Caracterizando jogos híbridos segundo a experiência de jogadores

Abstract

The advances in game development provided the rise of creative ways for designing a game, thus giving birth to a category that has traits of both analog and digital games simultaneously – the hybrid games. This project aims to identify through the players’ and developers’ perspectives features that define hybrid games and which of them are shared with analog and digital ones. The methodological procedures consists of commentary on related works by outlining selected texts and a quantitative analysis of the data obtained through a digital quiz published on social media and communication channels themed around games. The participants were asked for gender information, age group and whether they were gamers or developers. The quiz takers were then introduced to 11 distinct games of different types and were asked which traits were deemed important for analog and digital games and what is the level of hybridity present in each of them. Having concluded that the participants’ profiles held little impact over their choices, the following items were identified as being main traits of hybrid games associated with analog games: “face-to-face interaction” and “tactile experience”. In contrast, “animation”, “virtual interaction with other players” and “Music, sounds and sound effects” were selected as traits associated with digital games. Therefore, it was concluded that the main definition of hybrid games is that they hold no uniformity in their characteristics, since each game presents specific elements to their operation, which points to the existence of different levels of hybridity and indicates the possibility of forming subcategories in the definition of this type of game.