UFOs in SimCity
By Brian Keegan SimCity is one of my favorite computer game franchises from my childhood. I began playing SimCity 2000 when it required writing bootup batch scripts to allocate 4 […]
Category Archives: research
Interview with Jessica Hammer: Designing games that change mental models of discrimination and bias
Play As Life met up with researcher Jessica Hammer who was presenting her work at the Meaningful Play 2012 conference on serious games to talk about her game that will help […]
In My Tribe—Digital Elves
By Nathaniel Poor, PhD. A while ago, when I was playing Dragon Age II, I was reading over some wiki entry for elves in the game. It went on about […]
Designing games for pigs (and humans!): Interview with team behind the “Playing with Pigs” project
By Yvette Wohn Recently, researchers reported that they developed a game that humans can play with pigs (see their website for more details on the game “Pig Chase” and the larger […]
An underlying explanation for why Zynga risks talent drain
By Yvette Wohn (cross-posted on yvettewohn.com) This NYT article talks about how the aggressive culture at Zynga may pressure employees to leave. In short, the article suggests that employees of […]
No noobs plz! Barriers to entry in World of Warcraft
“WoW is an inherently social game, yet I wanted to be anti-social because of fear of the consequences of making a mistake. But because of the way the game is structured, I had to be social in order to advance beyond a certain point, so I gave up.”
Men who play female avatars play more like “women” than actual women
It’s pretty well known that the female avatars prancing around in MMOs such as World of Warcraft are not necessarily played by women. But what happens when men start putting […]
Finally: A Black Female Protagonist in a Game
It is very rare to find a non-white female character as the main character in video games. Many studies of triple A titles (big budget games) have shown that women […]
Cultural Differences in Social Game Play: Asians vs Whites
By Yvette Wohn Survey results of 176 Facebook game players showed significant differences between Asians and Caucasians in play motivation, perceptions of gifting and the extent to which the players engage in […]
Playing games with no handheld controls: Just use your muscles!
By D. Yvette Wohn When the Nintendo Wii came out, people were fascinated with how the game controller- the Wii-mote- could detect their motion. Although motion-detection devices had been available, […]
