Poster Information
| Title | Is the Play the Thing? Video Versus Board and the Space Between |
| Presenter(s) | Nicolas Lalone |
| Session | Conference Reception, Game Exhibition, and Poster Session |
| Time | Thursday, October 16, 7:00p-10:00p |
| Location | Ballroom |
| Format | Poster Presentation |
| Description | At the 6th Joint International Conference of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour stated that, "We have to understand the computer itself as an institution." The computer is an institution much like the societies and cultures that birthed it - disjointed, hegemonic, asymmetric in their understanding of what the computer is for, and trapped in the ontology of the language computation was designed through - English. This mishmash of development we call a computer has followed a singular path since the personal computer was released in the early 1980s and has grown to a near ubiquitous state (Dourish, 2004). This research in progress examines the changes in gameplay, strategy, and communication as a game moves from one end of the dialectic to the other. To be more specific, this study analyzes the changes in behavior between how players engage each other in a table top game - Settlers of Catan - and how those same players change their strategies once they play those same players in a virtual version of that same table top game - the Xbox version of Settlers of Catan. These players will be fully recorded during their initial play sessions in a focus group style manner. After 12 sessions, we will move those players to 12 virtual games. The virtual games will be recorded via game capture devices and the players themselves will be interviewed after their sessions to discuss the differences in their gameplay. |