A design framework for awareness cues in distributed multiplayer games

Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Publication Date

4-2018

Abstract

In the physical world, teammates develop situation awareness about each other's location, status, and actions through cues such as gaze direction and ambient noise. To support situation awareness, distributed multiplayer games provide awareness cues - information that games automatically make available to players to support cooperative gameplay. The design of awareness cues can be extremely complex, impacting how players experience games and work with teammates. Despite the importance of awareness cues, designers have little beyond experiential knowledge to guide their design. In this work, we describe a design framework for awareness cues, providing insight into what information they provide, how they communicate this information, and how design choices can impact play experience. Our research, based on a grounded theory analysis of current games, is the first to provide a characterization of awareness cues, providing a palette for game designers to improve design practice and a starting point for deeper research into collaborative play.

Keywords

Awareness cues, Distributed multiplayer games, Game design, Situation awareness, Workspace awareness

Discipline

Information Security

Research Areas

Information Systems and Management

Publication

Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Montreal, Canada, 2018 April 21-26

First Page

1

Last Page

14

ISBN

9781450356213

Identifier

10.1145/3173574.3173817

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

City or Country

New York

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173817

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS