From Keyboard to Gameboard.

Lots of Papers

A Transmedia Comparison of Digital and Tabletop Board Games
By: Brian Magerko

Compare board games to computer games

Survey highly rated modern ames form BGG

What are the main game mechanics...

Games

Ra

• 2-4 Competative.
  
• Players draw a random tile to add to tiles on board
• Start an auction for tiles on boaqrd (voluntarily or involuntarily via a specail drawn tile)
• Spend a god tile to hand ick a tile
• Decide wch peronsla tile to discard
• Table talke /goad other into decision
• Points are based on personal tile values after three rounds.

Why is ti fun?

• Bid decision making involves many factors
• values and probabilities change within a round and as the game gets closer to the end
• competative auction

Mapping to digital games

• Auctioning of currency for non-replenishing resources with the value of both the currency and the resources changing over time has no obvious..(slide changed)

Munchkin

• Flip cards to kick down a dungeon door
• fight monsters and get treasure for succes or run away
• Play curse/special cards on self or others
• Play weapon/armor/class cards on self.

Why is Munchkin fun?

• Humor
• adaptation of other game types
• Rules are'n even serious
• Asynchronous competition/collaboration

Mapping Munchkin to digital games

• Humor rarely seen in digital games (self-referential and breaking the 4th wall

Settlers of Catan (skipped for time)

Lost Cities

• Turn-based 2 players
• Players maintain hand of 8 cards from 4 suits
• Play expedition, number cards
• draw a card
• cars aare unique --> randomness is big

Why is this fun?

• Information game: trying to map opponents actions & game state to opponent's hand & Intentions
• Strategic choice of playing investor cards/when to play number cards

Mapping to digital games

• Concept of drawing random, unique resources from the same limited, fixed pool
• Tech tree developmentin in strategy games, online one player can go down a specific tree (civ)

Suggests the need for taxonomy...to discuss mechanics

Contrasting Player Conflicts in Digital Games and Board Games
By: Ben Medler

Defines game as conflict. Previous looked into Conflict Theory (How Humans begin, maintain, and resolve Conflict) and also Imartiality Spectrum (Game mechanics as neutral moderators between players.)

Going to look at Socai conflicts today: Anonymous Conflict in digital games, and how Tacit Conflicts in board games.

Anonymous Conflicts

• Artificial intelligence
• Strcit Rules
• Single Player Experience

Tacit Conflict

• Player realtionshipos
• Bendable rules
• Flow between competititve, cooperative, and collaborative.

Fairness: In digital games, the AI is used to balance the game/throught the mechanics (In mario cart the slower players get new bonuses that the lead players don't.
Board games the Players provide balance, and use indfferent mechanics (like randomness and luck)

Rules: Digital games have set rules and set win conditions. Baord games have bendable rules, builtiple rules sets (Expansions) and hosue rules.

Conflict Play Styles: Digital Games: Cheating, Grief play, Community Policies. Baord games Information Aggregation (you can see cheaters) you can experience groupthink, and accepted griefing.

Implications: Digital Games could implement bendable rules and provide dissemination of information. Board games, the next step is going Digital. (MS play surface table.)

Pigs in the Poke: The Dynamics of Traditional Village Life, Games of Chance and Strategy
By: Brian Hayden

Comparison of Monopoly vs. Pigs in the Poke

• Common element: Self-interest
• Difference:
• Capitalism vs. Tribal subsistence economy
• 'Individual vs. Social Strategies
• Familiar Culure vs unfamiliar
• "Serious Play" vs. "Fun Social Play"

The presenter continues on to talk about the various aspects of the economy of tribal living. The game is being developed in the context of anthropological study.

Lessons Learned From Building Board Games
By: Francisco Ortega-Grimaldo

The Ethnography of Collectible Miniature Game Storyworlds
By: Ethan Watrall and Patrick Shaw

Some concepts to lay out:

• An era of entertainment media convergence-narrative unfold across multiple media channels and rpoducts
• Audiences have become information hurnters and gatherers, tracking down cahracter information and plot-points
• Making connections across mutlipel texts within the same storyworld.

Shat is a story world

• Multiple media channels are an opportunity to chreate holistic storytelling realities in which many different stories can be told.
• Stories are bound together in a fictional reality that is designed (and evolved) with continuity and canon in mind.
• The reality connects the stories together, and is not only fed by the stories, but in turn feeds the stories.

Star Wars is a great example. The universe has rules and everyone agrees to participate in that context.

Question: Do story products that exist within a rich and compelling storyworld provide greater enjoyment for the audience than story products that do not?

Research Focus: Tabletop RPG's, with Miniatures.

• RPG materials - significant space is dedicated to in-depth information that defines the games world.
• Researchers focused study on HeroClix
• Tabletop miature RPG produced by Wizkids Inc.
  

Study Method
Ethnographic portion

• Phase 1 Interviews with gatekeepers (store owners and WizKids judges)
• Phase 2: Participant observation at two local game/comic stores (GS1 and GS2)
• Phase 3: limited open ended interview with players

Field notes coding

• game store
• competition
  
• figures
• game play
• other
• personal
• rule clarifications
  
• strategy
• Storyworld
• teams

At GS1 the discussion took place around the comic book sotries and associate

GS2 had much lower storyworld discussion

Very little cross pollination between the two venues.

Games in Libraries: Past, Present, and Future
By: Scott Nicholson

The Anti-Immersive Theatre of Role-Playing Games
By: Michael Ryan Skolnik

Those presentations without notes are papers I missed due to going to a different session.