We suggest that the designed game environment also plays a role in shaping the quality and structure of chat discourse, and that chat usability, or chatability, should be a design desideratum in MOGs, given that chatting is a major reason some online gamers play. In a classic treatise on computer game design, Crawford argued that underlying technical constraints and possibilities strongly influence game play design and the resultant player experience. These findings suggest perspectives that could be explored in research on multi-tasking in other, e.g., work, environments. For others, as suggested by the long-time player quoted above, the social benefits may outweigh the frustration and cost of making errors in game play indeed, a desire for social interaction may be what motivates BZFlag players to play and chat at the same time in the first place. For these successful multitaskers, factors such as youth and experience with the interface may favor success. In contrast, the BZFlag results suggest that for some users who chat while playing the game, the attention they allocate is largely sufficient for each task. Activity interruption can also result in frustration and stress. It has been claimed that the continuous partial attention required by multitasking causes errors due to insufficient attention. The study s findings have implications for multitasking research, as well. These differences can be attributed to the demanding nature of FPS game play and the smaller (and thus more ma- nageable) number of participants in the game environment. Public chatting in BZFlag is also more interactive than comments posted to Flickr, YouTube, or iTV SMS. FPS chat differs from other CMCMC, however, in that messages tend to focus on the stated purpose of the site (the game), rather than digressing onto other topics.
In these environments, CMC consists mostly of one-off comments interspersed periodically with interactive exchanges, in which responses tend to reply to an immediately preceding message. Similar to other CMCMC such as comments posted to YouTube and Flickr and text messages sent from mobile phones to interactive television pro- grams (iTV SMS), FPS chat takes place in a visually engaging environment in which textual com- menting/chat is secondary to the presentation of graphical content. In addition to providing evidence that supports a principled distinction between MMORPGs and FPSs, which is important for game research, the present study contributes to a small but growing body of research that seeks to understand and classify types of convergent media computer-mediated communication (CMCMC). If so, then the findings of studies of chat in FPSs are in fact quite consistent taken together, they underscore the need to distinguish systematically between MMORPGs and FPSs in MOG chat research. What was coded as socioemotional communication in other studies appears to be similar to what we coded as game play reactions (see Table 3). However, it is also possible that our results are less different from theirs than they seem. More generally, these differences could account for why our study found less social activity than some other studies of FPS chat. The design of BZFlag thus leaves less time than other FPS games for chat, which may contribute to the abbreviated, task-focused character of chat in the game. This puts a player in observer mode and allows him to view the rest of the match as a spectator, during which time he may engage in conversation with other spectators. In other FPSs (e.g., Counter- Strike, America s Army ), player death results in remov- al from game play for the remaining duration of the round.
#JUSTIN TV BZFLAG FREE#
As a result of this, a player is constantly engaged in action and does not have an extended period of free time during which to communicate with his team, the opposition, or observers of the game.
Another feature is that when a player is eliminated, he is not removed for the duration of the remaining game instead he respawns with a new tank. explain the relatively high degree of coherence some conversations in BZFlag chat achieve.
0 kommentar(er)
