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"It is always a lot of fun!": exploring dimensions of digital game experience using focus group methodology

Published: 14 November 2007 Publication History

Abstract

This paper focuses on digital game experience: the feelings and experiences people have when they play digital games. Digital game experience is not a one-dimensional concept. Great variety exists in game genres and game players, and game experiences will differ accordingly. To date, game experience is studied in a rather fragmented way. As such, the field still lacks a common vocabulary and a shared taxonomy of the different dimensions of game experience. In this paper we describe a focus group study and present a tentative, but comprehensive categorisation of game experience. Focus groups with various types of gamers were organised to capture a full first-hand account of game experiences and second, findings were discussed in an expert meeting in which empirical findings were consolidated with existing theoretical findings. The categorisation bears relevance for both game theorists and game developers wanting to get to the heart of digital game experience.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    Future Play '07: Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Future Play
    November 2007
    279 pages
    ISBN:9781595939432
    DOI:10.1145/1328202
    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: 14 November 2007

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    Author Tags

    1. categorisation
    2. digital game experiences
    3. emotions
    4. focus group methodology

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    Futureplay2007: Futureplay 2007
    November 14 - 17, 2007
    Toronto, Canada

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    • (2024)GameFlow Affordances: Towards a Tool for Designing Gameful ExperiencesExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3650887(1-7)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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