HANDLING DIFFERENCES IN SKILLS BETWEEN PARENTS AND CHILDREN PLAYING TRINE AND LITTLE BIG PLANET

There are several ways to classify the numerous games that can be played together. A major distinction can be made between competitive and collaborative games. In competitive games each player tries to win over the other player(s). In contrast, the goal of cooperative games is not to win as a player but as a team collaborating with other players. However, within the field of game studies it has become quite obvious that the way in which a game is designed affects the whole gaming experience (Björk & Holopainen, 2005), for individual players as well as groups of players, such as in cooperative games. Seif El-Nasr et al. (2010) developed a set of cooperative design patterns and concluded that both a split screen and the camera led by the first player caused the players to wait for each other and get in each other’s way. They conjectured that these patterns could have a negative impact on the play experience. However, in this paper it is conjectured that different skill levels between players play an important role in how these cooperative game design patterns are experienced. For instance, Voida and Greenberg (2009) found that the level of expertise in groups playing together usually varies and that ‘gaming groups gave careful consideration to the selection of an appropriate gaming platform and suitable games for groups with ranges of expertise levels’. Taking differences in skills into account therefore gives a crucial refinement to the work on cooperative game design patterns and helps designers to better understand the kind of player interaction a certain
cooperative game design facilitates. This paper thus aims to explore the interaction patterns that emerge when players of different gaming skills play co-located cooperative games and how this relates to different design characteristics of the game.