Online Games

Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is Olli Sotamaa, whose interest is in social games and gaming capital. Olli is a social gamer himself (on FrontierVille and Mafia Wars), as are other presenters in this session – these activities are publicly announced on Facebook and other social network Websites, generating what can be described as gaming capital (a special form of social capital); how does this operate in relation to social games, then?

Playing Mafia Wars, for example, isn’t a particularly exciting or deep gaming experience, but it is still very popular; what is of most interest here are the in-game achievements. Games like it are based on a freemium model that attracts as many players as possible, involves them as deeply as possible, and attempts to make at least some of the play. A key design driver is to support sociability and virality, to make the game a natural part of the social economy.

Gothenburg.
The next speaker in this session at AoIR 2010 is Luca Rossi, who begins by highlighting the great diversity in computer gaming, and the substantial social aspects of shared gaming experiences. Indeed, creating sociable gaming experiences is now an important aim for the industry.

And yet, playing on Facebook also remains a solitary experience to some extent – you’re playing with others, perhaps, but at a distance. Friends in such games are positioned as resources, who variously can be played with or against. Social relationships are used as games resources, and it is possible that specific game structures work better with specific underlying social structures.

Gothenburg.
And we’re in the final session of AoIR 2010 – it’s been a fun and very busy conference. I might be a little distracted in my coverage of this session, as the Hannover 96 – FC Köln game is on at the moment as well… 2:0 at the moment!

We’re starting with Lisbeth Klastrup, who notes that gaming on Facebook has really taken off in recent times; the Farmville application has been most popular so far, with millions of users. Studying social media network games has become an growing sub-set of digital games research, too.

Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is TL Taylor, whose interest is in game culture – an area where transnational connections are now also prevalent. Where games consoles used to be strongly region-controlled, this has loosened considerably – games bought abroad will now often also play in a different geographical region, even if the same is not necessarily true yet for DVDs and Blu-Ray discs. But in accessing and downloading games, for example, users are often still required to identify their location (or geolocated by their IP address).

Games companies themselves are also reinscribing regional specificity into the gameplay itself now – online players are often regionally segregated onto different game servers (for technical reasons, in the first place, but also through language and other choices). Interactions between users from different regions and nations (such as debates over what languages to use) also highlight a relocalisation of game participation.

Singapore.
The next presenter in this session at ICA 2010 is CarrieLynn Reinhard, whose interest is in human sensemaking when engaging in virtual worlds. Lab-based experimental approaches to this are sometimes criticised for stressing internal over external validity, and for being unable to prove causality without the black box of the experimental setup - they rely on holding a number of variables constant in order to observe the effects of a predetermined, measurable variable in order to determine causality.

Krems.
The final speaker in this EDEM 2010 session is Marko Skoric, who shifts our focus to Singapore and away from explicitly political spaces: rather, his interest is in investigating emerging platforms for online sociability and entertainment - like Facebook and (online) games. Such spaces constitute a third place for their users to gather.

Facebook has a substantial civic potential, and several studies have documented that potential, focussing both on everyday generic use of Facebook and on specific political pages within it. Similarly, various civic activities are happening in online games and immersive 3D environments; such games can also act as labs for practicing civic skills - through deliberately serious games but also through others.

Cardiff.
It's second and last day of Future of Journalism 2009 - and after Transforming Audiences in London and e-Democracy in Vienna, the last day in a long week of conferencing for me. Of the three, FoJ is the most multi-tracked conference, so I'll be able to see only a fraction of all papers here - but many of them will be available online as well. We start this morning with a paper on journalism in Second Life, presented by Bonnie Brennen. She begins by noting the current concerns about the future of journalism and views that facts and truth are losing their importance in the postmodern world. Still, there is good journalism being done, if not always in conventional formats, and this journalism is helping people understand key issues in their lives.

Leuven.
The next presenter at EuroITV 2009 is An Jacobs, whose interest is in the potential role of television in gaming. A combination and convergence between television and gaming is complicated by the existing routines of using each medium, which need to be altered in order to arrive at new models. The television set remains mainly in a shared space, usually in the living room, and in recent time, gaming has traditionally taken place elsewhere - playing on a PC, for example, also makes it less likely that the player is interrupted by other household members. Even the arrival of new media forms in the households doesn't tend to change such routines.

Singapore.
Up next in this Second Life session at ISEA 2008 is Bjarke Liboriussen, whose interest is especially in the process of building structures in SL. How does this process reflect users' understanding of their (physical as well as online) worlds? Bjarke points to Annette Markham's idea that online technologies are seen by users generally as either tools, places, or ways of being - and historically, initially perhaps as tools, more recently as ways of being, and even more recently as actual places. This latter view asserts that places have important features that affect social interaction.