week 11 Game Communities PDF

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week 11 lecture notes of IAT210 that describes game communities...

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2021-11-03

IAT 210 Introduction to Game Studies Week 11 : Gaming Communities

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Weekly Subjects Breakdown Week

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Date

Main Subject

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7-Sep-21 16-Sep-21 23-Sep-21

Introduction to Games and Game Studies Game Culture Game Mechanics and Design

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30-Sep-21 7-Oct-21 14-Oct-21 21-Oct-21

Introduction to Digital Games Casual and Mobile Games Psychology of Gaming

8 9 10 11

28-Oct-21 4-Nov-21 11-Nov-21 18-Nov-21

The Business of Video Games Narrative in Games

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25-Nov-21 2-Dec-21

Serious Games Art Games and Experimental Games

Gaming Communities

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Weekly Assignments Breakdown Week 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Date 7-Sep-21 16-Sep-21 23-Sep-21 24-Sep-21 30-Sep-21 7-Oct-21 10-Oct-21 14-Oct-21 21-Oct-21 28-Oct-21 29-Oct-21 4-Nov-21 11-Nov-21 18-Nov-21 19-Nov-21 25-Nov-21 2-Dec-21

Assignment Due Week 2 Reading Quiz Week 3 Reading Quiz || Week 4 Reading Quiz Gameplay Log (Physical Game) Week 5 Reading Quiz Game Analysis: Board Game Week 6 Reading Quiz Week 7 Reading Quiz Week 8 Reading Quiz Gameplay Log (Digital Game) Week 9 Reading Quiz Week 11 Reading Quiz Game Analysis: Digital Game

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Gaming Communities 1: Player Motivations

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Types of Fun: Fellowship Fellowship as: • Shared Mastery • Collaborative Gameplay • Team Membership • Shared Identity • Shared Reality

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Fellowship as Shared Mastery Example: Chess • Challenging game to learn • Opponents share skills and help each other • Small specialized group dynamic

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Fellowship from Collaborative Gameplay Example: Rock Band • Players working together toward a common goal • Shared victories and defeats • Reliance on the skill of other players to determine game outcomes

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Fellowship from Team Membership Example: Soccer • Compete alongside the same people for an extended period • Shared victories and defeats • Opportunity to create collective strategies and learn other players’ play styles

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Fellowship based on Shared Identity Example: Neko Atsume •

Shared identity with relatively small group membership

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Sense of exclusion from mainstream gaming communities or activities (not always, but often)

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Sometimes (but not always) connected to the content of the game

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Fellowship based on Shared Reality Example: World of Warcraft • Shared responsibility for collective narrative experience • More common on role playing servers • Sometimes extends beyond the game to fan art or cosplay

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Gaming Communities 2: The Internet

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Game Forums • Sources of game information •

Game purchasing and downloading

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Developer and game websites

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Player-created content

• Game Communication •

Direct contact with developers

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Forums

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Game Forums

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GTA wiki •

Deep and complex repository of information about the game world, narrative, game mechanics, etc.

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Player created content •

14,737 Pages

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146,148 pictures

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Fan Creativity Explosion of fan art of many kinds •

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Easier access to digital creation tools •

Open office (open source office software)

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Gimp (open source image editing)

Easier access to distribution tools •

Social media

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Photo sharing sites

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Fiction sharing websites

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Blogs

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Warcraft Fan Art (online edition)

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Warcraft Fan Art (convention edition)

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Online Gaming Communities (the dark side) August 2014: Gamergate •

Origins: Personal and sexual attacks against game developer Zoe Quinn

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Escalated into an organized campaign of harassment coordinated through sites like 4chan and reddit

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While the supposed focus was “corruption in games journalism” almost all of the targets of this group’s attacks were women or those who sympathized with them

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Reinforced stereotypes of gamers as being young, intolerant, antisocial and male.

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Sidebar: Gaming has a gender problem •

Between 48% & 52% of gamers are female

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Roughly 22% of game designers are female (around 10% in design / audio / programming)

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Representations of female characters in games tend to be overly sexualized

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Female gamers & developers •

More likely to be harassed online & at work

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Gender barriers to employment

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Sidebar: Gaming has a race problem Study of 50 top games from 2007 – 2012 •

67% of protagonists were white males

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8 % of protagonists were female

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3% of protagonists were black

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3% of protagonists were Asian

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1% of protagonists were Latino

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No indigenous representation at all

Source: Ross Orlando “Race and Gender: A Look at Modern Video Games”

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Sidebar: Gaming has a stereotype problem •

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Sexual stereotypes: •

Male characters are typically muscular and hyper-aggressive

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Female characters are thin, barely clothed and submissive

Racial stereotypes: • •

Black characters tend to be angry and aggressive (and often criminal) Sub-human or primitive characters are often designed using Indigenous iconography and are often voiced with those accents

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Exoticism and Orientalism are often foundational for defining marginal characters in games

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Gaming Communities 3: MMO Game Communities

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Studying Game Communities •

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Social Presence Theory •

Sense of community

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Mutual attention and support

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Open communication

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Affective connectedness

Social Capital Theory •

Relationships with other people valued and used to accomplish tasks

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Networks of relationships and experiences build trust and form communities

Tseng, F. C., Huang, H. C., & Teng, C. I. (2015). How do online game communities retain gamers? Social presence and social capital perspectives. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 20(6), 601-614.

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1997: Ultima Online • Large multiplayer fantasy world based on existing Ultima series of games. • Typed interactions between players & ingame interactivity • Complex economic simulation (for the time) • Commitment to player freedom (including the ability to commit crimes within the game) • Players organize into guilds to collaborate

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1997: Ultima Online “A few weeks after UO's release, a player named Mohdri Dragon initiated one of the game's first public displays of civil disobedience, to call attention to Origin's lax response to numerous unfixed bugs while it built new features. Hundreds of players gathered together in the capital, stripped their characters naked, and stormed the castle of Lord British – aka Richard Garriott, the real-life creator of the Ultima series. Once inside the castle, the players drank themselves silly, trashed Lord British's throne room, and protested loudly, much to the amusement and consternation of the game’s developers. "Everyone had a strong opinion, and many players were expressing opposite sides of the same issue," says Lord British, who watched the event from behind an invisible cloak. The players, in other words, started to behave like citizens anywhere.” Kim, A. J. (1998, May 1). Killers Have More Fun. Wired. https://www.wired.com/1998/05/ultima/.

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2004: World of Warcraft Multiplayer online fantasy RPG • Players belong to factions & guilds • Huge player base & online community • Gear and money can be transferred in game • •

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Gold & gear farming Real-money sales of equipment

Blood plague incident •

Location-specific disease released into the larger world, spreading in ways that mirror real-world epidemics

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2004: World of Warcraft Intimacy in WoW • Intimacy is often located across real and virtual worlds, and not in one or the other • Intimacy often emerges from mundane, rather than extraordinary, experience • Intimacy involves reciprocity • Intimacy is experienced in and articulated with temporal categories and concepts Bhandari, S., & Bardzell, S. (2008). Bridging gaps: affective communication in long distance relationships. In CHI'08 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 2763-2768).

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2004: World of Warcraft Intimacy in WoW • Couples meeting in WoW and developing real-world relationships • Couples playing the game together • Connections and friendships formed with others in the game world • In-game gifts as token reciprocity • Repeated interactions building social trust

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World of WTF??? • A well known WoW player died & their ingame friends decided to hold a funeral for them in the game world. • A rival guild conducted a raid on the funeral, killing and looting the character who had come to pay their respects…

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Eve Online (2003) Multiplayer online space sim •

Complex economic and political systems

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Social and behavioral norms for players

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Sometimes intense political intrigue

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Funerals in EVE online Sean Smith a.k.a. Vile Rat •

Prominent EVE Online player and also US Government employee

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Killed in the attacks on the US embassy in Benghazi, Lybia

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In-game memorials set up

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Studied as expressions on online communities during grieving processes

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Gaming Communities 4: Gameplay videos

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Participatory Culture • Wide definition: Culture in which “fans and other consumers are invited to actively participate in the creation and circulation of new content” (Jenkins, 2006a: 290) • Narrow definition: link between more accessible digital technologies, user--‐created content, and some kind of shift in the power relation between media industries and their consumers” (Burgess & Green, 2009: 10)

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Participation Models •

Viral model: connotes the proliferation of something negative (germs) that self--‐replicates passively

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Spreadable model: takes into account the agency exerted by participants as they actively share and discuss media content

Participants do “not simply pass along static texts; they transform the material through active production processes or through their own critiques and commentary, so that it better serves their own social and expressive needs” (Jenkins et al., 2013, pp. 293--‐294)

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Gaming Celebrities • The proliferation of gameplay videos is creating a new kind of gaming personality • Often humorous, certainly plugged in to game culture of all kinds • Really empowered by the rise of social video sites like YouTube, Vine, and Twitch, which challenge traditional distribution models • Strength: (relatively) low production values with a sharply defined niche audience

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YouTube Game Videos YouTube promotes user-generated content •

Less subject to controls and restrictions of broadcast TV

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Issues of copyright and stakeholders are rising, especially when the creator is earning ad revenue

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MCN (multi-channel network) is an organization used to help channel owners with monetization, licensing, and distribution issues

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Tabletop (Wil Wheaton) Game Introduction / Gameplay Videos • Show audience what the game is like • Share the social aspects of gameplay • Emphasis on community creation and fun

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Speedruns Demonstrations of player skill. •

Attempt to complete a game in as little time as possible

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Very popular with classic games

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Often broadcast live and rereleased on YouTube

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Let’s Play Videos Complete playthroughs of a game with commentary •

Player reactions

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Clues / hints

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Demonstration of skill

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Critical Let’s Play Videos Playthrough videos (or edited selections of gameplay) •

Addition of critical analysis

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Often academics and game theorists producing videos

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Twitch Streaming • Twitch: Live video streaming / broadcast platform • Three main types of video game streams: •

Let’s Play Live

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Speed runs

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Professional gaming streams

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Twitch Streaming •

Live videos of gameplay •

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Chat feed with emotes • •

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Immediate insight into gameplay Allows interactions between audience members Helps create sense of social presence

Multiplayer game feeds (especially e-sports games) most popular video category

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Twitch Streaming • Online example of tandem gameplay (multiple people gathering to play single-player games) • Having an audience changes the ways that streamers play •

Trying to make things more entertaining for their audience

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Taking suggestions from live chat

• Are these gamers playing with or for their audience?

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Twitch Plays Pokémon • Experiment in social gameplay • Pokémon playing AI received commands from audience texts

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Gaming Communities 5: E-Sports & Competitive Gaming

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Spectatorship & Games Even beyond watching sports, there is a long history of people observing gameplay. • Chess (1886) • Bridge (1950) • Poker (1971) • Scrabble (1972) • Monopoly (1973) • Go (1988) • Magic: The Gathering (1994)

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Caillois and Game Spectatorship Caillois’s analysis of sport spectatorship can also apply to games Engagement with game and players: • Mimicry – emulating what favorite pros do • Fantasy fulfillment as pros are victorious • Players analyze and speculate from the sidelines • Community shares a passion for the game

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eSports (Revenue)

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League of Legends

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SFU League of Legends Team

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DOTA 2

BattlePass: Collection of skins and live stream access sold to fans to provide part of the $25,532,177 in prizes…

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Gaming Communities 6: Machinima and Modding

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Co-creative Practices in Gaming "co‐created media”: both players and game designers are responsible for the cultural artefacts surrounding and including video games. This new, multi--‐dimensional mode of production requires a critical framework that accounts for the transformative social effect of this emerging fusion of community and technology. Modding: Altering game’s design to create new game experiences. Machinima: Using game environment & screen capture to create animations.

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Developers and Mods • Developers such as Valve Corporation, Mojang AB, and Epic Games provide extensive tools and documentation to assist mod makers, leveraging the potential success bought in a popular mod like Counter-Strike. • Popular websites dedicated to modding include Nexus Mods, GameBanana and Mod DB

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Mods (Modifications) •

Fan-created add-ons to games

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Allow players to take ownership of their game experience and share those experiences with others

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Reciprocal Relationship •

Developers encourage modding by providing in-game tools

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Mods add content (and therefore gameplay and desirability) to games

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Commercial view: Modding adds value through unpaid labour to the game

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Counterstrike (1999) Originated as a Half-Life mod Popularity led to it being released as a standalone game Note: Also, Stanley Parable

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Types of mods •

Skins / visual mods •

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Game content mods •

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Additional characters / weapons

Rule variation mods •

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Customized appearance

Additional play modes

Additional levels

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Vanilla State The term "vanilla" is often used to describe the original version of a game, which has not been modified with third-party add-ons, developer updates, downloadable content (DLC) or patches.

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Graphical Art Mod Vanilla game: low quality grass texture

Art Mod: improving lower quality grass texture with high definition one

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Graphical Art Mod

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DOTA Began as a mod for Warcraft III Valve picked up the idea and made it into the eSports game DOTA2

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The Nameless Mod Mod for Deus Ex •

New visuals

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New world design

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Thousands of lines of dialogue

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Multiple endings

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Machinima Animations created with screen captured game footage. • Usually involve telling a story within the game universe • Dubbed in post to give characters a voice • Edited from longer collections of footage. Often created with FPS games and others that have complex graphical capabilities.

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Red vs. Blue

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Freeman’s Mind