The Media Equation, Byron Reeves & Clifford Nass

The media equation (published 1996) states that “media equals real life” and is, the authors assert, a rule that governs how all of us interact with media. I guess most of us can imagine equating mediated and real life as something that we do occasionally when tired or stressed - shouting at the computer, for example - but the authors insist that it is ubiquitous - all of us do it, and do it often. To test their hypothesis that our interactions with computers, TV etc. are fundamentally social and natural, the authors started with social science research into human behaviour. They chose a range of findings, substituted “person” or “environment” with media to form a new hypothesis which was then tested in the same way as the original social science finding. For example, in investigating politeness, the authors came up with the following hypotheses:

1. When a computer asks a user about itself, the user will give more positive responses than when a different computer asks the same questions.
2. Because people are less honest when a computer asks about itself, the answers will be more homogenous than when a different computer asks the same questions.

Areas they investigated included manners (politeness, interpersonal distance, flattery, judgement), personality, emotion, social roles (including gender). In every case the authors found that their research backed the hypotheses.

They also found that it is true for all sorts of media – computers, interfaces, pictures, audio, video; it is true for all types of people (whatever their education or background – computer scientists included) and it isn’t dependent on the complexity, sophistication or “realism” of the media – very basic images or interfaces will elicit the same responses.

The authors are quick to point out that it’s not that we think computers are people, or that we think it reasonable to act as if they are – in a sense we can’t help doing it. (well, we can avoid it for a time but it requires a lot of effort and is difficult to sustain). And the reason behind these behaviours? According to the authors, evolution is the culprit – it simply hasn’t equipped us to deal with technology. Up until the technological era only humans exhibited rich social behaviours and all perceived objects were real objects, so we have evolved to respond to anything that appears to behave socially or seems to be a real object as if it actually is.

These findings have obvious implications for the design and evalution of media. If we design systems that mirror how social relationships and physical environments work, users will find using these systems intuitive, will more readily engage with the systems and find interaction more rewarding.

Jane McGonigal

Has done a rather interesting TED talk. I suspect it briefly touches on some of the subjects of her new book: Reality is Broken.

She claims she wants people to spend more time playing online games to solve the world's problems. This is based on a few things, including the idea of the emotion of the 'epic win'. An epic win is an outcome so positive that you had no idea it was even possible to achieve it until you are on the verge of it. These situations happen in games, but rarely in real life. She says the more normal feeling in real life is 'I'm not good at life' - or the feeling that you are not as good in real life as you are in the games.

She goes on to look at why games are making us feel so good about ourselves. Game challenges are always available, always sound epic or important and yet are carefully targeted to the ability of the gamer so that they are on the edge of what they can achieve. No unemployment, no twiddling thumbs or time to wallow. In addition to that you get plenty of positive feedback in terms of levelling up, which is missing in real life.

There is an incredible statistic that people have so far spent 5.93 million years online playing World of Warcraft. I think that must be in man-years. That's similar to the amount of time taken for humans to evolve from just standing. Apparently youngsters in countries with significant gaming cultures will spend 10,000 hours playing online games by the time they are 21. Apparently around 10,000 hours is the time taken to become a virtuoso, so she goes on to look at what gamers are learning from playing those games:

1. Urgent Optimism. There's something that needs doing immediately, and it Can Be Done. 
2. Weaving a Social Fabric. Proven to like people better after playing games with them (even if they win) because you've trusted them a lot to play the game in the first place. I think there might be some shared experience in that too (see cricket team!) but need to look into references. 
3. Blissful Productivity. Humans are happiest working, not relaxing. Gamers will work for hours if given the 'right work'. 
4. Epic Meaning. Gamers weave truly epic stories, and are used to operating with tasks that have a big effect. 

The problem is that they are changing virtual worlds rather than real worlds. The economist Edward Castronova describes what's happening as a mass-exodus from real to virtual worlds. Jane McGonigal believes that people are escaping their broken real world problems to virtual worlds, where they can form better social connections, and feel like they are good at it. She's working on games that bring those powers of concentration to the real world. Three so far, and I'd like to follow up on all of them:

1. World without oil - piloted in 2007. 
2. Superstruct
3. Evoke - played in 2010.

Evoke looks particularly relevant as it was shared with universities across sub-Saharan Africa.

Review - Homo Ludens, J. Huizinga

1. Huizinga J. Homo Ludens: A study of the play element in culture. Beacon Press, Boston; 1955.

A lot of the books and papers I'm reading kept referencing this book, so I thought I ought to read it. It's been a bit of a struggle, frankly! The most interesting sections for me included chapter 1: Nature and significance of play, chapter 3: Play and contest as civilizing functions, and chapter 12: Play-element in contemporary civilization.

Chapter 1 includes good definitions of play, that are built on by Jesper Juul and others. Play is "non-seriousness" and is outside of "normal life". It takes place in a magic circle, with boundaries carefully built up and maintained in the game by the rules. Huizinga states that the rules are "absolutely binding and allow no doubt" (pg 11) - I'm not sure this holds for multiplayer (or maybe computer in general) games where the rules of the game are discovered as the players play, although it could be argued that the rules of the game as defined by the code are in place before play starts, even if the players don't know them all yet. If the rules are broken or have to be renegotiated the game has to stop for that to be fixed.

In addition to this he introduces the concept of the play-community, the group of players, which can become permanent after the game ends. Along with this is the idea of the 'spoil-sport' who refuses to play the rules any more, and therefore exposes the players to the fact that their game is just a game. The cheat is something different, who keeps the magic of the game going by pretending to play but secretly breaks the rules.

In chapter 3 there is some discussion about single player vs multiplayer. Social play (or multiplayer) is considered more "generative of culture" than solitary play. It's recognised that the prevalence of single player games is quite a recent phenomenon (not in this book, in more recent literature) that came about with the personal computer.

(There's a cracking quote too: "The passion to win sometimes threatens to obliterate the levity proper to a game." pg. 47 - could be relevant in terms of why people might be driven to cheat?)

Then towards the end of chapter 12 the following: "Civilization will, in a sense, always be played according to certain rules, and true civilization will always demand fair play. Fair play is nothing less than good faith expressed in play terms." I felt the chapter on the play-element in contemporary civilisation was rather reflective of it's time shortly after WWII, but this particular point could again relate to a nebulous concept of 'fair play' and how that is defined by the community.

Relatively few points for a book I really struggled with!

Daggerdale

Co-operative D&D game, forthcoming from Bedlam Games. Interview at http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-01-31-daggerdale-the-future-of-d-and-d-games-interview?page=1.

Plays co-operatively online with up to four players, or single-player, or 'couch co-op' which is 2 co-located players.

Looks like playing online multi-player will work in one of two ways: you send invites to your desired playing companions, or you choose to host a public game that only starts once all four roles have been filled. Not disimilar to what we are proposing to do, which is something I've been worried about.

It's strongly based off the 4th edition rule book, but makes the move to live action rather than turn-based. I expect that's actually a marketing move as much as the 'passion of the developer team' - computer games support the live action and it makes sense to use that.

I'm not sure if each game is unique, or if you can keep your customised character between games. As it's not massively multiplayer and persistent as such (in much the same way as our game), would it make sense to transfer the levelled up players between game-runs? Also when you join a game, are you signed up for the duration, or could you play for 30 min and agree to meet up again later? Be interesting to see how successful this game is.  

Citizen Science

http://www.filamentgames.com/project_files/CitizenScience/Releases/Year2%20v1.0/popup.html

A game that was mentioned in the program for Games for Change 2010, you play the part of a persuasive young person (you get to choose boy or girl) who has to collect evidence for why the lake keeps getting polluted and stop it.

Neat little flash game, very linear storyline. Really clear who you need to talk to, and there's a little tag that tells you what to do next. Ideally I think the information the characters give you ought to be so clear that you don't need that, but it does help. Also occasionally the direction you're supposed to go in isn't really made clear.

It is very prescriptive, and after a while I kind of stopped reading the full arguments. You could tell which chunks are supposed to go with which arguments by reading the short bit at the top, rather than the full description. That might negate the learning somewhat. I guess the plus side for children would be something like fairy stories: the kid saved the world from the big bad guys. Be interesting to see if that really worked that way for children.

Playing 'Evil'

Doing a quick search to try and follow up on some of the 'cheating' in the book I just reviewed, I happened across a couple of interesting blog posts on playing 'evil' characters in MMORPGs.

http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2010/02/evil-in-multiplayer-games.html
This post follows up on a comment that to play evil characters you have to be evil in real life. The decision in the post is that no, you don't actually. And actually, the most 'evil' you can be is to behave badly in the game because that affects the other players.

On this one it's the comments section that is almost more interesting than the post. There are several very interesting comments, including:
- "I do *not* agree with a ruleset that includes ganking and betrayal, neither tacitly nor otherwise." (ganking appears to be killing another player...) This would be the kind of ruleset that Graham Chapman was concerned we wouldn't be able to have in an online game, where players wouldn't be able to steal from each other or scam them.
- "I don't get it. I thought the only evil thing one can do in a *game*, is cheating. Anything within the game's rules is fine." Which is really interesting in the context I was actually looking for.
There's also a long comment on the importance of immersion.

http://procrastinationamplification.com/role-playing-is-hard/
This post says that roleplaying a character that is not the way you would normally play is hard. So he claims even when he knows a different outcome is possible if you play a different way, he can't bring himself to do it. He also discusses three ways to play games: what would you do, what would your character do, and what's the most 'lucrative'. I think by lucrative he actually means potentially in experience points rather than necessarily in-game cash or anything like that, but could feature.

Just making a note for future reference.

Review - Cheating, Mia Consalvo

1. Consalvo M (Ohio U. Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames. MIT Press; 2007:228.

The book looks at the history of the videogame culture, starting with the magazines in the early days that published things like walk throughs and cheat codes and moving on to online resources. This is done to define what might be called 'cheats', and show how they have been used to a certain degree by the industry to maintain interest in games.

The author then goes on to look at how the players themselves view and define cheating within a videogame, and when they would or would not use cheats. There doesn't seem to be any consistent level of behaviour that is universally recognised as cheating - some players are hardcore and believe even asking friends is cheating, others see hacking the gamecode as an indication of just how proficient a player they are. Also, many players had engaged in a behaviour they did consider to be cheating, for a variety of reasons. These included making the game more fun (e.g. using codes to give you unlimited lives) or get past a particular stumbling point, right through to getting even with other people who 'cheated' (possibly not in their perception of cheating), or just making other players miserable. There is a difference made between cheating in single player games where the only person you cheat is yourself, and multi-player games where you gain an advantage over other people.

There is a look at how the industry attempts to counter the cheating, from making the cheats less effective and therefore worthless, right through to naming and shaming and banning individuals from playing the game. The varying reactions reflect the underlying feelings about the cheaters, to a degree. Also the reaction of the community (in MMOGs - particularly Final Fantasy IX) is explored, which mainly consists of naming and shaming in community areas to prevent others having the same problems.

Interesting point about the way the rules of multi-player games tend to be defined at two levels: the actual rules of the game, and the 'gentleman's agreement' of how cheats/hacks/exploits will be used. This struck me as very similar to the difference between the rules of cricket and the spirit of cricket. It is also interesting that the online games evolve in response to the behaviour of the playing communities. (A point raised in the paper 'Why virtual worlds can matter'.) If communities start using behaviour that the developers do not want, the code is changed to preclude that behaviour. Alternatively, communities can cause the code to be changed in a way that improves the game play. This really stresses the symbiotic relationship between the game development and the players - neither exists without the other.

I think the lack of a clear-cut definition of what is a cheat is fascinating, and also that many players are happy to do things even if they have defined them as cheating, and can justify it to themselves. Also the difference in perception of cheating in a single-player game vs a multi-player game is intriguing, as the comparison between cheating in real life vs cheating in an online environment.