Title:
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A multi-modal investigation of the effects of technological medium on gameplay in live interaction
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This thesis examines the impact of new media technologies on interaction, focusing on
pervasive experiences. It considers what happens when participants engage in mediated
gameplay activity within a live setting. As such it explores the effects of technology on the
framing of experience and relationships between participants. Its hypothesis is that
simultaneous engagement in multiple situations of co-presence leads to a new state of
being, termed 'co-co-presence', in which what happens in one situation pervades another. It
reports on a series of small-scale iterative experiments, using a specially designed game
that was devised to engender co-co-presence and isolate selected variables in controlled
conditions. The experiments compared the experience of new media technology (texting)
with old media (paper notes) and found no significant difference in either the creation of, or
effects of, co-co-presence. The evidence from these experiments suggests that what
happened in the game (one situation of co-presence) affected what happened outside the
game (another situation of co-presence) and vice-versa, confirming the hypothesis. The data
also showed that social framing factors had the greatest influence on participant behaviour.
In conclusion, while this study found that engaging in multiple states of co-presence, or 'coco-
presence', did create pervasive effects, that pervasiveness was not dependent on the
use of new media technologies but appears to relate more to the structure of the
technological medium and social framing factors.
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