Game - Farm Blitz

http://financialentertainment.org/play/farmblitz.html

This game was shortlisted at the Games for Change festival in 2011 in the Direct Impact category. Apparently this is for "Games targeted at specific audiences with proven outcomes." The game is apparently targeted at low-income adults, and takes inspiration from Bejewelled and Farmville to try and instill good saving habits in the players.

I really want to see the evidence for the proven outcomes. For me it was intensely patronising, and not particularly difficult or fun. The instruction screens seemed to last forever, and every other screen was reminding you to 'get rid of your bunnies of debt' and 'buy trees as savings'.

I suspect I'm not their target audience (although as a PhD student I am certainly a low-income adult!), as these are not new or novel ideas for me. Maybe if it hasn't occurred to you that clearing your debt before you save is a good plan it might be handy to play around seeing what happens if you don't. Maybe.

I felt this was a game that had little to do with the mechanics of earning money - but was all about what you do with it once you have it. The game mechanic of matching crops to earn money just felt a bit wedged in for me. Perhaps I'm wrong. And I'm not sure what I'd do instead. The overly-long instruction process that didn't let me do anything was just so frustrating that by the time the game started I was already pre-disposed to rubbish it! I'd love to see what Jim makes of this one...

Report - Ethical decision-making and internet research

Ess, C. (2002). Ethical decision-making and Internet research: Recommendations from the aoir ethics working committee. Readings in virtual research ethics. Issues and controversies (p. 1). Retrieved June 16, 2011, from www.aoir.org/reports/ethics.pdf.

The recommendations from the Association of Internet Researchers concerning the ethics of online research. The actual recommendations are pretty slim, but it has a lot of references (some of which I might follow up on), sample consent forms etc.

The first recommendation is to go back to the discipline the study is based in and consider the normal 'offline' approach used in that discipline. I would guess that would place me somewhere around sociology or communication studies. I think this is where Celia Pearce was mentioning feminist ethics as what she had based her study on - I need to go back and check, and also read up on what that framework is!

They also highlight the importance of understanding cultural differences. What are the ethical traditions/legal protections that the participants will be expecting? In fact, large chunks go back to understanding the arena the research is being performed in, and looking at what the participants will expect. They suggest checking both the public statements made about the arena (e.g. privacy statements, and I would guess the EULA would fall into this too), and also noting what mechanisms the system users utilise to indicate they expect things to be more private - e.g. moving to a private chatroom or (in the Rosenberg paper I read a couple of days ago) moving to IM rather than public chat.

They have some nice considerations that I can refer back to, and probably should aim to answer.

One interesting revelation is that the US and the EU have very different approaches to ethics, and these lead to different conclusions. The report basically says that the EU has very stringent laws protecting the privacy of the individual over that of business concerns. The US does the opposite, and protects the business concern over the individual. They call the EU approach deontological, while the US is more utilitarian.

Paper - Beyond recruitment? Participatory online research with people who use drugs

Barratt, M. J., & Lenton, S. (2010). Beyond recruitment? Participatory online research with people who use drugs. International Journal of Internet Research Ethics, 3(1). Retrieved from http://ijire.net/issue_3.1/6_barratt_lenton.pdf.

Paper talking about the recruitment and ongoing relationship with participants from online forums. Sensitive in this case because talking about drug use in forums that were not ostensibly about drug use (mostly about music), and due to the potentially illegal nature of the discussion.

They make the point that the potentially problematic aspects of the online environment (such as the anonymous nature of feedback, or the potential for the participant to just disappear without completing) could actually help where the subject was as sensitive as this. On-going discussion with the participant groups could help to shape the research in unexpected ways. Of course, this could still be a problem - the researcher doesn't have as much control over where the research/discussion goes.

Privacy is becoming a major theme here. In this case they decide to not even name the participating online groups. In fact, the majority didn't want to be named, but one group actively would have preferred it. Highlights how important it is to get to know the groups you want to work with. They also highlight that the perception of the group of how private their area is may not match the researcher's opinion.

Anonymising the data but quoting directly may not be good enough if the forum is indexed. A search will just trace it back to the group and the poster.

Interesting to note that most of the papers they reviewed skipped over the job of recruiting the participants in their methodology sections. I have a feeling it is quite often discussed in online world research, so that's an interesting distinction! Maybe it's to justify all the hours playing a game!

They highlight the potential problems with publicising findings before the research is published. In this case, they were aware that journalists were using the forums for stories and didn't want their research to wind up causing negative press for the groups. They ended up sharing their findings on separate, private sites, that reduced the follow up discussion from the communities. Not all projects suffer from that, but it's an interesting additional point about the problems of getting your work back out to the people who are interested.

Paper - The Duty to 'Play'

Reynolds, R., & Zwart, M. D. (2010). The Duty To “Play”: Ethics, EULAs and MMOs. International Journal of Internet Research Ethics, 3(1). Retrieved from http://ijire.net/issue_3.1/5_Reynolds_deZwart.pdf.

This paper breaks research into online worlds into three different categories:

• world-design view, where the virtual world is created or altered specifically for the study which is conducted from the outside. 
• avatar/in-world immersion view - the researcher is immersed as a participant. 
• database view/backend analysis - researchers access the data generated by player interactions. 

That's quite useful. I think I'd be wanting to do some kind of mix of the first two. 

They then go on to focus on the in-world version, or primarily ethnographic study, focussing on three intersecting forces: 

• The EULA or TOS agreed to be the researcher when they sign up to the MMOG. 
• Normative ethical considerations of community participation. 
• Established research norms as interpreted by the relevant ethics committee or IRB (Institutional Research Board).

I hadn't really thought about ethics committee approval for my research, but I guess I'll need it! 

Another interesting point to watch out for is an increased difficulty in getting participants if the researcher isn't properly 'embedded' in the game. Lack of levels etc. I hadn't considered that. 

It is useful to consider whether research does break the EULA. It seems in grey areas it is advised to talk to the game producers. You only really get into muddy waters if you intend to act 'outside the custom and practice of the MMO' - or either be a cheater or spoilsport (cheat is where you're playing, but outside the rules, spoilsport where you're outside the rules and you don't mean to play).

Looks like all the papers I've read on methodology so far point to at least spending some time playing the game for itself, to understand what questions to ask or where the lines are. This would be within the EULA, as even if the researcher is being paid they are still really just playing. It becomes a bit less clear when the player stops playing and starts conducting research, although I think you might be able to argue that plenty of players stop questing after a while and mostly socialise, that's still using in-game activities. 

Interesting angle, again, not one I'd thought of yet! 

Paper - Virtual World Research Ethics and the Private/Public Distinction

Rosenburg, A. (2010). Virtual World Research Ethics and the Private/Public Distinction. International Journal of Internet Research Ethics, 3(1). Retrieved from http://ijire.net/issue_3.1/3_rosenberg.pdf.

The paper discusses a study in Second Life on the boundary between public and private within Second Life. This is relevant to the ethics of research because if something is public it does not need to be treated with the same level of care when reporting (e.g. anonymising, obtaining consent etc) as private discourse. In fact, the two assumptions that the study is based on are listed as that researchers shouldn't do any harm to anyone, and that the public/private boundary is important to avoid doing harm.

The author outlines two simplified extremes of view:  public is publicly accessible, or public is if perceived as public by the participants. The first argument makes all online interaction in MMOGs or virtual worlds public, as it could be accessed by anyone who wants to. However, the study shows that the people using the spaces had clear ideas of which parts of their environment and (interestingly) communication methods were more private than others.

The main thing I think I can take from this paper is that you need to know your environment before you can judge what would be considered 'crossing the line' with participants. There is still a struggle as well between being open with your participants that you are studying them, and missing parts of what they do because they modify their behaviour for the study.

Also the writer spent a year spending between 10 and 30 hours a week in Second Life. Where am I going to find that kind of time?!

Paper - Paralanguage and social perception in CMC

Lea, M., & Spears, R. (1992). Paralanguage and social perception in computer-mediated communication. Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, 2(3), 321-341. doi: 10.1080/10919399209540190.

This paper was referenced by the another one I read in reference to the social identity/de-individuation (SIDE) model of CMC. Turns out there are earlier papers about that model that I should probably follow up on, but this paper does include some interesting findings that may help me to understand it!

They did two studies, the first of which looked at paralinguistic cues in e-mail and how they affected the perception of the communicators, and compared the use and interpretation of paralinguistic cues between novice and experienced users.

The second study got groups to take part in discussions via a text-only computer-conferencing system. The groups were given 4 different conditions: the group identity or the individual identity were highlighted (group salience), and they could see each other or they were in different rooms (de-individuation).

Looking at how they switch which identity is most salient could be useful. They did it in quite straight-forward ways, by manipulating the way the discussion was presented to the group. So group identity was pushed by being told they were being tested as a group, and the instructions referred to individuals as 'group members'. Each user was given a 'group membership number' to be identified by. In the individual identity groups, they were told they were being tested personally, and the instructions referred to 'participants'. Rather than a 'group membership number' they just had a 'participant number'.

They measured frequency of paralinguistic marks (ellipses, inverted commas, quotation marks, exclamation marks. Sequences/combinations double-weighted) and got people to rate each other on person-perception scales. The correlations between paralanguage use and perceived personal attributes were interesting. When subjects were in the same room as each other, the correlations don't really change regardless of the high or low group salience. In the condition where the participants couldn't see each other, high group salience gave positive correlation to the use of paralanguage, where as the low group salience gave a negative correlation. In other words, people who used paralanguage in a group were liked when everyone recognised themselves as part of a group, and disliked when people perceived themselves as individuals.

This paper extended work done in empirical studies from a social identity approach into the computer-mediated communication environment.

Chapter notes - Beyond initial interaction

1. Berger CR. Beyond Initial Interaction. In: Giles H, St. Clair R, eds. Language and Social Psychology. Basil Blackwell; 1979:122-144.

This chapter expands on the earlier work done on uncertainty reduction theory by looking at the strategies that people employ to get to know another.

The chapter starts by discussing the various reasons someone might increase the attention they pay to the behaviour of another in social situations. They outline three reasons:

1. Incentives - the other person could reward them.
2. Deviation - the other person is acting in a way that is not in keeping with the social norms. 
3. Future interaction - the likelihood of meeting the person again. People do not care about the behaviour of others so much if they will never meet them again. 

Having decided it's worth getting to know someone, there are then eight strategies of three different types identified: 

1. Passive strategies - the other person is observed but not interacted with. 
1. Reactivity search - watch the other person interacting with others. 
2. Social comparison - watch the other person interact with people you know.
3. Disinhibition search - watch the other person in an environment where their guard is down. Access as a non-interactive observer to that kind of environment can be tricky!
2. Active strategies - the other person is observed in situations that you have controlled to some degree, but still not interacted with directly, 
1. Asking others about the target. This brings the danger that news of your inquiry could get back to the individual you're asking about. 
2. Environmental structuring - set up a situation for the other person to negotiate. This sounds really intrusive and difficult, but could be as little as putting a range of magazines out on a table. 
3. Interactive strategies - talk/interact with the other person.
1. Verbal interrogation - ask the subject questions. There's a delicate balance between asking too many questions of too personal a nature in too short a space of time (and therefore prejudicing the other person against you) and not getting the information you need. 
2. Self-disclosure - tell them about yourself. Most people reciprocate. 
3. Deception detection - work out if the person is bragging, flattering or omitting information. 

These strategies focus on one individual learning about another, not necessarily mutual understanding. Also makes the point that discussing strategies does not identify the tactics used to employ these strategies, and there is no indication of which strategies would be adopted in which situations. 

Book - Cyberpl@y

Danet B. Cyberpl@y: Communicating Online. Berg Publishers; 2001:436.

Although a large chunk of this book is not relevant to the areas I'm looking at, it does have some nice descriptions and summaries of the ways that online communication differs from offline, and the ways that people have adapted their communication online to try and overcome some of these limitations.

 In the introduction she describes a continuum in online communication from 'speech-like' to 'writing like' (pg 16). While asynchronous communication like email is more like writing - allowing time to edit etc. - synchronous chat has more of the linguistic features of oral conversation - speed is of the essence, no editing.

Pages 17-19 provide 9 ways that users have adapted to digital writing:

1. Multiple punctuation e.g. "Type back soon!!!!!!"
2. Eccentric spelling e.g. "Type back sooooooooooooooooon."
3. Capital letters e.g. "I'M REALLY ANGRY AT YOU!" 
4. Asterisks for emphasis. 
5. Written out laughter
6. Descriptions of actions 
7. Smileys
8. Abbreviations
9. All lower case

The last two are particularly aimed at speed, and the all lower case is interesting. It is not acceptable online to use all upper case, because it comes across as shouting. All lower case is more acceptable. Some of these conventions have been used in comics and graffiti - e.g. the all caps for shouting. 

Obviously one of the big differences between this an face-to-face communication is that the writer chooses specifically what they want to represent in the text, while the non-verbal clues in face-to-face communication tend to be involuntary to a degree. 

pg 11-12 online communication is "both doubly attenuated and doubly enhanced". Attenuated by the absence of non-verbal clues compared to speech, and by the 'loss of text as object' compared to writing. But enhanced by the ability to easily record/reexamine what you said (as compared to speech), and the increased sense of the conversational partner (interlocutor!) enhances it compared to writing. This is used to demonstrate that this truly is a different medium to both speech and writing, and therefore worthy of study!

Jumping on to the study of personal emails, pg 64 outlines some of the ethical issues of studying the emails which are intended to be private even if the content is not particularly personal. Danet worked around this by using anonymised versions of emails to her, and attempting to get permission where possible. I really need to read around the ethics of this, because looking at chat could be a mine-field. 

Paper - The Influence of the Avatar on Online Perceptions...

1. Nowak KL, Rauh C. The Influence of the Avatar on Online Perceptions of Anthropomorphism, Androgyny, Credibility, Homophily, and Attraction. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 2005;11(1):153-178. Available at: http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.tb00308.x [Accessed May 26, 2011].

Paper represents 'static' avatars - that don't move or represent person in realtime. Not unlike ours should be.
URT - mentions a 1997 paper. Is that related to online use? (Infante, Rancer & Womack, 1997).

Woot! "Different types of avatars have different effects on person perception." (Koda 1996; Nowak, 2004; Nowak & Biocca, 2003; Taylor, 2002).

Credibility, attraction and homophily important in communication process (McCroskey, Hamilton, & Weiner, 1974). Credibility one of the primary predictors for things like attitude change and trust.

Their findings on androgeny are all well and good, but I'm not sure they designed any androgenous yet anthropomorphic avatars. Not to mention I find this disturbing: "Interface designers who wish to elicit attraction in users might consider anthropomorphic, non-androgynouse, feminine, child characters for their interfaces." They found evidence that people choose avatars that are of similar gender and type - which in this case just means human - so postulate that means that they might also tend to choose other characteristics that are similar to their own. I'm not convinced that holds true. In my experience, there is a definite variance between avatars and people's actual appearance that is greater than can be explained by the options available.

I think this is interesting in relation to GR, because in our game the avatar is indicitive of the class of character the player is playing (e.g. man or woman) rather than the underlying gender of the player. It provides more insight into the goals of that player than it would in (for example) world of warcraft where the gender is a choice and the class (warrior, healer, etc) is the clue to the player's motivation.

Again, my problem with her paper is that I would not want any of the avatars she is testing to represent me in any game. In fact, if that were the range of characters, there's a good chance I would be put off playing. I could just about cope with figure f3 in that list.

Paper - The Effect of the Agency and Anthropomorphism on Usersʼ Sense of Telepresence, Copresence, and Social Presence in Virtual Environments.

1. Nowak KL, Biocca F. The Effect of the Agency and Anthropomorphism on Usersʼ Sense of Telepresence, Copresence, and Social Presence in Virtual Environments. Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. 2003;12(5):481-494. Available at: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/105474603322761289 [Accessed May 25, 2011].

Presence can be split into several dimensions including:
Telepresence - Feeling like you are 'there' in the media.
Copresence - Feeling that other people are there too.
Social presence - The extent to which you are able to 'access another's mind'.

Tested agents vs avatars, and no image, hi-anthropomorphic image, low-anthropomorphic image. I don't like the 'high-anthropomorphic' heads - they look odd. The low ones are kind of friendlier looking, even though they are only eyes and mouth. Sounds like (in the discussion) the participants agreed with me, calling them 'not very attractive' and 'funny looking'.

They found any image is better for immersion in the environment than no image.

There are some consequences of the choice of image, although this paper found that users felt more copresence, social presence and telepresence when someone used a less anthropomorphic image. That apparently contrasts with other studies (Koda 1996; Wexelblat 1997).

They note that teh reaction to the high-anthropomorphic images wasn't bad, just not as good as the low-anthropomorphic image. The similarity to the results with no image suggests that the users may be putting in some default anthropomorphic mental image when no picture is supplied.

I think I'll give a brief overview of avatar research, but not focus on it. There's too much!

Paper - Avatar-Mediated Networking

Bente G, Rüggenberg S, Krämer NC, Eschenburg F. Avatar-Mediated Networking: Increasing Social Presence and Interpersonal Trust in Net-Based Collaborations. Human Communication Research. 2008;34(2):287-318. Available at: http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/j.1468-2958.2008.00322.x [Accessed May 25, 2011].


Mostly using this paper as a source for other papers to read. Lots of interesting stuff in the background bit at the top:

"Non-verbal channels account for major socioemotional variance in human communication. Media-dependent loss of this information comes at the expense of interpersonal uncertainty" (Bente et al. <- I can't find this reference online anywhere.)

Tanis and Postmes (2007 Two faces of anonymity: Paradoxical effects of cues to
identity in CMC. Computers in Human Behavior, 23, 955-970.) "The key point here is not that all these theories are the same, the point is that despite their differences they subscribe to the same metatheory that the social effects of communication technology are caused by the disembodiment of interpersonal communication. (p. 957)"

"Choice of concrete virtual representative might have specific consequesce on its own because its physical appearance can influence impression formation and activate social stereotypes" (look up Nowak!, suggest Nowak et al 2005 as most recent referenced in this paper).

Avatars in a shared online environment have been shown to be more effective than video for co-locating. That's really interesting. Shared space, rather than the image of the person you're talking to. (I wonder if a projected image of the person you're talking to in a shared space would be more effective? Or if you combined that tech with the individual cameras with a room?)

Social presence (Lee 2004 Presence, explicated. Communication Theory, 14, 27–50. for overview). Apparently closely related to interpersonal trust. (Cyr Hassanein, Head & Ivanov 2007).

Two forms of trust (leading on from Lewis & Weigert): cognitive based trust (CBT) based on rational judgement of knowledge, competence & dependability. Also Affect-based trust (ABT) emotional bond, confidence that they will protect us and care for our welfare. Some evidence that CBT is easier to establish in virtual environments (Kanawattanachai & Yoo 2002), but ABT is important.

This paper finds that all channels (audio, video and avatar) do equally well in producing interpersonal results - and all significantly better than text chat only.

Paper - Computer-mediated communication effects on disclosure, impressions and interpersonal evaluations

1. Tidwell LC, Walther JB. Computer-Mediated Communication Effects on Disclosure, Impressions, and Interpersonal Evaluations: Getting to Know One Another a Bit at a Time. Human Communication Research. 2002;28(3):317-348. Available at: http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/j.1468-2958.2002.tb00811.x.

Useful paper describing 3 different theories of how people interact and an experiment to try to find out which might be right!

Social information processing (SIP) theory (Walther 1992) suggests that people adapt to a lack of nonverbal cues to the remaining cues available such as content and linguistic strategies. Also related to a hyperpersonal perspective of computer-mediated communication, which argues that in the absence of nonverbal cues people form deeper (not broader) impressions of each other, suggesting that detailed information is shared on a smaller range of areas.

Social identity and deindividaution (SIDE) theory (Lea & Spears, 1992) suggest that rather than a hyperpersonal perspective, the absence of nonverbal cues means that the person is reduced to forming impressions based on social categories of the communicators. This reduces the individual aspect, and increases the group image.

Uncertainty Reduction Theory (URT) (Berger & Calabrese, 1975) sounds pretty interesting. This paper suggests that it hasn't really been evaluated for online (computer-mediated) stuff, but this paper was published in 2002 so worth following up on that. 7 strategies people employ to reduce uncertainty about the people you deal with. I think it's worth following up on this.

The methodology seems really pretty labour-intensive and hardcore, but could be useful to bear in mind. They use a panel of three judges to encode the text they get back - I think that would be outside the scope of my work but useful to note that the lack of separate judges may introduce bias. Also the difficulty of trying to get the same number of phrases in face-to-face and computer-mediated situations. They allowed 4 times as much time for the email conversation as for the face to face one, and still the number of utterances in the face-to-face experiments was twice that of the online conversation. I guess length of utterance would be worth looking at, plus they were using an email system which may have had a little lag. Also the interface may have encouraged longer messages, rather than the short ones people type in Skype (for example).

They seem to find in favour of the hyperpersonal model for CMC - people asked more direct questions over email and found out more about each other, but on a comparatively limited range of subjects. It would be interesting to see if this finding has been ported to MMOGs yet, with their avatars and guilds and 3-d representations, or not.

Paper - From tree house to barracks

Williams D. From Tree House to Barracks: The Social Life of Guilds in World of Warcraft. Games and Culture. 2006;1(4):338-361. Available at: http://gac.sagepub.com/cgi/doi/10.1177/1555412006292616 [Accessed March 25, 2011].

"However, the structure and rule set of the game world have a clear impact on what kinds of people play, what they do, and how and why they interact with one another."

Interesting paper on the social dynamics of guilds. The authors focussed on the player behaviour, attitudes and opinions to get at the meanings, social capital and networks that people formed in World of Warcraft.

There were two parts that I found extremely interesting (other than the above quote): methodology, and passing remarks to play style and guild behaviour.

The methodology used had three parts. They played the games, to understand what questions they needed to ask. They used bots to log data about who was online and for how long over a given period (which was necessary as they did not get any help from Blizzard) and surveys to try to understand teh different player and server types. They then did player interviews in-game to get opinions and explanations of behaviour. These were long interviews with an average time of 1 hour 39 minutes.

They used data gathered at each stage to inform the next stage in the methodology: an understanding of the game to know what to survey, then the results of the surveys to understand which players they wanted more information from. I think that is a useful approach to understand. The use of bots to gather log in duration and so on is also something I don't think I've seen in too many papers.

There is some kind of guild topography, explaining the difference between social, raid or pvp oriented guilds. They also give some size indicators, placing their boundaries between large, medium etc based on the surveying they did on group sizes within the game. I think there is soem correlation with business sizes, where they noted that larger guilds needed (by and large) more formal processes in place to keep the players happy.

"It is notable that people join, or in some cases, create guilds for their pragmatic or social needs. In some cases this is an issue of personal style; the player wanted to play with others of similar personality, real-life demographics or even sense of humor. Yet the most common reason to seek a particular guild type out was to accomplish game goals. This is a powerful case of the game mechanic influencing social decisions with unintended consequences."

They found that size of guild mattered, with smaller bonds focussed on social activities/bonds, and larger guilds focussed on game goals. That was not a hard rule, just an 'in general'. Large guilds are necessary for some game goals, so it may not be the player's individual preference to join a large guild, but important to access some of the game play.

(The treehouse to barracks relates to the group dynamic - informal like a group of kids in a treehouse or rigid hierarchy like a barracks.)

"Medium-sized guilds show the progression from the small, tightly knit groups to
the large, sometimes less personal ones. ... But with more members, there is a higher chance of a conflict in styles or ethics."

"While the purpose of guilds is to transcend the ephemeral nature of pick-up groups and questing parties, their longevity remains very much an issue. From earlier research (Ducheneaut, Yee, Nickell, & Moore, 2006), we know that about 21% of the guilds present on a WoW server at any given time disappear after a month. This high level of “churn” highlights the difficulties inherent in managing these entertainment communities: guilds appear to be fragile institutions.
Our interviews confirmed this fragility. For the vast majority of respondents, the guild they belonged to when we spoke with them was not their first guild. A lack of alignment between the player’s individual objectives and the guild’s objectives was often cited as an important reason for leaving a guild. As noted above, some merely used guilds as stepping stones and left, typically when the guild did not allow them to join the end- game raids. Other common sources of dissatisfaction were elitism, social distance, poor leadership, a lack of players at their level to play with, and the wrong level of seriousness (both too high and too low). Two players felt that women were a destructive influence on guilds because of their rarity and their potential to be sources of conflict. Pre-existing groups within guilds were often seen as problematic by newer members, especially if that group had played another game together beforehand."

Interesting things to investigate here about misalignment with original guilds. Also some interesting comments about what people didn't like about PUGs: different expectations with the other players about friendliness, sharing, leadership, roles.

Chapter notes - Unwritten Rules

1. Sniderman S. Unwritten Rules. In: The Game Design Reader. MIT Press; 2006:476-502.

This starts with a definition of a game as 'a play activity that consists of an object (a goal or goals that the players are trying to accomplish) and constraints on the players' behaviour (what they must do and/or what they may not do in attempting to achieve the game's object).'

Some of the constraints are explicit (the perceived rules of the game - the sheet that comes with the board game for example), whilst others are not. The author claims that some of the non-explicit rules may actually be impossible to completely define. He uses the example of tic-tac-toe (naughts and crosses!), where the basic rules are pretty simple, but what about a time limit on turn length? If a time limit is specified, then you need to specify how that time limit is measured, and what can interrupt the timer. In fact, trying to write a rule about an explicit time limit draws attention to the fact that it is a potential problem, where most games of naughts and crosses don't have that problem.

The author says rather than explicit rules we have unwritten rules (or expectations) of what will happen and how we will play.

Game officials can also pull and push and make extra decisions about the "real" or written game rules. The author uses the example of a fire alarm interrupting a chess tournament - does the time spent evacuated out of the building stop the timer or not? It's probably not written into the tournament rules. He claims that part of the problem is the real world settings for games - no set of rules can comprehensively cover every eventuality for the kinds of things that real life can bring to a game.

He also examines the concept of 'playing fair'. A very hard concept to define, which he illustrates with a great story about trainers who tried to teach dolphins to play waterpolo: they got the idea of scoring, but when they tried to stop the opponents scoring it descended into all-out war, not just a game.

Two big problems are outlined: working out exactly when a game starts, and when a move really counts. Uses the example of his friendly tennis matches, where it seems there are lots of unstated tweaks to the rules depending on who's playing and what the venue is. The process of learning these nuances is hidden - we don't realise we're learning them - so it's not until someone new tries to join in that the players may realise what they've done/learnt.

Players often adapt and reframe many official rules, depending on circumstances. For example in a friendly tennis match you may not switch ends as often as the rules state, or use new balls so often. Players may also add rules (my example: 6 and out playing cricket at Roedean because of the busy road along the edge of the pitch, his example: chat topics in the different groups he played tennis with).

The author goes on to ask how we can play if we don't know the rules, and suggests that we can play "as if" we know all the rules. This is his difference between human and computer players. Then the chapter veers off into looking at monetary systems and whether we can ever know all of the rules for that etc.

Could be a very useful reference.

Paper - Schmoozing and Smiting

Ratan RA, Chung JE, Shen C, Williams D, Poole MS. Schmoozing and Smiting: Trust, Social Institutions, and Communication Patterns in an MMOG. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 2010;16(1):93-114. Available at: http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2010.01534.x

(I actually got hold of the Word doc format from the Virtual Worlds Observatory, but they don't seem to want me to link directly.)

This is the second paper I've read that uses the same data gathering run. The other one was looking at gender roles, and I used it with the HCT reading group. The only author in common is D. Williams. They managed to get Sony to agree to let them have survey and behavioural data from Everquest, and also got Sony to create a special in-game item as an incentive to get players to fill out a 25 minute survey. Given the size of that opportunity (and how easy it must have been to negotiate) it doesn't surprise me that there is more than one paper as a result - but these are totally different! I would be interested to know how often that happens.

The authors were considering the levels of trust between players, and have a good review of recent changes in social behaviour (e.g. reduced engagement in civic/social events) and how they have changed the opportunities for trust. Prior research has shown that MMOG players list social reasons as important motivators for playing, so they wanted to explore if this social arena leads to new opportunities to trust.
(I need to follow up some of their references on trust and social institutions, particularly around the three major contributing features they outline.)

The paper considers the guild as a smaller social unit than the game itself, which in turn is a smaller unit than the internet at large. (Should also follow up some of their references on guilds!) They then look at trust by asking the players in the survey to rank whether guildmates, others in EQII, and others online "can be trusted" (on a 5-point scale). They did also ask a baseline question about how trusting individuals were ("Generally speaking, would you say that most people in everyday life can be trusted or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people?") They also used age and gender as controls.

They found that (as expected) they did support their hypotheses that players trust their guildmates most, then the other game players, and people online in general least. However, they found that the baseline question was the strongest predictor of the other levels of trust. I think that's interesting - how naturally trusting someone tends to be does show through in their online activities. The writers do seem to have just looked at the mean trust level - I'd like to see if people with lower baseline levels of trust had a smaller range of differences across the three classes, or if they still increased their level of trust by the same amount, just from a lower start point.

The other parts of this paper looked at mode of communication in relation to trust, and whether self-disclosure had any impact. They didn't have access to the content of messages, so had to rely on players accurately filling out the survey on how often they talked about personal matters. Having discussed (briefly) running a guild with a friend, they had rules in their guild that they were not supposed to discuss out-of-game details in raids at least. The paper finds that increased self-disclosure did relate to increased trust, so do guilds with rules similar to that actually risk shooting themselves in the foot as far as trusting each other go?

I was a bit worried when I read this paper that it might negate my line of attack, but I think it could be very useful while leaving me plenty of room to manoeuvre!

(Citation for gender paper: Williams D, Consalvo M, Caplan S, Yee N. Looking for Gender: Gender Roles and Behaviors Among Online Gamers. Journal of Communication. 2009;59(4):700-725. Available at: http://doi.wiley.com/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2009.01453.x [Accessed August 29, 2010].)

Paper - Trust as a Social Reality

1. Lewis JD, Weigert A. Trust as a Social Reality. Social Forces. 1985;63(4):967. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2578601?origin=crossref.

Paper on the topic of trust from a sociological viewpoint. Makes the point that trust is only possible between two people (or things) and therefore is not a characteristic of an individual. Trust goes beyond what is known and can be rationally concluded. It is a way to simplify the complexity of society, by removing possible outcomes to our actions that could not be removed by using solely rational means (and equally, distrust does the same thing with different outcomes).

If we knew everything about each other, trust would be unnecessary.  The trust in a relationship can change as the relationship continues.

The writers split trust into three dimensions: 'cognitive trust' (basing the choice to trust on 'good reasons'), 'emotional trust' (trusting someone is an emotional bond between participants) and 'behavioural trust' (the way we act when we trust). All three components feed into each other: i.e. if someone behaves as though they trust us, we are more likely to cognitively decide to trust them, and 'trust-implying actions' can help to feed the emotional part of the trust relationship.

Having split the concept of trust into three, trust is then split into types with one of these components dominant. They give examples of 'cognitive trust' being in nuclear arms reduction negotiation, or 'emotional trust' between lovers. The point is also made that most situations make trust a mix - e.g. emotional trust with no level of cognitive trust is blind faith, and the converse would be cold-blooded prediction.

The paper continues to discuss 'system trust', and how trust changes can be seen to have started the litigious  society. There is some discussion of whether the prisoner's dilemma game can really demonstrate trust, which is quite interesting.

I think it is worth following up on some of the bigger references in this paper: Luhmann, N "Trust and Power", and Bok, S "Lying" I reckon.

Glitch

Glitch (http://glitch.com/) is a new MMOG that is still in the alpha stage, but looks like it could be right up my street. It's a new project by the team who started Flickr. The basic premise is that 11 giants are imagining this world, and the players are just tiny figments of their imagination. There is a fascinating interview with the guy who's creating it (Stewart Butterfield) on Gamasutra.  There's also a player-created wiki.

I think the interview is interesting because he has the same problems with Second Life and There.com as I do - what do you do when you're in there? At the same time, he doesn't like the way that in games like World of Warcraft you don't leave a lasting impression on the world - i.e. you kill something but you can go on the same raid to kill the same boss tomorrow. Glitch is an effort to create a world that is changed and responds to the players, and I think it's quite exciting.

I managed to get an alpha account, and had my first go playing last Thursday (the game is only periodically open at the moment). The focus is on building things and learning skills, but unlike other sandbox style games (e.g. Wurm) there are also quests, so there's an entry point. The quests are silly too. I had one where I had to use my emotional bear (after equipping it with lips) to kiss 5 other players, after eating garlic. So the quests show you how the equipment can be used, and encourage interaction - I had to chat to the people I was kissing, I really couldn't bring myself to just run up, kiss them and run away!

There are going to be multiple ways to group players from that interview, so not simply guilds/clans/villages. Some are going to be 'religious' cults, dedicated to one of the giants. He also mentions corporations. It will be really interesting to see what forms, and if there are any differences in character between the two types of groups.

I'm looking forward to seeing this one grow, and really pleased to be on board at the alpha stage.

Review - Collective Action and the Evolution of Social Norms

1. Ostrom E. Collective Action and the Evolution of Social Norms. Journal of Economic Perspectives. 2000;14(3):137-158. Available at: http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/abs/10.1257/jep.14.3.137.

Starts out by explaining (briefly) the "zero contribution thesis" and how this contradicts the evidence we see in real life. Other evidence has been gathered by running "public good experiments", which examine the willingness of players to overcome collective action problems. If everyone is a 'Rational Egoist' - e.g. out for most profit for themselves - it makes sense that they will never contribute to public good because the best outcome for them is that they don't contribute, but receive the good from all the other contributions. Of course, if everyone reaches that conclusion, noone contributes.

Over many runnings of public good games, the following seven findings have been found repeatedly:

1. Subjects contribute between 40-60% of their resources in either one shot games or the first round of finite games. 
2. Contributions decay downwards, but stay well above zero as the game continues.
3. If subjects believe others are likely to cooperate, they are more likely to also cooperate.
4. Learning the game better actually leads to more cooperation.
5. Face-to-face communication increases cooperation. There is less cooperation when the communication is via computers. 
6. Subjects will use personal resources to punish free-riders.
7. The rate of contribution is affected by contextual factors. 

These finding can't be explained with the zero contribution thesis, where all actors are rational egoists. They can be explained by adding different types of actors (Ostrom calls them norm-users) to the model: "Conditional Cooperators" and "Willing Punishers". Conditional cooperators are willing to cooperate as long as they believe others will, and if enough people do they will continue to cooperate. They will tend to trust others, but if others are deemed to be free-riding they will get disappointed and stop contributing, which in turn means other conditional cooperators will also stop. Willing punishers will punish free-riders, either verbally or if available via other means. If reward mechanisms for people who cooperate are available, they may use those instead. 

She goes on to discuss the evolutionary argument for the development of these types. It gets really interesting to me where she says that if you knew the personality type of the people you are playing with, you could predict which is the best strategy every time and rational egoists would not be a favoured adaptation. However, if nothing is known about the other players, the best strategy is not to trust. So you need to know enough about the people you are dealing with to be able to judge them as trustworthy to cooperate. This would be more difficult online, and I would suggest that guilds are a way to find players to trust to cooperate with. 

There's a further section about the institutional rules having a potentially damaging effect on the evolution of good social norms (which also helps to dictate whether people will cooperate or not). There is a discussion of the field studies on public good and self-organised collective action e.g. fisheries. Could that feed in to game design at all? 

Need to follow up on finding out about trust I think, along with some more about this collective action stuff. 

Review - Human group formation in online guilds and offline gangs

1. Johnson N, Xu C, Zhao Z, et al. Human group formation in online guilds and offline gangs driven by a common team dynamic. Physical Review E. 2009;79(6):1-11. Available at: http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevE.79.066117.

This paper looks at building a simple model of how people decide to join or move between guilds or gangs, using membership data from World of Warcraft guilds and LA street gangs.

They attempt two types of model: where people choose to join groups where all members have the same attributes as them ('kinship') and where people choose to join groups where they complement the existing membership ('team formation'). The model that fitted the data most closely was the team formation model. I think that's extremely interesting, as I'm suggesting that guilds do form from players with similar playing styles, so perhaps this is a different angle. (By playing style I think I'm meaning subtle differences in emphasis, i.e. more emphasis on exploration vs raiding vs PvP etc.)

In addition to looking at both sets of data as a whole, they then divide the groups by 'ethnicity'. This is obvious in terms of the gangs, but for the WoW data they split it by server. This turns out to be a good fit because as it is not possible to change your ethnicity in real life, it is also difficult/expensive to move your character between servers in WoW. They find that although the model fits all the variations of ethnicity they need to tweak some of the constants slightly, suggesting that there are very subtle differences in behaviour not only between different gang ethnicities in LA (which might be expected - different backgrounds and cultural values) but also in between servers in WoW (same game, so what causes that?!).

Good analogy to job finding, and actually rather tallies with my empirical experience that teams tend to take on the character of their head (who does the hiring) while looking for members that complement the group skillset. Again, a difference between the two definitions of what people look for in a team - similar values, different skills.

Tragedies of the ludic commons - Jonas Heide Smith

1. Smith JH. Tragedies of the ludic commons - understanding cooperation in multiplayer games. Game Studies. 2007;7(1). Available at: http://gamestudies.org/0701/articles/smith.

An article that links player behaviour and dilemmas in online games into two new areas of research for me - collective action problems and social dilemmas. This is sort of what I've been looking for, because I think that research on multiplayer online society ought to have some grounding in research into offline societies, even if it's just to expose the differences between on and offline experiences.

The paper introduces the concepts of collective action and social dilemma, but then links the two for the remainder of the paper. He then discusses three aspects of multi-player gaming that he describes as 'conflict-heavy' and how they can be understood in terms of social dilemmas. The three areas he chooses are aligned with my interests: cheating, grief play and responsible participation.

Cheating he acknowledges is a slightly grey area in places. Defining some cheats is straightforward - hacking the client for example obviously contravenes the rules of the game. However, exploiting loopholes that the developer didn't expect is grey - the player has to guess at what is beyond allowed, and what the developer expected. Also the author states that if everyone is 'cheating' it may just be that they are all playing a different game (although mostly the games where everyone cheats are not wildly popular). The cheat is compared to the prisoner's dilemma, where the very best outcome for the player is to have everyone around them be playing fair while they cheat, but the best for the group as a whole (in terms of the game-playing experience) is if everyone is playing fair.

Grief play is defined as disruptive play that brings the player no or little personal gain. If the collective good is again seen to be the enjoyment of the experience, this can be seen to destroy that collective good.

Irresponsible participation is a tricky one. This is defined (in this article) by example - so if you know a raid is going to take upwards of an hour and you only have 40 minutes, you'll have to abandon and potentially wreck the raid party. Alternatively, gambling at one point in a game and putting yourself at such a disadvantage that you quit could take the enjoyment of beating you from your opponent. Difficult. I suspect these might be very personal calls on what is and isn't acceptable - would be interesting to follow up on that.

The article goes on to discuss the ways that these problems could be alleviated for the good of all, including code, cheat-blocker software etc. It gets most interesting for me when he starts to talk about guilds as a method of managing the great proportion of these issues. The guild rules and reputation allow the players to judge others - so you know that if you're playing with people from your guild they ought to have the same ideas about what is and isn't permissible (within the norms you are forming). So, if a guild is one where team kill is turned on, you know that and understand that risk and won't be so upset if one of your team shoots you (in theory). I think the grey areas and judgement calls (i.e. is it acceptable to concede the game early and deny the opponent the thrill of winning) is what the guild rules will probably centre on and clarify - it would be fascinating to check that.