Communication in Games

Abstract: This thesis answers the question of how, and what, people communicate to each other while playing games. The presented conclusions offer guidance to computer game developers on what means of communication they should support in games in order to provide better possibilities for interaction between people that play games together. The data for this study was collected from two sources: the first was during LinCon, an annual game convention in Linköping, and consists of four players playing a game of WarCraft: The Board Game; the second is from a game session of the multiplayer roleplaying game World of WarCraft. The sessions where documented using a combination of video recordings and participant observation in order to increase the quality and speed of the analysis. The video recordings were subsequently sorted into labelled passages and then organised into categories based on their similarity to each other with the purpose of finding categories and means of information exchange. The analysis identify five categories of information that people exchange between each other while playing games and three categories of how they convey that information. The implication of these categories on game design practice is also discussed.