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Friday, April 16, 2010

CHI 2010: Understanding and Evaluating Cooperative Games

via Ashley @ CHI2010
Understanding and Evaluating Cooperative Games
Research sponsored by Bardel Entertainment, who is developing a VW for kids
Simon Fraser University
Related Paper>>
Very few successful VIDEO games (not facebook games)
Build as cooperation as after thought

What cooperative patterns work and what don’t?

14 games w / coop patterns 4 kids
e.g.: Harry potter and goblet of fire, lego star wars, wall e, kung fu panda, rock band, little big planet, kameo, etc.

Principles of cooperative design (Rocha et al 2008):
  • Complementarity between character roles
  • Synergies btw abilities (allow one character to help the other)
  • Abilities that can only be used on another player
  • Shared goals – forces player to cooperate together thru synchronized goals
  • Special rules to allow collaboration (specific constraints on how actions affect friendly players)
  • Camera:
    • Split
    • Static
    • Dynamic with team
  • Two characters Interacting with same object
  • Shared puzzles
  • Shared character (lego star wars – two players can share character between them)

Mario Galaxy:
Limited resources – number of stars collected in shared resource
Shared goal – goal for both players is to gather certain amt of stars

8 – 12 year olds target (tested 6 – 16 y.o.s) – video tape playing + post play interviews

Performance metrics:
  • Laughter or excitement together
  • Worked out strategies planned strategies, succeeded
  • Helping by controlling vs telling
  • When did they wait for ea other
  • When did they get in ea other’s way

Laughter:
Lego Star Wars: got most laughter; little big planet 2nd most
Causes for increased laughter: narrative, funny character moments, shared goals btw players

Worked out strategies:
Lego SW b/c sharing puzzles together within a game… shared goals and complementarity betw characters

Helping each other:
Kameo, then LSW – action adventure games
Kameo is 3d… it was hard for younger kids, so a lot of helping from peers
Shared goals, synergies between goals

Wait for each other:
LSW, Kameo
Causes: shared puzzles, shared goals, camera (in LSW, all characters have to be together before you proceed to next room – have to wait for everyone and work together to move on)

Got in each other’s way:
LSW b/c of camera – condensing all characters in one space, tend to get in each other’s way

Conclusions:
Camera = really important – interesting pattern affecting cooperation

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