Co-Located Many-Player Gaming on Large High-Resolution Displays

TR Number
Date
2009-05-04
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Virginia Tech
Abstract

Two primary types of multiplayer gaming have emerged over the years. The first type involves co-located players on a shared display, and typically caps at four players. The second type of gaming provides a single display for each player. This type scales well beyond four players, but places no requirement on co-location. This paper will attempt to combine the best of both worlds via high-resolution, highly-multiplayer gaming.

Over the past few years, there has been a rise in the number of extremely high-resolution, tiled displays. These displays provide an enormous amount of screen space to work with. This space was used to allow twelve co-located players to play a game together.

This study accomplishes three things: we designed and built PyBomber, a high-resolution and highly multiplayer game for up to twelve players; secondly, user trials were conducted to see whether this type of gaming is enjoyable as well as to learn what sorts of social interactions take place amongst so many players; lastly, the lessons learned were generalized into design criteria for future high-resolution games.

Results show that with more people, much more of the time during a game was filled with vocal interactions between players. There were also more physical movements in the larger games.

Over the course of this study, we learned that good high-resolution games will: decide between a singular gameplay area and split views, use the physical space in front of the display, provide feedback that is localized to each player, and utilize input devices appropriately.

Description
Keywords
high-resolution, multiplayer, co-located, gaming, large tiled display, collaborative
Citation
Collections