The project mc2 has the goal of understanding the roles of mobility, community and user experience in playing games. The project studies the social meaning and impact of new communications technology for communities that are interested in mobile gaming. It builds an environment for monitoring and modeling the ecosystem of communities and commercial actors around open and collaboratively created game-related content. SoberIT/IERG's role in mc2

Our main goal in mc2 is to thoroughly understand some game-related elements: ideas of mobility, community and context of use. The main methods are literary studies and user-studies.

Instead of mere use of mobile device, mobility is approached here from the user-experiential perspective: individual efforts to organize everyday life creates a demand to understand the different levels of mobility are associated with the used artefacts, and with the social relations related to them. From the socio-spatial perspective, moving between virtual and augmented game-related realities raises the question of moving borders between publicity and privacy. Players are “roaming” from totally private states to impersonal publicity, then perhaps to mutual or even personal contacts to other individuals and rest of the community.

Our empirical target is the evolution and lifecycle of content communities, different roles and levels of activity for community members. The main viewpoint here is to follow activities of gaining and keeping social capital (= persons’ social networks and their potential use). For this reason, also the mechanisms of trust formation and trust expressions within these social networks will be identified.

The whole mc2-project in numbers

• 2,5 years (2003-2005)
• 22 person-years total
• first year funding 710,000€
• total project size 1,775,000€