Definition
Online players are players engaged in online gaming. They participate in a kind of games that are largely based on social interaction as their main form of play. Online players vicariously enter and interact with secondary worlds, their elements, inhabitants, and stories. Through their choices and activities, players affect the happenings occurring in such settings: they are in charge of taking action and making choices to make the game progress.
Secondary Worlds: Extra-Ordinary Spaces
Games can be framed as systems where players struggle against their fates, moving in a meaningful space of conflict with an uncertain outcome. If this definition describes games in general, it is not sufficient to explain the deepness reached by online games set in secondary worlds. They go further, engaging online players in challenging processes of immersion and absorption within persistent, evolving worlds where everything is deeply intertwingled.
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Mariani, I. (2018). Online Players: Engagement, Immersion, and Absorption Across Secondary Worlds. In: Lee, N. (eds) Encyclopedia of Computer Graphics and Games. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-08234-9_235-1
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