New Directions

In recent weeks as we've been wrapping up Bogost's Persuasive Games, I've also been doing a literature review of my own in anticipation of turning my energies toward completion of our final paper for the course.

Since our assigned reading has now turned to Clarke and Mitchell's Video Games and Art, we now shift from rhetoric to aesthetics. The latter is a field of which I know little but look forward to learning more (and have already learned more in this week's readings). So perhaps as I get my feet wet then, in upcoming posts, I may venture some thoughts about art and aesthetics.

But our blogs are, I presume, intended not only for reflections on assigned readings but also on our own explorations into game studies. Therefore I will be borrowing a page from last spring's RCID 804 and be sharing some scholarly resources I have found beneficial in my own lit review.

Some Background

First, though, let me give you the setup: Since I first heard that our second-year RCID cohort would be taking a class on Video Games, I was immediately drawn to the possibility of seeing MMOGs are cultures in microcosm (or maybe not even in microcosm, since World of Warcraft and Second Life have so many millions of registrants), providing virtual laboratories for seeing cultures at work.

Since my MA in Comm Studies, I've had an interest in how communication is used to cultural work such as negotiating and managing identities. But I had to actually participate in World of Warcraft and Second Life before I could fully appreciate how much, as a "newbie," I was stepping into new cultures.

In essence, my avatar is an "immigrant" in World of Warcraft and Second Life. And this thought put me in mind of how, only in recent years, have formal theories of immigrant adaptation and acculturation been developed within the corpus of intercultural communication studies. Nishida's (1999) schema theory, and Kim's (2005) integrative theory, of cross-cultural adaptation come to mind.

Both of these theories (and others) posit that immigrant acculturation is inherently a social process and therefore can only be worked out through communication. So with this in mind I set out to find whether the literature on game studies provides any indication whether this is so for newcomers to MMOGs cultures.

Four Schools of Thought

This forced me to look at the schools of thoughts within game studies. I was able to discern four such schools:

> Ludology, which focuses on the dynamics of play

> Narratology, which sees games as texts whose stories can be read and critiqued

> Media effects, which looks at the psychological and physiological effects of games

> Social science/sociology, which looks at the dynamics of gaming communities

Though ludology can (as Huizinga pointed out) plumb the connection between play and culture, I'm more interested not in games as cultural artifacts but as constituting cultures of their own.

Though narratology can tell us much about the culture that produces a game, once again I'm more interested in games as self-contained cultures rather than artifacts of real-world culture.

Though media effects research suggests that games can instantiate an effect called cultural consonance (the idea that people who are well adapted to a culture will experience a heightened sence of wellbeing), effects research is conducted from a behaviorist perspective and I'm more interested in gameworlds as social constructions.

So in writing my paper I'm focusing my lit review more on the sociological school. But as it turns out, the literature on games from the perspective is still fairly new. Only with the emergence of massively multiplayer games (and with increasing interest, generally, in computer-mediated communication) has this perspective begun to gain some ground.

New School on the Block

Let me offer some quotes. For example, Eastin (2007) points out:

Media theory has focused on individual reactions to mediated content; however, the expansion to multiuser environments suggests that researchers should consider group processes (p. 453).

Similarly, Pena and Hancock (2006) relate:

Although our understanding of mediated communication processes in instrumental and organizational contexts is substantial, we know much less about these processes in social and recreational contexts. . . . such as playing video games. A number of research communities have highlighted the need for more research examining communication in recreational and playful contexts. Some research has begun to examine recreational social interaction on the Internet. . . . Although these studies have begun the investigation of recreational CMC [computer-mediated communication] contexts, they have not yet addressed the nature of the communication processes that take place in these settings (p. 93).

An Interesting Study

The latter study by Pena and Hancock, entitled "An Analysis of Socioemotional and Task Communication in Online Multiplayer Video Games," is an article I recommend. Interestingly, they started out with two perspectives:

> The cues-filtered-out (CFO) theory which, in analyzing computer-mediated communication (CMC), focuses on the absence or diminution of nonverbal cues

> The Social Information Processing (SIP) theory which holds that interlocutors in CMC can test each other's reactions, develop cues and, given enough time, learn to conduct true interpersonal communication

Pena and Hancock hypothesized that CFO theory would predict that MMOG players (with their nonverbal cues filtered out) would conduct more task-oriented communication than socioemotional communication, and that any socioemotional communication would tend to be more negative than positive.

On the other hand, they hypothesized that SIP theory would predict that MMOG players (being able to develop new cues over time) would conduct more socioemotional communication than task-oriented communication, and their socioemotional communication would be more positive than negative.

After coding and analyzing more than 4,400 text chat messages from 59 players in the game Asheron's Call 2, Pena and Hancock confirmed the SIP predictions: Communications among players were more often, to a significant degree, more socioemotional than task-oriented. And socioemotional messages were much more often positive than negative.

Interestingly (for my proposal that newbies are "immigrants" in a new culture), the study found differences in the communications of experienced and inexperienced players. Experienced players used communicative conventions (e.g., game jargon, emoticons, abbreviations) about half of the time, while inexperienced players used them very little.

And while experienced players easily conveyed mostly positive messages, a large majority of negative messages came from inexperienced players. These negative messages were mostly about breaking social rules, impolite behavior, and frustrations about losing the game or getting lost in its geography.

This sounds a lot like intercultural communication theories of immigrant adaptation, which Kim (2005) describes as a dialectical trial-and-error process of stress-adaptation-growth.

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REFERENCES

Eastin, M. S. (2007). The influence of competitive and cooperative group game play on state
hostility. Human Communication Research, 33, 450-466.

Kim, Y. Y. (2005). Adapting to a new culture: An integrative communication theory. In W. B.
Gudykunst (Ed.), Theorizing about intercultural communication. Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage.

Nishida, H. (1999). A cognitive approach to intercultural communication based on schema
theory. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 23, 753-777.

Peña, J., & Hancock , J. T. (2006). An analysis of socioemotional and task communication in
online multiplayer video games. Communication Research, 33(1), 92-109.