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As per July 1st 2007, my PhD-thesis on multi-player games across platforms is finished, and will be handed in for review soonish. To whet yer appetites, I have included the abstract below. Please contact me if you would like to see more of the work.
Role-Playing Games: Beyond Boundaries
If there is one genre of gaming that has crossed the traditional boundaries of media, platform and cultures, it is the Role-Playing Game (RPG). Forming one of the major genres of games, the character-driven concept of RPGs have proven extremely portable and mutable, from the physically embodied live action and tabletop formats to the various digital, online, mobile, enhanced- and augmented reality formats. Furthermore, RPGs are utilized outside the gaming sphere job training, teamwork building and simulation exercises.
This thesis is an examination of a series of aspects of RPGs, with the emphasis placed on the multi-player version, as these games cross between different media of expression. Through a series of theoretical exercises and thorough empirical study involving more than 150 hours of recorded play, the form and function of these games are clarified, and the interactions of the players examined in unprecedented detail.
Multi-player RPGs are of notable interest because they form a very rare example of a collaborative storytelling system, a system that is has so far been impossible to create digitally, despite the commercial interests and the obvious application in next-generation interactive entertainment experiences – e.g. interactive dramas such as the well-known Façade prototype. By analyzing how RPGs operate, however, valuable insights is gained as to how storytelling systems capable of handling multiple users, or even just one, could be designed at the high level of architecture.
The work presented in this thesis was initiated when academic research on RPGs was in its infancy. Apart from a few distributed groups of theorists working outside the academic and industry environment, a few scattered studies of RPGs and of course a rapidly growing games industry with a substantial amount of knowledge about how to develop digital RPGs but very little motivation for innovation, this project originated in a hiatus of knowledge, and therefore examines these games at their basal level. There had been no large-scale empirical experiments done on RPGs, and no studies of how the communication between the participating players varied as the games were ported between tabletop and digital media. In the past three years there have been a proliferation of new studies, and this is reflected in the new references that gradually appear in the papers that form the basis of this thesis, which were published from early 2005 and onwards.
This thesis presents models of how multi-player RPGs operate, based on existing theoretical knowledge and observations from the empirical experiments. Live Action RPGs (LARPs) and Massively Multi-player Online RPGs (MMORPGs) are also discussed and evaluated within the context of studying the player experience and the crucial requirement of controlling games that can feature thousands of players interacting within the same virtual world – whether physically or virtually. The major contribution of the presented work is however the results from a comprehensive series of empirical experiments, that have focused on several key features of RPG play, notably: 1) The operation of time within and outside multi-player games; 2) The player experience; 3) Interaction and communication between the game participants and 4) The relationship between the players and their fictional game characters.
The results show that the media of expression impacts directly on the way that players interact, communicate and play multi-player RPGs. For example, in the way that the game characters are utilized and how character- and game design can affect these patterns, which challenges the idea that for players to be immersed in their characters, they have to be able to project themselves into an essentially open vessel.
It is also shown how different factors are important in determining the quality of the gaming experience as a function of the game format, with the fictional game characters being highly important in digital RPGs, while the functionality of the player group is vital in tabletop contexts. Multi-player games are inherently complex and challenging to study empirically, and it is shown how traditional measures of predicting the quality of the gaming experience based on the predisposition of the players do not operate in multi-player games, forcing a revisal of such techniques traditionally utilized in single-user virtual environments.
Finally, multi-player games are shown to feature intricate and connected levels of game time, which can operate in a non-linear fashion, and even vary within the minds of the individual players.
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