Talks by Panagiotis Koutsouras and Martin Porcheron

We will hear short talks from Panagiotis Koutsouras and Martin Porcheron, both of the MRL.

Panagiotis Koutsouras

Panagiotis (or Panos) is a 3rd year PhD student from the Horizon CDT. His PhD focuses on games that revolve around User-Generated Content (UGC) practices, such as Minecraft. These games provide the affordances of, and base the experience they provide on, managing the aforementioned practices of creating and sharing content. The expected outcome and contribution of this research will be twofold. Initially, we will provide a rich understanding of how play is socially organised in the context of UGC based games. Alongside that, we will get a sense of the values that are attached to UGC by the players.

New economies are emerging in the ever-changing construct of the gaming industry. The traditional way of purchasing and playing games as a finalised and unmodifiable product is giving its place to more elastic models of acquisition and consumption: free-to-play games, crowdfunding, UGC trading, e-sports, or even game streaming services.

Significant bodies of work (such as participatory culture and the literature on modifications in videogames) have already looked into the practices of creating and sharing content in media and videogames. However, these practices have not been empirically studied in the context of videogames that revolve around UGC (such as Minecraft). As such, the questions of "What are the practices involved in the creation and generation of content?" and "What is the cultural value of these practices?" remain unanswered. The main research question that encapsulates the aim of this research project is framed thus: "How is value constructed through play in UGC-driven video games?"

Martin Porcheron: Using Mobile Phones in Pub Talk

This talk will discuss the outcomes of  a study of how people interleave mobile phone use with conversation in pubs. The findings, informed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, unpack the interactional methods through which groups of people in pubs occasioned, sustained, and disengaged from mobile device use during conversation with friends. Fundamentally, the work that is done consists of various methods of accounting for mobile device use, and displaying involvement in social interaction while the device is used. The talk will highlight multiple examples of the nuanced ways in which interleaving is problematic in interaction, and relate our findings to the CSCW and HCI literature on collocated interaction. The talk concludes by discussing how we may support or disrupt interleaving practices through design to overcome the highlighted interactional troubles.