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Researcher: Leigh Carver, Department of Communication, Trinity University
Supervisor: Dr. Aaron Delwiche, Department of Communication, Trinity University (210-999-8153)
Researcher’s statement
PURPOSE AND BENEFITS
This interview is being conducted as part of a course titled "Ethnography of Massively Multiplayer Online Games." In this class, we are studying the behaviors and attitudes of gamers who enjoy virtual worlds such as Vanguard and World of Warcraft. Our research will benefit game developers, scholars, and broader player community by increasing our understanding of this emerging medium. The results of my study might also be interesting to you. At the end of the semester (December 15, 2008), I will share my findings with Vanguard players and with the broader community of gamers. My paper will be linked to the course web site and made available to anyone with an Internet connection.
PROCEDURES
I will interview willing, of-age participants over instant messenger or in-game and will ask them variations of questions from a set list. If participats are uncomfortable with real-time interviews, I will email them a questionnaire for them to fill out at their leisure. All names will be changed and all participant identities will be protected.
RISK, STRESS OR DISCOMFORT
No risk, stress or discomfort is anticipated as a result of this study. I will do everything that I can to make sure that your responses are both private and anonymous. If at any time you feel uncomfortable or stressed, you may terminate the interview immediately.
OTHER INFORMATION
You must be 18 years or older in order to participate in this study. This interview is voluntary. You may refuse to answer any questions that I ask. You may terminate the session at any time.
This data will be used as a basis for my academic research. My professor and I are the only people who will have access to the transcripts and survey data.
If your comments appear in my research, a pseudonym will be used to protect the anonymity of your real-life identity and your game character. You may refuse to participate or may withdraw from this study at any time without penalty.
This study has been approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Trinity University. If you have any questions about this research, you can also contact the IRB chair: Professor J. Paul Giolma, Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Engineering Science, Trinity University, 1 Trinity Place, San Antonio, Texas, 78212-7200. Professor Giolma's telephone number is (210) 999-7563.
________________________________________
Signature of Researcher
Participant's statement:
The study described above has been explained to me. I voluntarily consent to participate in this activity. I have had an opportunity to ask questions. I understand that future questions I may have about the research or about my rights as a subject will be answered by one of the researchers listed above.
________________________________________
Signature of Participant
[As noted above, because collecting signatures is not practical in virtual worlds, students will instead post this form on a publicly available web page. Before conducting any interviews, they will ask the participants to confirm that they have read the consent materials and agree to participate. On-line surveys will be prefaced with a statement which reads "By completing this survey, you are indicating that you have read the consent materials and agree to participate."]
Well, Dr. D has REALLY done it this time. Lines have been crossed. Pandora's box has been opened. This newest assignment has forced us all back through the gateways of our memories into our childhoods, where one year was happier than the rest of our adult lives combined.
I swear, if Edward sings the "Magic School Bus" theme one more time, I'll name one of my characters on Oregon Trail after him and I will make sure he's the first one to DIE.
Anyway, so in my hunt to recall my childhood addictions, I stumbled across a website that has a vast collection of retro educational games. The website is even called "Classic PC Games" and their educational games index can be found here. Their only problem is that you must engage in three to five minutes of sponsor activity and review before you have enough "credits" to earn a game. However, they still have an admirable list of programs, and the games that jumped out at me as I was browsing this website were as follows:
Mario Teaches Typing
Music Construction Set (I grew up in a musical house, leave me alone)
Oregon Trail
SimTown
Super Solvers: Gizmos and Gadgets
Super Solvers: Operation Neptune
Super Solvers: Treasure Mountain
Amazon Trail
Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego?
I also found another website, download free games.com that has a large selection of kids' games (here), including Putt Putt Saves the Zoo, which was my younger sister's favorite game when we were kids.
I found a torrent of Treasure Galaxy (here), and tried to track down a few other games but I couldn't remember their names and only could recall a very vague description of them (I had to kill these little trog things with mathematical equations, or I captured fish using math equations. My parents were big on the math thing.)
So, out of all these options, I decided to stick with what I knew and loved well, except that I couldn't decide for the life of me between the three (four) Super Solvers games. I chose Treasure Mountain, just because I have warm, fuzzy memories of playing it with my cousin Leanne, and managed to find a free download of it at filefront.com. I downloaded the zip and opened it with bated breath....
Except that it wasn't Treasure Mountain. It was an Age of Empires map! :( Sad, sad day.
I finally located a free download of Treasure Mountain at XTC Abandonware. (Thanks, guys!!) I spent the next twenty minutes working through the game, only, I realized that in order to defeat it I have to collect 300 Treasures. On my first run through the three levels of the mountain, I located.... two. Ding ding. Go me!
The interesting thing about Treasure Mountain is that I remember it vividly and was surprised by what I saw when I played it once more. The TM gnomes of my childhood wore baggy purple tunics (and caps that matched), brown belts, red pants, and had flowing white beards. Their noses were long and lumpy and their deeply lined skin was pale. The mountain was a paradise; there was lush green grass and many colorful flowers, and sparkling water and, on the higher levels, thick, deep banks of crystalline, glimmering snow.
I couldn't have been more surprised once I started playing through the game. The verdant grass I'd recalled from my childhood was represented by a field of flat green, and the flowers were merely dotted pixels. The elves were practically shapeless and colorless. I thought for a moment that I had accidentally downloaded the wrong version of the game, but after playing through the first round, I realized the truth-- this was the beloved game of my childhood.
... what???
My conclusion (after mulling it over extensively while consuming koolaid, gold fish, and gushers in the hopes that it would jog my brain) is that part of the reason why so many of my generation eagerly recall our initial digital experiences is because they were fodder for our imaginations. They provided us with a skeletal outline of a fantastical world where we could fill in the blanks. In TM, for example, the faces of the elves are almost impossible to make out, so our imaginations fill in the blanks. The flat grass and dotted flowers prompted us to imagine utopian mountain gardens, and the stark white representation of snow (with the occasional bright blue asterisk to suggest sparkle) might as well be piles of diamond powder in the mind of the child.
It's a universally acknowledged fact that kids' imaginations run rampant. What else (aside from a malicious sibling) could cause such practically hallucinated imaginings of monsters under the bed (or, in my case, evil trumpets in the air vents. I was a special child.) Because of this, I like to think that the old-school pixelicous video games were (are?) fodder for the imagination. Newer games are wonderful and exotic because they show you another world and act as a window into someone else's imagination, however, old games that require more brain power and less drool power shouldn't be discredited just because they lack shiny graphics or even any graphics as all (like DikuMUDs).
So, maybe revisiting the video games of my childhood has been a little disappointing, but maybe it has been a good lesson. Maybe I need to take a break from all of my ridiculously CG'd movies or exceedingly pretty video games, and rekindle my imagination. Maybe I should go back to old-school pixel games and reading adventure novels.
Or maybe I could go level up in Vanguard. ;)
- Mood:
sunburned
Courtesy of Wikipedia, I have located a parlor game that could be potentially hilarious to act out on Vanguard. The wiki entry is as follows:
"Consequences is an old parlour game in a similar vein to the Surrealist game exquisite corpse and Mad Libs.[1] It also has a variation known as Picture Consequences. Each person takes a turn choosing a word for one of six questions, in this order.
- Man's name
- Woman's name
- Place name
- He said to her…
- She said to him
- The consequence was… (a description of what happened after)
- An outcome
Then the story is read (for example): Scary Michael Jackson met voluptuous Buffy the Vampire Slayer at the Zoo. He said "You are delicious", she said "Hit me baby one more time". He gave her a red rose, she gave him cholera. The consequence was that they eloped to Mexico. The world said "the femme fatale will always win".
It is traditionally played by writing the words on paper and folding the paper to hide the previous words before passing it to the next player."
This could be modified for Vanguard by having a moderator to whom comments are whispered. They prompt the group of people for the blanks, except that the names supplied must be of classmates in the game. The narrator tells the two classmates what to do, and they perform it in an in-game charade. This is also like chain link murder. I don't know if this would actually work or not, but it would be fun to experiment with the different kinds of actions that can be emoted in-game.
Ideas (appropriately appropriated from Terra Nova, of course) that I like and think I could tie in with my research:
1. Cocooning (as presented by Dmitri Williams at the 2005 GLS conference). Why do people cocoon themselves? What is preferable about online interaction to cause them to cocoon themselves?
2. Does how casual or hardcore a gamer you perceive yourself to be affect your in-game behavior? Does it affect the way you interact with your peers in the game? Or, is there no real distinction between a casual and a hardcore gamer when everyone is in-game? (Idea thanks to Nate Combs.)
3. Politics! There seems to be a general anti-gaming sentiment in Washington D.C., as it is generally (and erroneously, a lot of studies show) believed that games cause violent behavior. Do gamers care that there is a potential for anti-gaming legislation? Do gamers ever discuss politics in-game? Do gamers allow politics to affect gameplay? (Thank you, Dan Hunter.)
That's all for now. Ugh. Mornings.
- Mood:
icky
So, I fail at life. I thought the blog entry was due Wednesday evening before lab instead of Tuesday morning before class. I guess that's what happens when you spend a whole weekend sweating in some dirty park and not being near computers. (Sorry, Dr. D!) With this utterly epic shortcoming in mind, I would like to present to you (my faithful, forgiving, and gracious readers) my guild selection. But first....!
Potential (probable) research topic: Norms of social interaction in-game vs. real life. This will compare acceptable real-world behavior with acceptable in-game behavior. Should be interesting, right?
Thus said, here are my guild selections.
GUILD NUMERO UNO: "The Platinum Order"-- This is the second largest guild in Vanguard and the largest guild on the Seradon server. It is a cooperative guild that seeks members with "team player" ethics and good social skills. Currently (at least according to this little page) there are 1222 members in TPO, which breaks down to 537 main characters and 685 alternates.
GUILD NUMA ZWEI: "Pain"-- This guild caught my eye because it was ranked #1 (on vgplayers.station.sony.com) for most wealth, most diplomacy missions per member, most areas discovered, most NPCs discovered, most items discovered, and most quests discovered. Clearly, this is a guild that embraces the ambitious- and thus the hardcore- gamers. Hardcore gamers have a culture and set of social values that are their own, and I think it would be fascinating to interact with these gamers and chart their interactions. Again, according to sony's station website, Pain has 160 members, with 94 mains and 66 alts. This sample is substantially smaller than TPO, but probably more indicative of the behavior of a certain facet of gamers, as opposed to online gamers as a whole. (The only problem that I forsee is that Pain is on the Xeth server.)
GUILD NUMBER THREE: "Trinity"-- No, I'm not being biased because the guild happens to share a name with the most awesomest school ever!!1. I picked the Trinity guild because (a) it's on the Seradon server, and (b) it has an average of 947 deaths per member.
....
Yeah. You read that right. I typed it right. 947 deaths. Per member. I don't know about you but I think that's FANTASTIC. Either Trinity is a guild for the entirely incompetent (who somehow still managed to get to an average level of 49) or the ridiculously curious. As I feel that I might easily fall into both categories, not only would I probably be accepted by the guild and thus have an easier time researching, but I could also study the facet of gamers that is generally ignored- the non-achievers. (I come to this conclusion because I assume, perhaps erroneously, that no self-respecting achiever would allow their character to die NINE HUNDRED AND FORTY SEVEN TIMES. On average.) When I think of hardcore gamers, I think of achiever or kill-type players. It could be interesting to examine the behavior and social standards of the non-typical gamer. Furthermore, the guild is composed of only thirty-seven members, which is obviously a tight group, and all thirty-seven members are playing on their main characters.
So, those are my three choices: either the super-social social guild, the hardcore PAIN guild, or the guild of suicidal maniacs. Be sure to phone in your decision on whether or not I should date contestant number one, contestant number two, or contestant number three. See you next week, folks!
- Mood:
bouncy
After completing the incredibly challenging, mind-meltingly difficult Bartle survey, I found myself astounded and confounded by the news that I am, in fact, an explorer type.
(This is my surprised face.)
In fact, the type analysis wasn't surprising at all, but I was mildly taken aback by my gamer-DNA breakdown. According to Bartle, I'm 93% exploring enthusiast, 40% (over)achiever, 20% ruthless killer and 47% social butterfly. Aside from the fact that these number add up to a dizzying 200%, I felt that the quiz did not accurately reflect the options available during gameplay. I distinctly recall a question about an empty area, and whether I would be more inclined to explore or go find monsters should I encounter said empty area. I know that I would be desirous of exploring (because, let's face it, there's nothing much better than finding a shortcut from point A to point B, or lording your superior knowledge of landscape and mythology over your higher level friends) but the fact is that when I play MMOs, I play in groups, and groups get bored in empty areas, and thus up and away we go to find more mobs to grind so that we can collectively *ding* level up. Charming, no?
I'd also like to add that I might be of a more murderous disposition had my first MMO experience included the ability to slice and dice my fellow players up like cucumbers. I'm hardly an aggressive person in real life (though I'm prone to long-winded, profusely explicit rants about the general failures of humankind upon occasion), but there's something about encountering a complete idiot in-game that gets my hackles up. My first MMO (Final Fantasy XI, excluding a brief jaunt in EQ when I was twelve, in which I drowned and decided I hated the game) was positively rife with complete dunderheads who clearly had no clue how to appropriately socially interact in-game. I refer, of course, to the much-hated kill steal, or loot steal, or just that useless jerk that you pair up with during a feel-good group killing session. Granted, I never had any experiences quite like the infamous Leeroy Jenkins catastrophe, but I feel that in playing FFXI before anything else led me to be more of an exploring nature- past level 15, it is impossible to level up without the aid of a group, and so when it was difficult to get a group going, I'd explore. Ta-da! Mystery unraveled.
I was slightly annoyed by my number breakdown, as I felt it did not accurately represent my game playing habits. My results came out as such: -20% physical, -32% reward-driven, 32% thoughtful, 100% explorer, -14% social, and -53% competitive. I'm actually a highly social, highly competitive person, however, perhaps the presence of an in-game universe slightly negates my desire to brutally crush anyone and anyone who stands between me and what I want. I do know that I sometimes get lonely while playing MMOs if there's nobody to talk to or explore with; perhaps, in the future, Mr. Bartle can re-adjust his quiz to be a slightly more in-depth of players and their in-game inclinations.
- Location:Comm tower
- Mood:
silly - Music:Tymps (The Stick In The Head Song) -- Fiona Apple
A novice gamer with no wish to "cheat" but a desire to increase wealth might watch a video or read up on tricks to generate their own money. However, a 'lazier' gamer (or one with more disposable income) might purchase a pre-leveled character as well as gold.
It comes as no surprise that (according to wired.com) gold farming is a $500 million industry. However, as I alluded to earlier, it would be difficult or impossible to completely shut down all gold farming, especially as the real-world economy is tied to the economies of virtual worlds as well. Additionally, I feel some amount of pity for the "professional gamers" in China; their job is another equivalent to working in a merchandise-producing sweat shop, only theirs is electronic. Gold farmers are harassed by their customers in a way that sweat shop workers are not, and I feel that, though the practice is unfortunate, it should be recognized that it can not be effectively abolished, and thus we should treat "professional gamers" with some level of understanding.
( Links on the virtual worlds industry )
( Links to fan forum sites )
- Location:comm tower
- Music:Chris chattering
