Playercentered game environments: Assessing player opinions, experiences, and issues Game developers have identified, explored and discussed many of the key issues that arise for players interacting in game worlds. However, there is a need to assess the thoughts and opinions of gameplayers on these issues, through structured, empirical studies. This paper reports the results of two playercentered studies aimed at investigating these issues from the playeru0027s perspective. The first study, a focus group, supports some of the issues identified by game developers; consistency, intuitiveness and freedom of expression, and identifies new issues; immersion and physics. The second study, a questionnaire, examined the relationship of these issues to gametype preference and gameplaying experience. This paper represents important initial exploratory research that supplements the existing literature by focusing on the playeru0027s perspective and exploring which issues and context have the most impact on player enjoyment.

Making more of games: Cultivating perspectivetaking through game design Abstract   Perspectivetaking xe2x80x93 the consideration of othersu0027 mental states and subjective experiences xe2x80x93 has been acknowledged as a vital component of interpersonal interactions and communication across divergent social groups. Yet, perspectivetaking is neither simple nor automatic; it requires motivation and practice. Though still a nascent area of research, video games have been presented as means of engaging students in perspectivetaking due to their immersive and interactive nature. We offer to expand this view and examine the relevance of game design to perspectivetaking. Introducing a multiplecase exploratory case study of two groupsu0027 work in a game design workshop conducted with high school freshmen, we examine three facets of game design that position this practice as a potentially fruitful context for cultivating perspectivetaking: (i) game design is otheroriented xe2x80x93 games are created with the intent of being used by others xe2x80x93 and hence could elicit motivation to analyze oneu0027s work from the perspective of future players; (ii) games are an interactive activity that can be pursued over short periods of time, in public, allowing designers to receive immediate feedback via playtesting sessions; (iii) as game design entails translating abstract insights concerning usersu0027 experiences to concrete design decisions, games can function as xe2x80x9cobjectstothinkwithxe2x80x9d in the case of perspectivetaking.