IetsNieuws

IetsNieuws is an interactive game/web toy, where participants are asked to do voiceovers for OpenImages videos. One player takes on the role of a newscaster, while the other player remixes news footage. This game was developed by Lukas Hulsbergen and Victor de Boer as part of Lukas' BSc. research project 's thesis.

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Three phases of the game

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Abstract

This research-project describes an experiment in which examines how two players experience the relationship between each other when playing an asymmetric game on a split screen in the presence of an audience. This relationship is defined as competitive or cooperative. This research is done by means of an experiment in which a group of subjects was invited to play the game "Iets Nieuws" in a living room. This game is designed with an asymmetrical style of play where the objective is to mix video fragments (player one) of the nostalgic dutch news show “Polygoonjournaal” by means of a computer keyboard and to comment on the video (player two) through a microphone. The subjects who weren’t playing fulfilled the role of audience. The subjects were young adults and friends of each other. During the experiment, there were different forms of interaction, both between the audience and the players as well as between the players themselves. Because of the limited game explanation in which only the basics of the game were explained, the players created their own style of play which is called “emergent gameplay”. This meant that the players created their own goals aside from the original goal of the game “to be as good as Philip Bloemendal”. These created goals were not defined by the game itself. The results of the observations during the experiment and feedback through a questionnaire at the end of the experiment show that the subjects saw the other player as a team player and not as an opponent. This means that the game in its present form has a cooperative orientation. It also showed that the audience has an impact on how players play the game. However, this did not apply to competitiveness, but rather on the above mentioned user-created goals. This experiment has introduced a new application containing the aspects mentioned above and provides a basis to further develop this application and to further investigate these aspects.