Terra Novans descend on Vancouver tomorrow for DiGRA 2005, Changing Views: Worlds in Play. As you can see from the program, TL Taylor will be kicking off four days of hundreds of videogame-related papers with a keynote address (w00t!). The other big news, though, is that many of the hundreds of papers are now available in full-text form online.
Paper presentations from Terra Novans:
- Timothy Burke, Department of History, Swarthmore College: Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me a Match: Artificial Societies vs. Virtual Worlds
- Constance Steinkuehler, University of Wisconsin-Madison: Styles of Play: Gamer-Identified Trajectories of Participation in MMOGs
- Constance Steinkuehler, Curriculum & Instruction,
University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dmitri Williams, Speech Communication, University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign: Where
Everybody Knows Your (Screen) Name: Online Games as “Third Places”
- Dmitri Williams, University of Illinois: A Brief Social History of Game Play
- Nicholas Yee, Stanford University: Motivations
of Play in MMORPGs
The list following is a partial slice of the diversity of MMORPG-related papers that are available. These are the ones that sparked my initial interest based on the titles, but there are hundreds of papers--if any of these look interesting, the best bet is to just browse yourself.
- Peter Edelmann, Interdisciplinary Studies, Univeristy of
British Columbia
Framing Virtual Law - Anders Eriksson, Division of Philosophy, Royal Institute
of Technology, Stock
*Kalle Grill, Division of Philosophy, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Who owns my avatar? - Rights in virtual property - Lisa Galarneau, The University of Waikato, New Zealand
Spontaneous Communities of Learning: A Social Analysis of Learning Ecosystems in Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMOG) Environments - William Huber, Art History, UCSD
Fictive affinities in Final Fantasy XI: complicit and critical play in fantastic nations. - Elina M.I. Koivisto, Nokia Research Center
Christian Wenninger, Sony NetServices
Enhancing player experience in MMORPGs with mobile features - Lars Konzack, multimedia, Aalborg University.
Thessa Lindof, multimedia, Aalborg University
From Mass Audience to Massive Multiplayer: How Multiplayer Games Create New Media Politics - Tanya Krzywinska, Brunel University, School of Arts
‘Who’s World is it?’: Creative Play and Player Presence in World of Warcraft - Ian MacInnes, Syracuse University School of Information
Studies
Virtual Worlds in Asia: Business Models and Legal Issues - Jane McGonigal, Department of Performance Studies,
University of California
SuperGaming! Distributed Design for Massively Collaborative Play, or, Why I Love Bees - David Myers, Loyola University
/hide: The aesthetics of group and solo play - Mike Molesworth, The Media School, Bournemouth University
*Janice Dengeri-Knott, The Media School, Bournemouth University
The pleasures and practices of virtualised consumption in digital spaces - Daniel Pargman, School of Humanities and Informatics,
University of Skövde,
Andreas Eriksson, Department of Numercial Analysis and Computer Science
Law, order and conflicts of interest in massively multiplayer online games - Jason Rhody, University of Maryland, College Park
Game Fiction: Playing the Interface in Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Asheron’s Call - Javier Salazar
On the Ontology of MMORPG Beings: A Theorethical Model for Research
nice work greg, v useful!
see y'all there.
ren
Posted by: ren reynolds | Jun 15, 2005 at 06:55
Gawd, it's going to take me weeks to read through that lot!
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 15, 2005 at 10:30
Looking forward to seeing you all in Vancouver--my home town! Wewt!
Posted by: Florence Chee | Jun 15, 2005 at 15:18
Just briefly reviewing some of the abstracts of the papers to be presented, I think I'm seeing a common thread.
If the measure of any theory's value is how many people spend large chunks of their time trying to poke holes in it, then the original Players Who Suit MUDs typology has to rank as one of the most important theories of play of all time.
Man... is there anyone who doesn't want to try to whack this piñata? :-)
--Flatfingers
Posted by: Flatfingers | Jun 16, 2005 at 13:07
Flatfingers>If the measure of any theory's value is how many people spend large chunks of their time trying to poke holes in it, then the original Players Who Suit MUDs typology has to rank as one of the most important theories of play of all time.
That's why I expanded the theory in my book. At least now if they want to beat on it, they have to have paid me a royalty to do so!
I haven't read any of the anti-Bartle papers yet, but if past experience is anything to go by at least half of them will be due to misconceptions I could easily have pointed out if only the authors had got in touch with me first. People very rarely do this, though, with the result that when our paths do finally cross I wind up looking mean for criticising them in public. As I've said before, I'm not dead and I do have email.
I don't actually mind my theory being attacked if we get a better theory as a result. We never do get such a theory, though. Even Nick Yee's constant assault on the model hasn't got any underlying theory explain it. It's like I'm a physicist saying that stars in general should follow a particular lifecycle and he's an astronomer saying that there are a bunch of other ways stars in some particular galaxies can be looked at: it's interesting data, but it explains nothing. Every year, Nick publishes more data showing his categorisation to be valid; every year, I explain how this still fits into my theory; every year, Nick asks more questions that address my new explanation; and so it continues. We're getting some good results here, but when are we going to see a model that explains why people fit his facets, rather than why his facets aren't an exact match for my model? Nick doesn't have to do this himself - he makes his data freely available to all researchers? Why aren't people picking it up and doing something with it? If my model has flaws (and it does), use Nick's data to develop a new theory that doesn't have those flaws.
I want to see new theories, not merely new stats. I want to see people who are interested in developing ideas because their ideas are intrinsically useful, not people who just want to take on the grizzled old gunslinger whose heart isn't in it any more. The roots of that HCDS paper go back 15 years, based on an analysis of a long discussion: surely it's not impossible for someone to go off and do their own such discussion and analysis to develop their own theory as a result? Why is so much effort spent in chipping away at the one theory we currently have? Why don't we see any new theories?
Maybe I should just take the paper's web pages off the net and make people come up with new theories instead of constantly rehearsing the old ones?
Richard
Posted by: Richard Bartle | Jun 17, 2005 at 07:54
Richard> I don't actually mind my theory being attacked if we get a better theory as a result. We never do get such a theory, though.
Exactly. It's interesting and helpful to get real-world data. But to understand the meaning of those data and to know how best to apply them require an attempt to discern a pattern to them. Why are those the data we get, and not something else? Why do people act that way, and not some other way?
Without a Theory of Why that proposes a pattern, how do you know what other data to look for? How do you fill in the gaps of a model if you have no model?
This leads me to wonder whether there's always a model, even if it's not made explicit. If I say that "preferences are uncorrelated; humans can want more than one thing at a time," isn't that a model of personality?
Is that model somehow innately better than "people can want one thing more than other things"? Why? What makes it so clearly superior that the alternative can be dismissed as "putting people in boxes"?
Why consider these models mutually exclusive? Why can't both theories (and others) have something useful to say about why people act the way they do? If there's no such thing as one perfect theory, then why not be open to using multiple theories that, as long as they can be shown to have some predictive power, fill in each other's gaps?
If nothing else, the HCDS model has been great for energizing the conversation about gamer personality types. I think there's been real value in having a description of this model available on the web.
But having said that, sure -- I'd also like to see some alternative models. Nick's data could be the starting point for such models... so where are they?
Richard> Maybe I should just take the paper's web pages off the net and make people come up with new theories instead of constantly rehearsing the old ones?
Speaking personally, I hope that doesn't happen. For every one person who gets stuck on it, I suspect there are thousands over the course of a year for whom it generates the eye-opening realization that people play games for different reasons, and that this diversity is a Good Thing.
Even a bad model can be a good start. And this isn't a bad model.
--Flatfingers
Posted by: Flatfingers | Jun 19, 2005 at 01:10