Framework to understand players' generated content

Call it grey literature if you like. All I can say is that it has really helped me in shaping my ideas for my dissertation. I guess for my study I need both: literature review of academic endeavours and everything I can dig from the blogsphere. I learn a lot from the latter from the few weeks of commentaries I have been giving to postings and articles from members of the gaming community in cybersapce.

And again, today I find an excellent article by Aldo Tolino in Gamasutra: Beyond Play: Analyzing Player-Generated Creations. Tolino analyzes player-generated creations inspired by videogames and calls them ludic artifacts. He makes a distinction that ludic artifacts only refers to artifacts that are made available in the internet beyond the confine of the game environment. He proposes a framework or what he calls "a taxanomy of ludic artifacts" to "better understanding player-created content and the motivation for players to creatively expand on their gaming experience" and for designers to design games in a way "which encourages players to not only play the game, but to transcend the video game itself and invent their own game-based creations".

We have learnt from Klastrup that a player's “continuous presence…helps keep the fiction of the world alive”. A player's presence and gameplay not only mediates the fiction of the gameworld, but also the fictions other players create. He becomes "part of the many "texts" which enable the collective and ongoing (re)creation of the world". I wonder whether players will get hook to a game longer if he is able to create his own content. Furthermore, the practices of generating ludic artifacts also transcend game playing experience beyond the game environment. How will these practices mediate the game playing expeirence, what player read from the games and the conversation he carries within and beyond the game?

Before reading the article, my understanding of players' generated contents is too narrow. There are many practices in Granada Espada that I see now as such. Tolino explains how players' motivation to create can be understood from any of the six categories he proposes. And within each categories, the practices can be situated to represent whether they afford players denser immersion into the games (which means the practices are closely linked to the rules of playing the games) or transcend players beyond the confine of the game environment. Again, excellent piece of writing!