We know this picture is absurd, and not only because the controllers are turned off.
It's in the way they're leaning forward, the open-mouth smile and pursed lips,
the suggestion of triumph and bitter defeat.
We know that this image exaggerates people's actual experiences with games.
But that knowledge doesn't show in the ways that we write or think about games academically.
Instead, we study emotionally moving or challenging experiences.
We evaluate game designs with the assumption that higher self-report scores are better,
we value strong responses over subtle ones,
And we have a long history of studying games in terms of flow,
what the theory calls optimal experience.
These ideas are foundational to HCI games research for good reason.
But these infrequent, extra-ordinary experiences, are what we recognise as exaggerated in these photos.
And what we're missing so far are ways to account for more prevalent, ordinary experiences of play.
Our work contributes a conceptual model to articulate and reason about these experiences.
Ordinary and extra-ordinary aren't distinct categories of experience.
We're borrowing from work on ordinary UX that recognises them as opposite ends of a continuum.
Our model of ordinary PX draws ideas together from more commonly cited areas;
obviously HCI, particularly UX, and psychology, and some that aren't seen as often
like game studies and consumer research.
Our definition has four components: familiarity, moderate emotion, co-attentiveness, and abstract memory.
You can find the detailed descriptions of those in the paper.
For today, I'm just going to talk about co-attentiveness.
Twin-stick control isn't intuitive, or easy.
If you're comfortable using a gamepad, it might be hard to remember a time when it demanded
(mental) effort and concentration, when it demanded attention away from other aspects of play.
But eventually you become familiar, and there comes a time when you don't need to look down
to locate A, B, X, and Y.
Your familiarity with the button layout expands the play situation, to include the gamepad
and events on-screen at the same time.
This is a basic form of co-attentiveness.
Becoming more literate in patterns of game design again reduces their demands on your attention
and so what we think of as 'play' can expand to incorporate things like watching TV,
holding up your end of the conversation, or knowing where you are on your regular bus route.
The second contribution of this work is to demonstrate how our reliance on a few theories
and concepts has shaped and limited the ways that we think about games and play.
The idea that we can have optimality, that we can identify a generalisable model of good player experience,
is so ingrained that we don't have the words to talk about games in other ways.
I wrote this paper to figure out how to account for games that our theories and concepts can't explain.
We've seen huge changes in game design over the last decade
and we really have to expand the ways that we theorise games to match.
Neither ordinary nor extra-ordinary PX concepts can speak to the singular genius
of something like Oikospiel Book 1.
But we have to find the words.