The many faces of sociability and social play in games

In the past, social interaction has been discussed mostly in the context of multiplayer games, ignoring the implicit forms of sociability in single player games. This paper distinguishes between the sociability around the playing of a game and the social play mediated by the game, and looks at single player, two player, multiplayer and massively multiplayer games as arenas for social interaction. The paper does not view social interaction as a new feature or a genre, but as a group of different, yet related, phenomena.

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