Off-Peak: An Examination of Ordinary Player Experience

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Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
A4 Artikkeli konferenssijulkaisussa
Date
2021-05-06
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Mcode
Degree programme
Language
en
Pages
12
Series
CHI 2021 - Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Abstract
Videogames' increasing cultural relevance and suffusion into everyday use contexts suggests they can no longer be considered novelties. Broadly speaking, games research at CHI has concerned two forms of peak experience—historically, research aimed to support flow, or maximise enjoyment and positive emotions; more recently, scholarship engages with more varied experiences of intense emotion, such as emotional challenge. In different ways, both approaches emphasise extra-ordinary player experience (PX). Conversely, videogame play and PX have become more routine—indeed, more ordinary—as the medium's cultural presence grows. In this paper, we argue that HCI games research is conceptually ill-equipped to investigate these increasingly common and often desirable experiences. We conceptualise "ordinary player experience'' – as familiar, emotionally moderate, co-attentive, and abstractly memorable – articulating a phenomenon whose apparent mundanity has seen it elude description to date. We discuss opportunities to productively employ ordinary PX in HCI games research, alongside conceptual implications for PX and player wellbeing.
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Citation
Tyack , A & Mekler , E 2021 , Off-Peak: An Examination of Ordinary Player Experience . in CHI 2021 - Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems : Making Waves, Combining Strengths . , 115 , ACM , ACM SIGCHI Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems , Yokohama , Japan , 08/05/2021 . https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445230