First Person Games induce presence, thus fulfilling Steuer’s definition as virtual realities. As such, it is worth considering the qualities of the realities they form and how these may help us understand the relationship between the player, the contents of the game and the game system itself. Ludic reality is proposed as a construct to elucidate this relationship: an artificial temporal space in which the constrained rules of the system, the semantic contents and sequencing constructs it contains, and the behaviour and subjective experience of the player are combined into a more-or-less stable and effective state of being-in-theworld. Ludic reality directly addresses the question of the impact of internal, semantic factors in the experience, such as world, narrative and agency, together with the adoption, by the player, of a schematic, structured means of effectively interacting with the system to draw out its specific systems of affordances and reward. Read more...

Home computer game playing appears to be one of the social and leisure phenomena of the nineties, yet there is still little known about the acquisition, development, and maintenance of computer game playing among children and adolescents. A survey of 147 eleven-year-old computer game players attending a summer camp revealed that their main reasons for playing were for fun, for a challenge, because there was nothing else to do, and because their friends did. Males played computer games significantly more regularly than did females and were significantly more likely to play sports simulation games and violent games. Females were found to play platform games and puzzlers significantly more than did males. It is suggested that computer game playing for most children is a fairly absorbing and harmless activity but that, for a small minority of children, it may be problematic. Read more...