research

Of DIGRA things to come

This year’s DIGRA conference is almost upon us. All in all, I much enjoyed the previous instantiation, and will be looking forward to Vancouver surrounded by game research greatness.

In particular, I’ll be looking forward to (although I have not yet read the papers):

Styles of Playing Violent Video Games: An Individual Differences Research Methodology
Amanda Bolton, Gregory Fouts

Addressing Social Dilemmas and Fostering Cooperation through Computer Games (full paper)
Mark Chen

Gaining Advantage: How Videogame Players Define and Negotiate Cheating (full paper)
Mia Consalvo

The “White-Eyed” Player Culture: Grief Play and Construction of Deviance in MMORPGs (full paper)
Holin Lin, Chuen-Tsai Sun

/hide: The Aesthetics of Group and Solo Play (full paper)
David Myers

Law, Order and Conflicts of Interest in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (full paper)
Daniel Pargman, Andreas Eriksson

A Brief Social History of Game Play (full paper)
Dmitri Williams

Oh, and then of course there’s TL Taylor’s keynote and Jesper Juul’s dissertation talk – not to be missed by anyone who don’t have the pleasure of their everyday pleasantness.

But all in all it seems those Vancouver days will be quite packed.

BTW, here’s my own paper abstract and the full version.

First rule of methodology club

One of the few universal rules of methodology club is that you are not allowed to say that all studies within a specific area must conform to a certain methodological approach. I’ll refrain from mentioning names here, but please believe me: You REALLY shouldn’t. If tempted, please recall your first methodology lesson where they told you that the “correct” methodology is a function of the research question. In this particular case “they” were right.

Gonzalo at Copenhagen University tommorow

The opposite of fun is not boredom: Videogames, art and communication

Sure, videogames are fun but is that enough? If television had focused solely on fun, we wouldn’t have news programs, documentaries, commercials or drama. Fun is just one element in the equation of making games, especially when you have a different agenda than just entertaining your players. This talk will review the artistic and communicational potential of videogames by exploring different examples of political, educational and non-traditional games. The language of cinema owes a lot to early art and political films (Griffith, Eisenstein, Riefenstahl): could a similar trend happen in videogames?

Thursday May 26
9.15am to 11.00am
Room 8.3.32 (KUA)

Gonzalo Frasca works at the Center for Computer Game Research at the IT University. He edits Ludology.org and co-edits Game Studies and WaterCoolerGames.org. He is the co-founder of Powerful Robot Games studio, leads the Newsgaming.com project and co-designed the first official videogame ever commissioned for a US Presidential campaign. He is also a former head of game production at Cartoon Network LA.

The Project takes a new direction… – or: At least the sub-title is still reasonable

Okay, I wasn’t kidding when I said this was a research blog of sorts. Not fully kidding, anyway.
Elsewhere on this site I have claimed to be researching the issue of social order/control in multiplayer gamespaces. That’s still an interesting topic, of course.
But recently I have drifted towards another main issue: How can analytical game theory help us analyze video games? What predictions as to player behaviour does such a perspective entail? And how do these prediction fare when confronted with empirically real players?
I approach the latter part by analyzing the behaviour of players who play a small series of multiplayer console games. The players are videotaped while playing (as hinted at here) and their behaviour/communication is then analyzed (for more details send me an email).

One thing quite interesting about this approach is that my study seems to be fairly unique. Of course, whenever people say that no-one else has done X one may follow the rule of thumb that they haven’t looked properly. But at least I’m working with the hypothesis that no-one has done really micro analyses of the interaction between video game players on a small scale (that is non-ethnographic) working with questions like: “What do players say to each other?”, “Do players play to win or to make sure everybody has fun?” etc.
Prove my hypothesis wrong and I’ll buy you a beer.

Update: Unrelated to this post both Jesper and Bryan have actually alerted me to XEODesign’s report “Why We Play Games” (11mb download) which in fact reports a very interesting (and ambitious) study of player behaviour – even if targeted at “why?” and not “how?”. Not sure what the rules are exactly, but I might owe both of you a beer.

Oh, the media…

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at a public library as part of the nicely idealistic “Day of research” (where researchers meet “the public”). I spoke about media panic, public perceptions of games and of games as media/art.
Business-oriented Danish daily newspaper Børsen was there covering the event. Let me quote one of the funnier captions in this Tuesday’s edition: [Below a portrait of yours truly, worthy of early German movie expressionism] “PhD student Jonas Heide Smith of the IT University has no problem with violent and crime-glorifying computer games like ‘Grand Theft Auto’ which is about stealing cars“.

The article itself has a few confusing points and a Jonas Heide Smith quote that initially made me sigh deeply: “Discussions about giving government support to computers is far more serious than it was five years ago”. Now, of course I said computer games, not computers. But on second thought, is it so outrageous? After all, the poor machines are slaving away day after day under our desks – are they not in fact entitled to government support? Where is the minister of equality in all this?

Considering the number of individuals entitled to government support in this country the thought is hardly outlandish. If Blade Runner had been made in this country, the big question would of course had been: If entities have memories and emotions, how can we then deny them government support?