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).
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.
I rambled a bit below on player rating systems. On that note we have a (much more) interesting new article on Game Research about Trust, Cooperation, and Reputation in Massively Multiplayer Online Games by Tony Tulathimutte.
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My evaluation comitee has found my dissertation (draft version final version) to be defensible, which means I move on to the final level: Defending the thing on 7 December.
We are close now, we feels it…
Last night I had the dubious honour of playing Dawn of War on national television – in a segment on video game ratings. Note to self: The whole “talk while playing” idea probably sounds better than it actually is (come to think of it, it sounds pretty dumb in the first place).
