ABSTRACT
This chapter describes a short chronological overview of the relevant literature regarding the influence of social settings on player experience, followed by an extraction of the common dimensions in this literature. It examines interactions with other people about a game session are included, exceeding the game played and thus including the player's testimonials during or after the game. The chapter aims to demonstrate that there are important differences within each category that cannot be investigated by single variable approach. The first wave of interviews aimed to get an overview of the different roles attributed by the player to other person involved in game session. 'Game session' refers to one instance or unit of game play. The goal of second wave of interviews was twofold: first, validating the archetypes that emerged after analysis of the first wave by exploring their boundaries. The second goal was to link the discovered archetypes to dimensions of social play commonly used in the gaming literature.
