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Where everybody knows your game: the appeal and function of game cafés in western Europe

Published: 29 October 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Game cafés are popping up in cities across Western Europe and are rapidly becoming popular places in the tangible world of the gamer. Compared to studies focused on Asia, motivations and activities of Western European visitors of game cafés are relatively unclear and not discussed in academic literature. Since understanding these motivations would contribute to explanations of why and how people play games, focus groups and contextual inquiries were organized with visitors of Dutch game cafés. The findings indicate that- similar to Asia - Western European game cafés can be seen as third places, a home base separate from home and work or school. Moreover, this research identifies why a game café and a virtual game world can both be regarded as a third place.

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        cover image ACM Other conferences
        ACE '09: Proceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology
        October 2009
        456 pages
        ISBN:9781605588643
        DOI:10.1145/1690388
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Published: 29 October 2009

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        Author Tags

        1. contextual inquiry
        2. digital gaming
        3. focus groups
        4. game café
        5. internet café
        6. social interaction
        7. social play
        8. third place

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