Jaakko Stenros

Tampere University | UTA · School of Information Sciences

How games are built on the foundations of rules, and how rules—of which there are only five kinds—really work. Board games to sports, digital games to party games, gambling to role-playing games. They all share one thing in common: rules. Indeed, rules are the one and only thing game scholars agree is central to games. But what, in fact, are rules?...

Tämä artikkeli tarkastelee, miten lapset ja nuoret pelaavat digitaalisia pelejä, miten pelikulttuureihin osallistuminen rakentuu, ja kuinka sukupuoli ja ikä vaikuttavat näihin. Vuosittain 2019-2022 kahdelta helsinkiläiseltä ikäkohortilta kerätty pitkittäisaineisto antaa laajan kuvan 11-16-vuotiaiden koululaisten pelikulttuurisesta osallistumisesta....

Especially since the 2010s, we have seen rapidly increasing discussion and research on the causal and correlational relations between digital gaming and different dimensions of well-being. This quantitative study presents a starting point of a four-year longitudinal study of the connections between adolescents’ gaming motives, gaming culture partic...

The challenge of combining narrative and gameplay in live action role-playing games (larps) has been successfully negotiated with the use of runtime game mastering and interactive actors (ractors) performing non-player characters (NPC). Based on expert interviews six functions for the interactive actors (facilitating, content creation, character po...

Erotic larp is an emerging trend in the Nordic countries. Sexuality and socio-dramatic play have been combined in numerous ways in the past; what is new about this concentration of erotic embodied adult pretend play is that it is emerging from a culture of reflexive, critical, and bespoke design, as a tradition of art games. By studying 25 design a...

IJRP 12: Full Issue Table of Contents William J. White, Evan Torner, and Sarah Lynne Bowman,“Editorial: The Social Epistemology of Analog Role-Playing Game Studies” Reflections on the interdisciplinary and heterogeneous nature of role-playing games studies, as evident in the five uniquely distinct articles in Issue 12. Tadeu Rodrigues Iuama and Lui...

Milloin olet viimeksi pelannut jotakin peliä? Oliko viimeisin pelikertasi lyhyt mobiilipelihetki bussia odotellessa, pitkään odotettu viikonloppuseikkailu tietokoneella, pari kolikkoa peli-automaattiin kauppareissulla, matsi sulkista kaverin kanssa, pubivisa joukkueena, sanomalehdestä täytetty ristisanatehtävä tai vaikka lautapeli-ilta perheen kesk...

Collecting is a major part of the miniaturing pastime, in which enthusiasts collect, paint, and play games with small historical and fantasy wargaming and role-playing figurines. Miniaturists often have large collections of miniatures, and many buy more miniatures than they have time to paint. This quantity of unpainted miniatures is often referred...

In this chapter, we propose that academic papers on ephemeral development events, such as game jams and hackathonsHackathons, pay more attention when providing identifiable details of the events, or have a dedicated reference section (‘jamography’)Jamography detailing the referenced events in an identifiable manner in order to improve transparency...

Yrjö Hirn (1870–1952) was an early Finnish scholar of aesthetics. He was well-connected and widely travelled a century ago. In 1916 he published Barnlek in Swedish, a book on the play and games of children. This monograph draws on a wide array of sources and discusses children’s play as both a herald of things to come and as a living museum of past...

This article summarizes three years of studying game jams. Rooted in extensive field work — participating, organising, studying and discussing game jams — and multiple methods, we have explored different digital and non-digital jamming formats to apply in educational settings, especially in the Finnish context of general formal teaching for 16-19 y...

In game jam events games are created in collaboration and within design constraints, e.g. time limits and themes. Game jamming is a relatively novel pedagogical method, comparable to hackathons and other accelerated collaborative creation events. Earlier research suggests that game jams have a wide range of potential positive outcomes, such as lear...

Background. Miniaturing, or painting, collecting, and gaming with miniature wargaming figurines, is a popular, yet vastly underresearched subject. Previous research suggests a multitude of practices and ways of engaging with miniatures. Aim. This qualitative study explores the various elements of miniaturing to both map the phenomenon and build a f...

Game jams are intensive events focusing on creation. Their popularity and visibility have soared in recent years. The phenomenon has attracted the attention of scholars interested in education and learning, and the potential of game jams has been studied in various ways. Increasingly, game jams have come to be viewed as a site for learning. They ar...

Contributors from a range of disciplines explore boundary-crossing in videogames, examining both transgressive game content and transgressive player actions. Video gameplay can include transgressive play practices in which players act in ways meant to annoy, punish, or harass other players. Videogames themselves can include transgressive or upsetti...

Representations of LGBTQ (or queer) themes and characters have been scarce throughout the history of role-playing games. However, there is a gap between source material of a game and the actual play of it. Our chapter explores this gap with two objectives: first, the authors review what kind of queer existence is possible in tabletop, online multip...

Welcome to the Adult Play Special Issue. In this introduction, we (the editors) explain the origin of the collection and our unique take on what adult play means as a term. Rather than be specifically about sexual play, the term adult is taken here to reference the age of players. The article included how adults play, what they play with, and when...

Are shaggy seats which make cute noises playful or disruptive in a conference setting? This article pushes the limits of game scholars’ lusory attitude by breaching an academic seminar with a playful experiment. Five MurMur Moderator seats, interactive and interruptive furniture prototypes, were set up at a game research seminar where they were use...

Pokémon GO is a location-based augmented reality mobile game based on the Pokémon franchise. After the game was launched globally in July 2016, it quickly became the most successful mobile game in both popularity and revenue generation at the time, and the first location-based augmented reality game to reach a mainstream status. We explore the game...

Drinking games have a history several millennia long. Yet the global community of game scholars has barely touched drinking and games, leaving the area for researchers of health and safety issues. This article is a think piece that approaches drinking games as games and as play, ponders what the study of games can learn from drinking games, weighs...

In this article, over 60 definitions of games since the 1930s are reviewed in order to pinpoint what those definitions agree on and, more importantly, what they disagree on. This article is conceived of as a tool game scholars can use to better position themselves in regard to the concept of “game” by working out their answers to the 10 questions r...

A. Fedoseev, J.T. Harviainen, O. Vorobyeva (Eds.), Nordic-Russian Larp Dialog. COMCON-2015. Moscow. Abstract. This book starts a bidirectional dialog between two larping traditions-Nordic and Russian. The book contains two symmetric parts: the Nordic Way and the Russian Way, each part in Russian and English. Each part consists of ve chosen articles...

This article reviews the history of the concept of the magic circle, its criticism and the numerous other metaphors that have been used to capture the zone of play or the border that surrounds it, such as world, frame, bubble, net, screen, reality, membrane, zone, environment, or attitude. The various conceptions of social, mental and cultural bord...

International Journal of Role-playing Issue 4 -- Full Issue Table of Contents J. Tuomas Harviainen -- "Editorial -- Special issue: Role-Playing in Games" This special issue contains five articles chosen from amongst those presented at the Role-Playing in Games seminar at the University of Tampere, Finland, April 10-11, 2012. Several others from tha...

This article presents the results of an interview study on how people perceive and play social network games on Facebook. During recent years, social games have become the biggest genre of games if measured by the number of registered users. These games are designed to cater for large audiences in their design principles and values, a free-to-play...

Studying pervasive games is inherently difficult and different from studying computer or board games. This article builds upon the experiences of staging and studying several playful pervasive technology prototypes. It discusses the challenges and pitfalls of evaluating pervasive game prototypes and charts methods that have proven useful in previou...

Alternate Reality Games (ARG) tend to have story-driven game structures. Hence, it is useful to investigate how player activities interact with the often pre-scripted storyline in this genre. In this article, we report on a study of a particular ARG production, Conspiracy For Good (CFG), which was at the same time emphasising the role of strong sto...

Research and documentation of live action role-playing games, or larps, must tackle problems of ephemerality, subjectivity, first person audience and co-creation, as well as the underlying question of what larps are. In this paper these challenges are outlined and solutions to handling them are proposed. This is done through the prism of producing...

This article reviews the history of the concept of the magic circle, its criticism and the numerous other metaphors that have been used to capture the zone of play or the border that surrounds it, such as world, frame, bubble, net, screen, reality, membrane, zone, environment, or attitude. The various conceptions of social and mental borders are re...

Facebook use is a ubiquitous part of contemporary life. Based on user interviews this paper probes the performative actions presenting self on Facebook. Instead of a medium or a place Facebook usage is approached as a collection of social situation. The findings support earlier small scale studies of Facebook use and find that Facebook is mostly a...

Due to the popularity of social media networks and the games played on those platforms interest in the so-called social games has piqued. This article looks at those games in the context of general social aspects of game play. By approaching game play as an activity, it is possible to distinguish between different kinds of social interaction: the s...

In this paper we describe a high-end pervasive larp Momentum that sought to create a seamless merger of life and game for the game duration of five weeks. During the five weeks the players could be able to play an immersive game set in our ordinary reality augmented with game content, both through narrative content and through game artifacts. The c...

The paper provides a cultural and economic background for the rise of the service paradigm in the realm of games. Both the complicated relation between products and services and a variety of contemporary examples are examined in order to develop a detailed understanding of the ecology of games-related services. From mapping the current situation we...

This paper outlines the different ways in which people play in and with digital games, virtual worlds and social media. People engage in play individually, yet it is often social. This paper explores combining the personal with the social and the connections between playfulness on serious social media sites and seriousness when in a game world. Vie...

In this paper, we introduce and discuss a theoretical framework that can be used for designing and understanding game experiences in their situated contexts. The framework illustrates the fact that the design process for casual games, which values acceptability, accessibility, simplicity, and flexibility in game design, has become relevant for more...

In the past, social interaction has been discussed mostly in the context of multiplayer games, ignoring the implicit forms of sociability in single player games. This paper distinguishes between the sociability around the playing of a game and the social play mediated by the game, and looks at single player, two player, multiplayer and massively mu...

Pervasive games are staged in reality and their main attractiveness is generated by using reality as a resource in the game. Yet, most pervasive games that use mobile and location-based technology use reality only in a weak sense, as the location for a computerized game. In this article we analyze two game practices, Nordic style live action role-p...

Role-playing games form one of the major genres of games and exist across all hardware platforms as well outside of the technology domain in a huge variety of forms and formats. Role-playing oriented research has focused on culture, storytelling, game processes as well as e.g. user interaction, play experience and character design. Today role-playi...

In this paper we chart how pervasive games emerge from the intersection of two long-standing cultural trends, the increasing blurring of fact and fiction in media culture, and the movements struggling over public space. During the past few decades a third trend has given a new meaning to media fabrication and street cultures: the rise of ludus in t...

Crossmedia games offer different alternative gaming interfaces to a player. This paper presents the results of an evaluation of the player experiences in the crossmedia game Epidemic Menace and focuses on the characteristics of the gameplay, the story and the intertwining of these two central concepts of game design. In this context the paper discu...

Game studies would benefit from acknowledging that digital games should be studied as a special case of games rather than the other way around. Digital games research tends to look at games as fixed structures or media, largely ignoring the role of the player. Conversely, play and player studies tend to ignore the role of design. We argue that in o...

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