Susana Tosca

Understanding Video Games now in stores

The video games text-book which I have co-written with Susana Tosca and Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen has now left the printers and reached the virtual shelves of Amazon.com.
The book is so interesting that it actually has a (somewhat rudimentary) Companion Website featuring the book’s brief introduction chapter.

If you’re in Denmark, here’s a list of fine web book stores that will be happy to ship the book to you.

If you’re in the UK, you can get it directly from Routledge.

It’s 16.99 UK Pounds / 29.95 USD, took some time to write, and we do hope you buy it :-)

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.

Game seminar Friday next week

The University of Copenhagen is hosting the next down-to-Earth but often pleasant public game seminar in our twice-a-year series. Program below:

To Kill or not to Kill � and other presentations on computer games research

Friday November 12, 2004
MODINET�s Conference Room 5.2.29a (old KUA)

PROGRAMME:
09.15-09.25: Welcome
09.25-10.05: Gitte Stald Perspectives on Fascination of Death and Violence in Games
10.05-10.45: Kjetil Sandvik Game Characters with Scruples?
10.45-11.00: Coffee
11.00-11.40: Susana Tosca To Kill or not to Kill: the Butterfly Effect in Blade Runner
11.40-12.20: Troels Degn-Johansson On Death and Destruction in Strategy Games
12.20-13.15: Lunch
13.15-13.55: Jesper Juul What the Game Means: About Grand Theft Auto 3
13.55-14.10: coffee
14.10-14.50: Charlie Breindahl Racing Games
14.50-15.30: Jonas Heide Smith Games, Peacocks, and the Theory of Conflict