Computer Science 282: Social Aspects of Games, Leisure, and Entertainment

Unit 2: Social Games

Photograph of players and referee taking part in a hockey game. One of a set of photographs taken at the official opening of the Deseronto Community Recreation Centre in 1975. Courtesy Deseronto Archives.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/deserontoarchives/3600077165/

The focus of this unit is on the nature of social games—games played with other people. In this unit we will be exploring what kinds of social games exist, the nature of identity in social games, and the kinds of interactions that occur within them.

Learning Outcomes

At the end of this unit you should be able to

• classify and distinguish a variety of genres of social game.
• analyze the effects of game design on social behaviour.
• design game features to affect social interaction.
• assess the causes and effects of antisocial behaviour in games.
• reflect on social interactions in games and game-like systems.

Key Concepts

Your reflections should show an understanding of these concepts:

forms and technologies of social games; identity, personas, avatars and sock puppets; cheating; glory and shame; modes and models of social gaming

Some Questions to Think About

• What kinds of social games are there?
• How do people present themselves differently in online games? Why?
• What makes virtual spaces different from physical ones?
• How do game designers shape social interactions within games?
• How do communities form in online games; what makes them succeed; why do they sometimes fail?
• Do all games need goals? Or points? How do different ways of measuring success affect how people play together?
• What kinds of behaviour are unethical in online games?

Time

This unit is expected to take around 20–25 hours for the average student to get an average mark.

Unit 2 Learning Journal Template

You may copy the following headings into your Unit 2 learning journal to make it easier to organize your work in this unit. This provides the headings for the tasks to be completed to meet the minimum task requirements. You are both welcome and encouraged to create new subheadings and headings as needed.

Remember, the more evidence you supply of meeting the required outcomes, the more likely you will be to achieve success on this course, so don’t be afraid to add notes, comments, thoughts, and reflections that go beyond the basic requirements.

Task 1: Game Comparison

Task 2: Representing Identity in Online Games

Task 3: Designing Social Spaces

Task 4: Reactions to Griefing

Reflections on Unit 2

Further Reading

Background

Social computer games have a long history. While a lot of early games research went into teaching computers to play traditional games like tic-tac-toe, checkers, and chess, from among the earliest days of shared-memory multi-user computers, the communication capabilities of large centralized machines with dumb terminals were used for game playing.

Although early messaging systems allowed people to play conventional games that later became the play-by-email game genre (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Play-by-mail_game), perhaps the earliest pure example of a multiplayer game dates back to 1962 with the creation of Spacewar!, a two-player shoot-’em-up game that continues to spawn variants to this day. If you are interested in what it felt like to play this, there is an emulator available at https://spacewar.oversigma.com/html5/ that is close to the original. Unless you are ambidextrous, you will need to find someone else to play it with you, sharing a keyboard: the README file linked from the page explains the simple controls.

From around the early 1970s, a series of more complex games and game-like systems were developed that often took their inspiration from the classic “geek” pursuits and interests of their programmers. Notable among these was STAR, a strategy-based game based loosely on the world of Star Trek. A variant on this, DEC Wars!, was distributed with the DEC operating system used in DEC computers that were the mainstay of university computers used to teach generations of programmers in the 1970s and 1980s; thus, despite frequently being banned by computer services staff due to overuse of limited resources, these games strongly influenced many of the early multi-user computer game developments. This pattern of stretching the limits of what computer hardware could support is a continuing theme in multi-player gaming today.

In a parallel development of similarly geeky origins, Dungeons and Dragons provided the inspiration for the development of the MUD (multi-user dungeon) genre. While games like Spacewar! and DEC War! could, at least in principle, be played against a computer, MUDs had no single-player mode and were, by definition, social games that could not be played without other people. Through text-based interactions, people were guided around a space that had no other existence beyond paragraphs describing where they were, the objects that could be found there and, crucially, the words typed by other people. This in turn led to the development of the MOO (MUD Object Oriented) that allowed players to build and create a text-based game-like environment that was highly immersive. MOOs still exist in large numbers and have spawned some descendants such as Second Life that remain significant.

Pong, the first commercially popular video game in the 1970s, was designed to be played by two people. The social aspect of this game was highly situated, relying on direct physical interaction between two collated people. Technically speaking, this was an analogue system that did not rely on a digital computer and owed more to electro-mechanical ancestors than digital forebears, but it was not long before small, cheap microprocessors led to an explosion of video game arcades offering classic two-or-more-player games like Tron, as well as competitive modes for single player games like Space Invaders that used alternate gameplay and halls of fame to provide a social context for gameplay. For a long time, this was the dominant social mode used by many of the video games that created the industry, at least largely because networked communications in their infancy were expensive and slow.

In the mid 1980s, Habitat, the first popular multi-user world was created by Lucasfilm. Relying on dial-up connections and a large, centralized computer to host and coordinate activities, it was a genre-defining system that wrapped a graphical user interface around what was, at its heart, a child of the MUD. Read “The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat,” first presented in 1990 at http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html, for a fascinating glimpse into the origins of games like World of Warcraft and other popular MMORPGs (massive multimedia online role-playing games). The issues that the paper raises are still highly relevant even though the technologies have moved on since then.

For a long time, multi-user games relied upon shared-memory mainframe and mini-computers. The first networked computer games, in which machines with their own processors and memory were pitted against one another, are a more recent development. Perhaps the earliest example was in the 1987 MIDI Maze for the Atari ST that linked two machines via their MIDI interfaces. However, the first to use a LAN (local area network) was Spectre in 1991 on the Apple Mac. Following that, Doom arrived on DOS-based PCs in 1993, featuring advanced graphics and fast network play. This was a primitive system by today’s standards but stretched the limits of computer hardware of the period. I was an administrator of a network at the time and recall the earliest version’s habit of swamping Ethernet networks with broadcast packets that led to its use being banned on my network (but this didn’t stop my team from “testing” it extensively out of office hours!).

Since then, there have been a host of genres and sub-genres of social games and game-like systems. Try to think of as many as you can. If you are unfamiliar with gaming genres, don’t worry—that’s what the next exercise is intended to help you to explore.

Task 1: Game Comparison (2–3 hr)

It is very easy to form preconceptions and biases that lead you to think of a limited range of prototypical social games without thinking of the full gamut of possibilities. This task is intended to help you to think about the range and forms of social games.

Starting at the Wikipedia page for social gaming at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_game, explore the various categories of social game presented on that site. Try to subdivide these categories further. For example, try to find a categorization that would distinguish, say, Happy Farm from Samurai Romanesque, and Samurai Romanesque from World of Warcraft, and World of Warcraft from chess, or chess from poker.

Although you are free to consider non-digital games, it would be more useful in the context of this course to think about computer games and/or hybrids such as augmented/alternative reality games rather than those played out solely in physical space. How many ways can you find to categorize them? It is worth spending a while on thinking about or looking for games in order to get a good sense of the range of possibilities.

Examples of distinctions might include

• the technologies they use (do they use dedicated engines or do they exist in web browsers, for instance).
• whether they mimic the real world or not (do they use abstract representations? Do they change the physics?).
• whether they enable direct dialogue or whether they use some other form of interaction (such as shooting people, moving pieces on a board, or competing through financial proxies, for instance).
• whether they are synchronously or asynchronously played (moving together or taking turns).
• whether they involve competition or cooperation.
• whether they are played by individuals or in teams.
• etc.

There are indefinitely many ways to distinguish one game from another. You might further consider things like aesthetics, business models, communities and audiences, rate of interaction and gameplay; whether they are historical, mythological, or entirely fictional; whether they derive from earlier games etc.

Find two examples of social games that are as different as possible from each other. Ideally, these should be two that you are familiar with as a player or, if not, ones that you can read about to find out how they work, who plays them, what they look like and so on.

Now, compare and contrast the two. The more different they are, the better.

Write your comparison in your Unit 2 learning journal with the title “Task 1: Game Comparison.” Feel free to look at what others may have done for this task, but do not copy it! The point of this exercise is not just to reflect on the different kinds of social game that are available, but also to see that there are different ways of understanding and categorizing them which are valid and useful. With that in mind, now read at least one other page created for this task and compare it/them with your own. What differences did you discover that they missed, and vice versa?

The Nature of Identity in Online Games

Knowing how people see and present themselves is central to understanding social computer games. This exercise is intended to provide you with the intellectual tools and vocabulary to discuss and explain such issues

Avatars, Personas, and Sock Puppets

In many online games as well as other interactions in cyberspace, the differences between mediated and non-mediated (real-world) interaction is most visible and most pronounced when we consider how people represent themselves in an online environment. While the rise of social networking systems since the early 2000s has led to an increasing determination on the part of many system owners such as Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn to enforce “real” identities, in the world of gaming it remains commonplace for people to explore different facets of their identity, to use avatars and sock puppets that are distinct from the aspects of themselves that they present to others in face-to-face interactions.

It may be argued that this is a good thing. As Goffman showed many decades ago, we act differently in different social contexts, so systems that force us to be the same over multiple contexts run counter to the social realities that we have evolved to live in. Playing games is, for many, an opportunity to play with different identities, not just to follow a set of game rules.

Task 2: Representing Identity in Online Games (3–4 hr)

Choose two different social games or game-like systems that require an avatar or profile to be created and where it would be common for people to play a role outside that of their normal work and leisure identities—MMORPGs, immersive worlds, etc. These games or game-like systems may be the same as those selected in Task 1 or different—it’s up to you.

In your Unit 2 learning journal, present your work under the title “Task 2: Representing Identity in Online Games,” with subheadings for each game or game-like system you have chosen.

You will be creating an avatar for each of the two games. You may use any tools that you like for this. You might take and distort digital photos, draw and photograph images on paper, use picture-editing software, or even use the Landing’s own very primitive picture-drawing tool (there is an option in the Files tool to draw a picture). If you wish, you may use clipart or pictures from elsewhere (properly cited and in accordance with any copyright restrictions they may have).

The important things to concentrate on for this task are the reasons that you select or draw each avatar—how it relates to the character and the character’s role in the game.

For each avatar, provide a paragraph or two of description of the persona that it represents.

1. For one game, design an avatar and brief description of your character that matches you and how you would normally wish to present yourself in a social context. This doesn’t mean that it has to look like you—this is about projecting the qualities of your identity that are significant to you. Make the description relevant to the game: this is not about creating a biography or summary of your real identity, but about writing things that would be of interest to others in the game.
2. For the other game, design an avatar and description that is, as much as possible, the opposite of how you would normally present yourself in a social context. Again, make sure that what you design and write is relevant to the game context.
3. For both personas, think about how you might behave differently in the games you have chosen.
4. Now for the hard part: for each avatar, explain and reflect on the decisions that you made when designing these avatars, thinking about what parts of the process were easy and which were more difficult.

Social Spaces

We would like you to think about ways in which the design of the game affect the behaviours of people within it. Identity in computer games has meaning only when situated in the context of a social space in which it is embodied. In the exercises associated with this element, we ask you to explore some literature on this topic, think about a game that you are familiar with, and synthesise your findings. This work will be particularly valuable when you come to design your own game in the final unit, as it encourages you to reflect on the elements of design that affect social interaction.

We start by introducing just a few of the concepts that have been applied to social computer games to provide you with a sense of the breadth and interests of the field. These are far from the only ideas and models that are relevant but are intended to provide food for thought in the ensuing exercise.

Space, Event, and Movement

The architect Bernard Tschumi has developed a theory that describes architecture in terms of space, event, and movement/activity (or program). His theory is an attempt to get away from the idea of architecture being simply about designing forms; instead it can only be properly understood as a situated system in which things happen and people do things. This dynamic is more obvious in computer games, where the spaces that are inhabited by people play an active role both in reacting to what people do and in guiding their interactions.

McLuhan is alleged to have said that “we shape our tools and then our tools shape us,” echoing Churchill’s earlier comment that “we shape our dwellings and afterwards our dwellings shape our lives.” Interactions within the virtual spaces that we create for computer games are greatly shaped by the decisions made by their designers.

Miss E. Moore [between ca. 1910 and ca. 1915]. Courtesy The Library of Congress. https://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/2162906635/

The Third Place

The notion of the third place (or third space) was introduced by Oldenburg in his book The Great Good Place and taken up more fully in Putnam’s book Bowling Alone. The concept refers to the concept of social surroundings that are neither at home nor at work. Oldenburg suggests that such places should be

• neutral ground, where no one is obliged to come and no one need stay.
• levellers, where status is not important.
• places where conversation is the main activity.
• accessible and accommodating.
• places where regulars gather.
• low profile—not extravagant or grandiose.
• playful spaces—lacking tension or hostility.
• a home away from home.

If this sounds like a pub or café, that it not too surprising, as these are good examples of the kind of thing Oldenburg was talking about. The concept has been picked up to refer to virtual as well as physical spaces, and some have tried to apply it to at least some computer games. Read “Where Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as ‘Third Places’ ” https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/article/11/4/885/4617703#104163477 (full paper at https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1083-6101.2006.00300.x).

This paper is not particularly notable in the field, but it has been chosen for this part of the course because of its coverage of two of the more significant issues in social gaming, third places and social capital, as well as branching into aspects of personal identity in online spaces that provide a common theme for most of this unit’s activities.

Magic Circles

Having read about third spaces, now look at “Forget the Magic Circle (or Towards a Sociology of Video Games)” http://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/19350/3/Garry_Crawford‑1.pdf (alternatively see http://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/19350/).

In this unpublished paper, Garry Crawford critiques the notion of a magic circle (a space in which a game happens), preferring Goffman’s theory of framing that we brushed against briefly in the previous unit. See also http://gamestudies.org/1001/articles/wanenchak,which uses frame analysis (amongst other things) to investigate behaviour in a role-playing game.

The Metagame

In many social games, there are dialogues and engagements taking place that are not part of the gameplay as such but that are about the game. Sometimes this occurs in separate communities, often in the form of web forums, sometimes within the game itself. Popular games like World of Warcraft include both in-game socialization and extensive fan sites where players can discuss tactics, strategies, issues, and mods. In WoW, socialization between missions is as much a part of the activity for many people as gameplay, leading it to be described as “the new golf” by Ito and others.

In many cases, people spend as much time engaged in metagame activities as they do within the game itself, pointing to the crucial importance of the social side of gaming. The game becomes a shared environment with a set of shared artifacts and goals that are the focus of conversation, but the conversation is as important as the goals of the game. Many games allow modding, and some such as Spore, the Sims, or Little Big Planet are essentially concerned with making such mods as a core element of gameplay. This is often a highly social activity. People show off such mods, talk about them, build on or use what others have done, develop whole communities around them. The lines between game and metagame are often blurred in such systems. While games themselves may be highly rule-bound, the metagame can develop in creative and diverse directions.

Task 3: Designing Social Spaces (8–10 hr)

Think of an online social computer game that you have played. If you have never played such a game, now is the time to start! Use the list of free games provided for this course at the end of Unit 0, or find one yourself through whatever means you wish.

We would like you to reflect on the experience, thinking about the ways that the space is designed to enable or inhibit interactions with other people, the channels of communication that it provides, the ways metagames develop, and the effects of the space on your behaviour, especially with regard to others in the game. The following questions are intended to help with these reflections but do not treat them as a set of tasks to perform. They are simply meant to encourage you to think in terms of social space and the effects of virtual environments on your behaviour and interactions with others:

Using the title “Task 3: Designing Social Spaces” in your Unit 2 learning journal, describe your experience of the game as a social space for interaction with others. Pay particular attention to the ways that the space governs or influences the behaviours of people in the game. What does it make likely to happen? What is inevitable? Are there ways that people subvert or bypass the game designers’ intentions? What contributes to your sense of the social presence of others?

What we are looking for is an analysis of the ways that the game design enforces or encourages particular kinds of behaviour, so anything that you spot that affects interaction or behaviour to others will be relevant. We expect something in the region of 2–3 printed pages’ worth of writing for this exercise.

Griefing

The term griefing is widely used in the social gaming community to describe a range of anti-social behaviours in games: it is concerned with grief caused to others.

To some extent, griefing is built into the way many games work. In many cases, social games are played competitively and, consequently, they encourage behaviours that pit one person against others. However, griefing goes beyond the rule-bound competitive behaviours designed into the game. It is about “unsportsmanlike” behaviour, to borrow a term from a bygone era, in which unkind, unfair, abusive, harmful or antisocial activities go beyond what it allowed or encouraged by the rules.

Gaming communities are just that: communities. They operate on a basis of fair play, engagement, and social cohesion. Even when competition is fierce, this does not necessarily mean that there is no cooperation or collaboration. Far from it. Many games make use of clans, guilds, alliances, corporations, supergroups, teams, and other tribal or small-group units in which people work together, typically against other clans or guilds though sometimes simply as a means to get through the game more easily and enjoyably. Griefers may or may not be breaking the rules of the game, but they disrupt both gameplay and social cohesion within a gaming community.

Read https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Tutorials/Griefing_prevention, which describes the kinds of bad things done by people in the social game Minecraft, as well as describing tools and methods for both causing trouble and preventing it.

Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident, a Wikipedia article on the corrupted blood incident. The article links to a variety of academic articles on the subject that are worth reading, especially those that draw real-world conclusions about terrorism and epidemic research. This is a useful advance organizer for the next unit.

Now read http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/a-rape-in-cyberspace/ A Rape in Cyberspace by Julian Dibbell. Note that this contains coarse language and graphic imagery that may be disturbing to some students but we think that it is worth reading. Indeed it is, in some ways, one of the most important readings in this course, as it covers a diverse range of issues and raises a number of wicked questions to which there are no easy answers.

Describing unpleasant and thought-provoking events that occurred in a MOO (an early text-based form of virtual world), this is a famous and elderly article that helped to frame many ensuing discussions about the nature of identity, social media, and the relationships between real-world and virtual communities in general. As well as exploring the nature of virtual space in a depth seldom covered elsewhere, it raises profound issues about identity, social contracts, and ethics in general. It may leave you feeling disturbed, but it will hopefully provoke some rich reflections.

Before we leave the topic, it is worth noting that some social games make use of a relatively mild form of griefing to enhance their gameplay—guilting. Guilting is a means of influencing other players on moral grounds and can be seen in as a legitimate tactic in, for example, games like The Pioneer Trail and Intrigue.

Task 4: Reactions to Griefing (4–5 hr)

In your learning journal for Unit 2, using the heading “Task 4: Reactions to Griefing,” Describe an example of griefing that has affected you or, if you have never experienced this, use one of the examples above (or find you own) and try to think how you might be affected if it happened to you. If you have experienced griefing of some sort or another in a game or game-like environment, including social networks or other social media systems, use this.

Describe the experience. Describe how you felt (or imagine you might have felt if this is a second-hand report). Describe what actions were taken and reflect on the possible actions that might have been taken to deal with this. Note that we are interested in effectiveness of possible actions for all concerned. In most cases, there are no ideal solutions that will make everyone happy. If censorship or exercise of authority is used, who wields it? How might it affect the social dynamics of the community? How does it affect the balance of power? Is it fair? Is it susceptible to abuse of power?

We expect in the region of 1–2 printed pages of work for this exercise.

Bonus Task: Play! (as long as you like)

Find a social game or game-like activity (e.g., a visit to Second Life or a session interacting with others on a social networking site) that you would like to engage with. This could be anything game-like at all, as long as there is some social element to it, including playing with kids or playing cards with friends but, as always, it is better that you choose something that relies on digital technologies, as that is the emphasis of the course.

As you play, think about what you are doing. Reflect on it in the context of what you have been reading and doing so far in this unit. Make a note (mental or otherwise) of things that you notice that were not covered in the earlier work you did for this unit. We would like you to discuss your findings in your learning journal.

Reflections on Unit 2 (2–3 hr)

As for every unit on this course, write a learning journal entry reflecting on the activities you have performed in this unit, paying attention not just to what you have done but how it affected you and how your attitudes have changed or been reinforced.

Optional Formative Feedback (1–2 hr)

If you would like to receive feedback on your work for this unit, first collate it into a portfolio (as a single wiki page) that maps what you have done to any relevant learning outcomes, using the template provided at the beginning of Unit 2. Submit a link to your portfolio page for the unit to your tutor via the Unit 2 Formative Assessment link on the Moodle home page.

Your tutor will provide brief feedback and may make suggestions for improvement if needed. Note that this carries no marks towards your final grade, and the tutor will not provide you with a grade for this at all. It is purely intended to help you to know how you are doing as part of the learning process. Although this involves extra effort on your part, we think that the process of collating the portfolio is valuable as a learning activity, and this provides useful practice for a task you will have to perform at the end of the course anyway.

Further Reading

Chen, V. H-H., and Duh, H. B. L. (2007). Understanding social interaction in World of Warcraft. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology, Salzburg, Austria (pp. 21–24).

Kolo, C., & Baur, T. (2004). Living a virtual life: Social dynamics of online games. Game Studies 4(1). Retrieved from http://realities.id.tue.nl/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/kolo-baur-2004.pdf (a paper examining players of Ultima Online).