Terra Nova

The virtual census

This isn't an entirely VW post, but it seems related enough to toss up here. Working with colleagues Nicole Martins of Indiana, Mia Consalvo of Ohio (and TN) and Jimmy Ivory of VaTech, we embarked a couple of years back on a content analysis of all game characters. It was kind of ambitious, but we thought someone ought to take a census of who is in all the worlds and games we study. We do a lot of research on effects and identity, but until you know what's there, well, it's hard to say a lot. The results are in and in print, available from the journal New Media & Society, or in a pre-press version off my site.

The highlights are that whites, males and adults are over-represented compared to the actual US population via US Census data, while females, Hispanics, Native Americans, children and the elderly are under-represented. These numbers parallel similar research for TV. Breaking the findings down into primary (playable) and secondary (NPC) characters, the divides are stronger still.

More below the fold . . .

Social Network Adoption Effects Map From Real to Virtual

The broader mapping project (first identified by Dmitri Williams) has an new entry in the social networks field. The mapping project is a (unorganized) effort to find out where real-world behaviors map onto virtual worlds and where they don't. The Law of Demand maps; human response to deadly plagues does so only in part.

A new paper from Michigan and Santa Fe (Bakshy, Karrer, Adamic) (thanks Mark Bell for the tip) reports on social network adoption effects in Second Life. "Adoption rates quicken as the number of friends adopting increases and this effect varies with the connectivity of a particular user. We furtherfind that sharing among friends occurs more rapidly than sharing among strangers, but that content that diffuses primarily through social influence tends to have a more limited audience. Finally, we examine the role of individuals,finding that some play a more active role in distributing content than others, but that these influencers are distinct from the early adopters."

The authors don't explicitly associate these findings with mapping; that is, they don't ask or test "is this the same as we see in the real world?" But that conclusion seems fairly easy to make, in that the results don't seem (to me anyways, a person decidedly not expert in this field) all that amazing. In fact it all looks rather normal. That's a finding. The news is: Though virtual, it's pretty normal.

Bit by bit, the grid in Williams' paper is filling in. In many areas, the things we do offline are replicated well when we go online. 

Media Violence, Aggression, and Policy

There's no solid evidence that violence in media causes violence in society, certainly not at the level that would warrant any kind of policy response. Here at Terra Nova, this has been discussed again and again and again and again and again. Yet the issue will not die, or, more accurately, a misguided conversation continues and at times certain points need to be reiterated. The immediate spurs to this post include a) getting an email about videogame violence effects from an undergraduate at another school, b) seeing one of Indiana's PhD students give a talk on videogame violence, and c) seeing media effects being debated at the International Communications Association meeting in Chicago this past weekend. Researchers continue to pursue evidence for a causal link between violence in media and real-world violence, and important people in the real world still think there's some sort of emergency.

Common sense objections to the agenda and the urgency are legion, best summed up here and here. Yet there are deeper issues, of a scholarly nature, that need to be addressed as well. Research in the field of media violence effects is generally ill-conceived, poorly executed, and result-driven. I have seen few things that I would describe as findings - results that become a permanent part of my view of the world and how it works. Before any more PhD students waste their careers on bad science, let's once again put the cards on the table.

Research Methods, Culture and Virtual Worlds

Monday, March 30th at 11am Pacific Time, Tom Boellstorff, Celia Pearce, Thomas Malaby and I will be in Second Life on a panel discussing the following question:

What can qualitative and experimental methods tell us about virtual worlds and culture?

Roland Legrand of the Belgian news outlet MediaFin, and author of Mixed Realities, will moderate the panel.  Click here to get details on attending the event in Second Life.

And read on for the dramatic backstory!

GLS Conference, CFP

From the organizer of GLS:

Back by demand and now expanded to accommodate last year’s waiting list, the GLS conference this year will features substantive discussion and collaboration among academics, designers, and educators interested in how videogames –- commercial games and otherwise -– can enhance learning, culture, and education. This year’s theme of “Learning through Interaction” highlights the expansive nature of our definition of games & game culture to include research and design in areas including popular culture and fandom, interactive design more generally, and digital/visual cultures. This three-day conference will be held at the UW’s historic Memorial Union, overlooking downtown Madison's beautiful Lake Mendota.
 
Submissions deadline has been extended and all submissions are now due online by Monday March 2, 2009. Complete submission guidelines can be found on the submissions site, here.
 

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Sean Michael Dargan
GLS Conference Coordinator
http://glsconference.org

Gaming and Guanxi

I recently read and enjoyed a paper that has been posted to ssrn on gaming and guanxi in China, and I wanted to post about it here because this is the kind of new scholarship on online gaming that we need. Guanxi is the management of relationships of reciprocity in China, primarily through gift-giving, and it is a topic with a long history in the anthropology of China. Here, Silvia Lindtner, Scott Mainwaring, and Yang Wang accomplish what has been a relative rarity in game studies -- they give an account of how the rise of online gaming there shapes and is shaped by this longstanding cultural practice. What is really impressive about this kind of new work is that it resists two common temptations. They do not reduce online gaming there to existing cultural forms (which would be the old wine in new bottles argument), nor do they argue the exceptionalist position -- that online gaming changes everything and sweeps away the past. While I would like to see this kind of work weave in more participant observation data (the emphasis here is on interview material), this is a step forward. Highly recommended.

Game as Cultural Form, Play as Disposition

I've just posted a piece to SSRN about play. In the past I have focused on games as a culturally-shaped activity (what we anthropologists would call a "cultural form"), and in the course of that I have made explicit efforts to decouple games from the concept of play (see here, for example). I argued that it is not very useful to see play as an activity, with games as a subset of it, and suggested that play more usefully denotes a disposition, a way of approaching the world.

In doing that I wasn't trying to argue that games and play are not related to each other, but rather that we need to move beyond seeing them as intrinsically linked (where the question of, for example, whether something is a game boils down to whether it brings about a playful experience). The primary motivation was to make room for an approach to games on their own terms, but the issue of play has been simmering with me for a long time. The posted essay is the result – a long-planned attempt to articulate play as a disposition.

GLS Conference 5.0 Call for Papers

Games+Learning+Society 5.0: Learning Through Interaction
June 10-12, 2009 Madison, WI

The GLS conference in beautiful Madison every summer is one of the highlights of the year for many game researchers. Constance Steinkuehler, Kurt Squire, and the gang of incredibly capable GLS students somehow combine high-level discussions, fascinating presentations, and (most important) great gaming time and time again. The coming year's theme is "Learning Through Interaction," and I've put the full call for papers after the jump.

Protecting Virtual Playgrounds: The Home Version!

You can access the archive of last week's symposium, "Protecting Virtual Playgrounds: Children, Law, and Play Online," here.  Plus, you can see Robert Bloomfield and yours truly do a little postmortem of the conference on Metanomics, here.  Additional must-see-videofeed: Ted Castronova showed how virtual worlds could cause the end of the human race, because virtual sex could get so good that we stop having children.   In short, much fun was had by all--more below the fold. 

Protecting Virtual Playgrounds Symposium

On Friday, Oct. 3, the Washington and Lee University School of Law (in scenic Lexington, Virginia) will gather a range of top thinkers to discuss the regulatory future of children's worlds in a one-day symposium. 

Our own Ted Castronova, Greg Lastowka, Robert Bloomfield and yours truly will be there.  We hope you can all come!  More information (and registration forms) at law.wlu.edu/virtualplaygrounds, or below the fold.