Tech Reports

Tech Report kmi-04-23 Abstract

Designing Multiplayer Games to Facilitate Emergent Social Behaviours Online
Techreport ID: kmi-04-23
Date: 2004
Author(s): Yanna Vogiazou and Marc Eisenstadt

This paper discusses an exploratory case study of the design of games that facilitate spontaneous social interaction and group behaviours among distributed individuals, based largely on symbolic presence state changes. We present the principles guiding the design of our game environment: presence as a symbolic phenomenon, the importance of good visualization and the potential for spontaneous self-organization among groups of people. Our game environment, comprising a family of multiplayer bumper-car style games, is described, followed by a discussion of lessons learned from observing users of the environment. Finally, we reconsider and extend our design principles in light of our observations.

Publication(s):

Submitted to: ITSE - International Journal of Interactive Technology and Smart Education, Special Issue on 'Social Learning through Gaming'

Future Internet

Knowledge
Management Multimedia &
Information Systems Narrative
Hypermedia New Media Systems Semantic Web &
Knowledge Services

Future Internet is...

With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Internet's physical infrastructure, software, and content now play an integral part of the lives of everyone on the planet, whether they interact with it directly or not. Now nearing its fifth decade, the Internet has shown remarkable resilience and flexibility in the face of ever increasing numbers of users, data volume, and changing usage patterns, but faces growing challenges in meetings the needs of our knowledge society. Globally, many major initiatives are underway to address the need for more scientific research, physical infrastructure investment, better education, and better utilisation of the Internet. Within Japan, USA and Europe major new initiatives have begun in the area.

To succeed the Future Internet will need to address a number of cross-cutting challenges including:

Scalability in the face of peer-to-peer traffic, decentralisation, and increased openness

Trust when government, medical, financial, personal data are increasingly trusted to the cloud, and middleware will increasingly use dynamic service selection