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Beings in the game-world: characters, avatars, and players

Published: 03 December 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Immersive and engaging are words often used interchangeably to describe the player's experience of gameplay without clear distinction between what these terms refer to, and without investigation of the underlying basis of each experience. This paper aims to build upon previous work by other authors on the nature of the player's experience of gameplay by focusing on how these experiences are mediated by the player's point of control within the game-world. The relationship between the player and their point of control in the game-world is discussed in terms of embodiment to articulate differences between the terms avatar and character, distinctions that are in turn used as a basis for understanding how different attitudes towards the activity of gameplay arise from the interplay of different relationships between the player and their point of control. Finally there is a consideration of how the relationship between the player and their point of control and resultantly their attitudes towards the activity of gameplay may influence different types of an experience of being-in-the-game-world, namely immersion, engagement, presence, and telepresence.

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  • (2020)Paper to PixelsProceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3357236.3395502(1433-1451)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2020
  • (2019)The Surrogate Body in PlayProceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play10.1145/3311350.3347189(397-411)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2019
  • (2018)Design Patterns for Voice Interaction in GamesProceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play10.1145/3242671.3242712(5-17)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2018
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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
IE '07: Proceedings of the 4th Australasian conference on Interactive entertainment
December 2007
174 pages
ISBN:9781921166877

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RMIT University

Melbourne, Australia

Publication History

Published: 03 December 2007

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Author Tags

  1. avatars
  2. characters
  3. embodiment
  4. telepresence

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  • Research-article

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IE07: Australian Conference on Interactive Entertainment
December 3 - 5, 2007
Melbourne, Australia

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Overall Acceptance Rate 64 of 148 submissions, 43%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2020)Paper to PixelsProceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3357236.3395502(1433-1451)Online publication date: 3-Jul-2020
  • (2019)The Surrogate Body in PlayProceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play10.1145/3311350.3347189(397-411)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2019
  • (2018)Design Patterns for Voice Interaction in GamesProceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play10.1145/3242671.3242712(5-17)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2018
  • (2018)A Design Framework for Awareness Cues in Distributed Multiplayer GamesProceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3173574.3173817(1-14)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2018
  • (2016)Player/Avatar body relations in multimodal augmented reality gamesProceedings of the 18th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction10.1145/2993148.2997618(550-553)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2016
  • (2014)Whom are you looking for?Proceedings of the first ACM SIGCHI annual symposium on Computer-human interaction in play10.1145/2658537.2658698(171-179)Online publication date: 19-Oct-2014
  • (2010)The anatomy of engagementProceedings of the 28th Annual European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics10.1145/1962300.1962315(59-66)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2010
  • (2010)Player as parent, character as childProceedings of the 14th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments10.1145/1930488.1930494(25-31)Online publication date: 6-Oct-2010

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