Understanding and evaluating cooperative games

Abstract

Cooperative design has been an integral part of many games. With the success of games like Left4Dead, many game designers and producers are currently exploring the addition of cooperative patterns within their games. Unfortunately, very little research investigated cooperative patterns or methods to evaluate them. In this paper, we present a set of cooperative patterns identified based on analysis of fourteen cooperative games. Additionally, we propose Cooperative Performance Metrics (CPM). To evaluate the use of these CPMs, we ran a study with a total of 60 participants, grouped in 2-3 participants per session.Participants were asked to play four cooperative games (Rock Band 2, Lego Star Wars, Kameo, and Little Big Planet). Videos of the play sessions were annotated using the CPMs, which were then mapped to cooperative patterns that caused them. Results, validated through inter-rater agreement, identify several effective cooperative patterns and lessons for future cooperative game designs.

The Effect of Closely-Coupled Interaction on Player Experience in Casual Games

“…Game patterns are descriptions of reoccurring interaction, that depict how game components are used by players to affect various aspects of gameplay [11]. Since cooperation became an integral part of many multiplayer games and virtual communities, defining and analyzing effective cooperative patterns are the primarily goals in game design studies [8,12].…”

“…Studies presented in [8,12,16] investigate cooperative patterns based on existing games. In [16], Zagal et al explore cooperative patterns within traditional board games, and summarize observations that can be applied to computer games.…”

“…Work presented by Rocha et al [12] introduces a list of cooperative patterns based on the analysis of numerous commercial computer games available on the market. This list is considerably extended by El-Nasr et al [8] by analyzing more recent games that support some form of collaboration between players. Here, the authors also investigate which pattern triggers which event (e.g.…”

“…Although cooperative patterns have been widely analyzed [16,12,8], these works always assume presence of communication between players or even an ability to see each other. Oppositely to the existing studies, our work focuses on collaboration in games where communication is not supported and players are remotely located.…”

“…By analyzing different types of cooperation (based on cooperative game patterns [8]), we aim to study the effect of closely-coupled collaboration on player experience in casual games through a comparison with loosely-coupled interaction.…”