Developing a New Major

ch7 – player culture

not everyone who plays videogames is part of the gamer culture – we’re talking people who spend a lot of time playing, who know the conventions of the game community, talking about the game, modifying the game, interacting with others about the game; they’re creative, they are self-organizing — gamers use games to create something new – a degree of authorship, activity that goes beyond consumption, something of their own , being part of hte game community increases their enjoyment of hte game

discussion of Flow – one way to explain videogame enjoyment elements of enjoyment = challenging activity that requires skill, merging action and awareness so you become totally absorbed by the activity, clear goals & feedback, forget everyting else because you’re giving this task total concentration, sense of exercising control in situations where your abilities are pressed tot he limit, loss of self-consciousness, time seems to apss quickly or very

slowly another explanation for enjoyment – whole range of emotions elicited – social feelings,

other people play because they enjoy griefing others others, social games have lots of room for anti-social behavior, intentionaly cause stress to other players, can harass people thru the chat channels, aka greed play – ignoring the needs of other players in order to collect some virtual good (corpse camping in a public space)
game metaculture – not just the player psychological effects, but the whole community around the game, the rules, official tournaments, offical player ratings, journals about the game, equipment used in the game, ways a player can achieve fame, each game has a metaculture, players create meaning

-social side of videogames not the game’s structure or the text of the game (that’s next semester), looking at players and their relationshis, player culture born within games and then expands, players form game communities

game communities – they say they’re mostly virtual (that’s an assumption, do people start playing online games with their friends from RL or do they go into games alone and make new friends), not just for MMO’s but for other types of games too, decide oninformal rules among a specific group (who might all play on the same server) – they create a game subculture, one game can have many subcultures with rules and expectations different from each other – and they increase players devotion to the game

goes thru a list of elements in the game that seem to encourage game communities

• membership (have to join, not just come and go like forums)
• relationships (sometimes rules set by the game determine relationships and sometimes by the narrative in the game, relationshps become formalized in guilds and clans and members feel responsibility to each other and to spending the necessary time in the game – can affect real life – implications for the magic circle)
• commitment (games take lots of time, sometimes agree to stay in character during game play and members feel responsibility to each other and to spending hte necessary time int eh game – can affect real life – implications for the magic circle)
• shared values & practices (people in the community talk about the game and come to agree on what htey think is important in the game – in many games advancing the character is most important)
• collective goods (the world itself, the things players create and collect int he game and then sold for real money, gold farmers, ebay stopping a lot of rmt of virtual goods, raises the question of who owns the avatar and the virtual goods)
• duration (does it have to be a persistent world to foster community – some people say so, others say even sporadic interaction can create community, even if you’re in a game alone you interact with npc’s, game culture strengthend by being involved i the metaculture outside of theactual game)

- cooperation & conflict in game communities

• multiplayer games = balance of cooperation and conflict between players, most definitions (remember ch1) of games include some kind of conflict (tho usually they’re tlaking about 1 person winning by overcoming hte conflict
• intra-mechanics = player relationships that are shaped by the actual game code
• extra-mechanics = relationships that aren’t controlled by the game itself, the conflict isn’t the problem, it’s people not being able to accept shared codes of conduct, game makers put in limits on behavior to try and keep things under control, limit destructive play
• game core rules are enforced by the computer so winning/losing not confusing, but players often have to come to a mutual agreement about how to play/how to get along with each other, sometimes the game designers build into future versions the implicit rules and agreements that players have developed on their own
• meta culture – take the game beyond the screen, out of game meeting places to discuss the game and evaluate their performances, metaculture also includes modding and official competitions, fully official community (the game company’s webpages), semi-official (sites iwth ties to developers), fully independent (clan websites)
• metaculture comes from players’ interest in the game that goes beyond just playing the game, sharing information, discussing strategy
• can have metaculture around a genre (so lots of people who want to talk about action games or rpg’s), subcultures form around the subgenre with shared lingo/experiences
• and a metaculture around videogames in general – talk about games in general, new developments
• people in a metaculture take the stories from teh games and the images and create new things – poaching – part of hte authorship – walk thrus, videos, stories, poems, mods (new story lines, new characters)
• game companies feed on the game culture – betatesters (free quality assurance, build community of supporters early/before full release
• professionalization of play – competitions, talks about ESEA – E-Sports Entertainment Association, people can earn respect and attention thru pro sports that they might not get from their families or most of their friends
• videogames are active – not like tv/movie watching – so our interactions with other people is different than watching one character interact with another in a tv show, our image of ourselves thru our chosen character is different than watching the hero of a tv show, we’re more involved – many times we’ve made important decisions about hwo character looks, about their race and professions – decisions that affect the story and how other people react to us – so probably not enough to just look at how characters are represented on teh screen in games (and definintely not enough to look at boxes or ads alone) – need to talk to players and see how they interpret characters
• difficult to separate spheres of reality and virtual, harder still to maintain the idea of hte magic circle -games are affected by and have an effect on the real world/our real lives. the player is at the border between RL and virtual life and the edges of the 2 are very ragged and overlapping – and becoming more so as time goes by
• notice all the research mentioned – give you starting point for your own projects – interviews, content analysis, ethnography – techniques we need to do bits of

- questions

• what are real money transfers and how do they relate to idea of game metaculture
• do players start out with a group of real life friends who all go online together and play together or do they go online and meet new people to play with?
• what’s the magic circle and how do the ideas of game culture and metaculture relate to it?
• what’s griefing – is it a good or bad thing for game culture? why?
• should game developers put in behavior limits to control griefing?
• find an example of poaching related to videogames and be ready to share with class – how do the creators use aspects of the game? can you tell if the creators are actually part of hte game culture or just people out for a quick buck?

-resources

• Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen
• King of Kong documentary – professional game play
• pro game play leagues (see notes from ecarocon)

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