SEGA

Since the 1980s, video gaming has steadily grown in popularity and moved from the cultural periphery toward its mainstream. With the emergence of the field of game studies around the turn of the millennium and similar movements in other disciplines, games took their first steps on the research stage, but, whilst these attempts have been commendable and important, the methods employed were generally derived from research into other media and therefore unsuited for studying the specific qualities of the gaming experience.

One factor that is rarely taken into account in previous studies about gaming, is the self-representation and self-experience of the player in the game. One of the unique characteristics of play is that it reserves a role for the person taking part in it (which can sometimes be observed in the fact that the player will refer to their in-game identity as ‘I’).

The research in SEGA will be broken down into two parts.

On the one hand, we will study how a specific role is shaped and embedded in game play (selfrepresentation) which can involve factors as diverse as platform, narrative, interface and controls(witness the success of the Nintendo Wii controllers).

On the other hand, we will look into how the player experiences their own role, their ‘imagined self’, and how this influences the various other factors involved in the overall game experience such as immersion, the sense of involvement, the feeling of flow and how his relates to overall game enjoyment.

The general aim of the project is to identify and describe the parameters involved in shaping the self experience, to analyse how they relate to one another and to evaluate the potential for improving future game experiences through new formats and technologies.