monday 27.11.2006.

From the official page:

Monday November 27th 2006, 8:30-16:15

IT University of Copenhagen, Rued Langgaards Vej 7, 2300 Copenhagen s, Auditorium 2. How to get here.

The emotional dimension of computer games has has in the recent years became a popular focus for game research and development. While new games appear dubbed as “emotional rollercoaster rides”, academic research projects attempting to understand games and emotions pop up on the fields of game studies, psychology and HCI, to name a few. Even if one does not subscribe to David Freeman’s statement that the next revolution in games is emotional, the topicality of emotions as both a subject and an approach for computer games research seems evident.
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Danish newspaper establishes news room in Second Life

New-comer Danish newspaper 24timer (named after Jack Bauer’s show, I’m sure) has established a “news room” inside Second Life and will report on virtual happenings for a week.
I haven’t seen decidedly negative game (or virtual world) coverage in Danish media for quite some time. Times they are a’changing.

(The paper can be downloaded in PDF format or viewed on-screen – all it requires is that you read Danish).

Paper on role-playing game communication out

I wrote a paper with Anders Tychsen, Michael Hitchens and Susana Tosca which is now published:

Tychsen, Anders & Smith, Jonas Heide & Hitchens, Michael & Tosca, Susana. Communication in Multi-Player Role Playing Games – The Effect of Medium. Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment (Lecture Notes in Computer Science). Berlin: Springer Verlag.

Abstract: The Pen-and-Paper role-playing game is a successful example of collaborative interactive narrative. Meanwhile, computer-based role-playing games, while structurally similar, offer quite different narrative experiences. Here results are presented of an experimental study of role-playing gamers in Pen-and-Paper and computer-supported settings. Communication patterns are shown to vary significantly on measures such as the share of in-character statements and the share of dramatically motivated statements. These results are discussed in the light of differences between the two gaming forms and finally some design implications are discussed.

Find it at Springer or, if you don’t have access, try this version.