Collaborative and cooperative games : facts and assumptions

Collaboration and cooperation are fundamental activities and processes for humans. There has been a recent rise in the interest in collaborative and cooperative processes in several fields of study and an increasing popularity of commercial collaborative games. In this paper, we aim to identify how are collaboration and cooperation processes studied and promoted in the field of game research, with emphasis in digital games. To that end, we systematically analyzed two sets of data: academic publications on collaborative games and reviews of commercial collaborative games. From this examination, we acknowledge the important relationship between games and the cultural context, and we identify three main areas of study for this type of games (learning environments, interaction, and in-gameplay experience), which serve as a landscape for the investigation on collaborative and cooperative games.