Game Designer & Ludologist
I have had the pleasure to present a paper on intimacy in MMORPGs at the Intimacy conference at Goldsmiths’s College. In essence, I argue that intimacy in MMORPGs is not to be dismissed as play, but rather to be seen as a meaningful form of social interaction. It’s generally an acted performance, which is not [...]
I just got back from the GAMES 2006 conference in Portalegre, Portugal (a really beautiful place). There I presented my MA Thesis as a shorter paper, examining whether war exists in MMORPG and what we could learn from it. The abstract:
Most online games let players fight each other, but this fighting does not constitute war. [...]
Jan van der Crabben is a game designer whose work includes Empire: Total War as well as mods for Civilization III & IV. He is also very interested in academic game studies and has published papers on the subject.