Online Games, Social Narratives

Esther MacCallum-Stewart

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138548480
• eBook ISBN: 9781317652229
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The study of online gaming is changing. It is no longer enough to analyse one type of online community in order to understand the plethora of players who take part in online worlds and the behaviours they exhibit. MacCallum-Stewart studies the different ways in which online games create social environments and how players choose to interpret these. These games vary from the immensely popular social networking games on Facebook such as Farmville to Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games to "Free to Play" online gaming and console communities such as players of Xbox Live and PS3 games. Each chapter deals with a different aspect of social gaming online, breaking down when games are social and what narrative devices make them so. This cross-disciplinary study will appeal to those interested in cyberculture, the evolution of gaming technology, and sociologies of media.

Introduction

‘Give Honeydew 46 /1’

Online communities are not virtual. The people that we meet online are not virtual. They are real communities populated with real people, which is why so many end up meeting in the flesh. The topics that we talk about in online communities are important topics, which is why we often learn about and continue to care about the social and political causes that we hear about through our online communities. Online communities are communities; there is no room for debate about this topic anymore. They teach us about real languages, real meanings, real causes, real cultures.

—Kozinets (2010: 15)

The people who made money from the gold rush were not the gold rush miners. It was guys named Levi Strauss and Crocker, and folks who ran banks, and people who sold jeans, and sold picks and axes.

I think ultimately in the long term that the money that will get made in Minecraft will not be about Minecraft, but will be about the services and products that get introduced into it. And so that’s what’s most interesting … the ecosystem.

—Hilleman (in Sheffield, 2012)

In 2008, two friends and podcasters, Lewis Brindley and Simon Lane, started to upload webcasts to the video-sharing website YouTube. Using footage of themselves playing digital games, the Yogscast added a voice-over in which they discussed aspects of gaming, geek culture and anything else that struck the duo as interesting or amusing as they played.

At the same time, the Russian company Digital Sky Technologies bought a 180-million-dollar share in the rapidly growing social gaming company Zynga (5% of its worth). Zynga made games designed to run on social platforms such as Facebook. Based on the principles of gifting and time delay, these games encouraged players to engage in a relatively novel type of gameplay. Instead of spending long sessions at the computer, players were encouraged to come back to the game frequently and often, limiting the length of actual play sessions to only a few minutes.

Last, a Swedish man, Markus Persson, released a small Indie game in which players used cubes, or ‘blocks’, to build houses and other structures in order to survive from frightening monsters that came out at night. The game, Minecraft, was unfinished, but by originally uploading the game to an Indie games developers forum, TIGSouce.com, Persson, also known by his gaming title ‘Notch’, used an existing community of developers and enthusiasts to publicize and troubleshoot early versions of the game. As an additional carrot to interested gamers, he promised that anyone who bought Minecraft would never have to pay another registration fee again.

These three groups are symptomatic of the huge changes that have taken place in videogaming culture in recent years. In 2011, Zynga was one of the largest and most profitable gaming companies in the world, and dominated the casual gaming market across technological platforms and social networks, but it was on social networking site Facebook that they really held sway. By 2012, nearly 25% of the 1 billion Facebook accounts in existence had accessed a Zynga game (Appdata, 2012), and Facebook attributed more than 12% of their revenue to the company, (estimated at 445 billion dollars) to sales taking place within Zynga games (Takahashi, 2012). These games frequently ask players to spend real world money on in-game arte-facts or events—a purchasing mechanism known as micro-transactions— and bombard them with messages to virally share the games with their friends. Zynga, and the many other social gaming companies rapidly taking advantage of this boom, appeared to encourage players to involve their circle of friends by sharing items from each game and encouraging them to take part in collective tasks. However, this relationship was in fact used to generate more income by guilting the player into spending money in order to keep up with his or her peers or by spreading the game virally across social networks. When Zynga’s tactics became too intrusive, the popularity of their games rapidly began to wane. In 2012, Zynga shares crashed to a low of $2.09 after the company announced huge losses. The company was almost universally vilified by the gaming press for its exploitative gaming practices and resulted in a general distrust of Facebook gaming, even as it was rapidly replaced by an almost identical sales model on the (now booming) Android market (Wiggins, 2013). By 2013, Zynga had been involved in series of high-profile buyouts of other companies, desperate to recoup its losses by investing in games which apparently supported less aggressive means of micro-transactioning.

At the other end of the scale, Markus Persson became a CEO of Mojang Specifications, a company formed after he was approached by the gaming company Valve Corporation, which wanted to integrate his work into its downloadable games platform, Steam. He and his team still create small-scale Indie games, but Minecraft has sold more than 24 million copies across console, Android and PC platforms (Dyer, 2013). Mojang relies on the gaming community for publicity and famously has no employees for marketing, although it does have a director of fun, who promotes the game and helps organize the yearly Minecon convention. These members are encouraged to spread and endorse Minecraft through word of mouth, but unlike the anger directed towards Zynga for aggressively enforcing this tactic, respect for Notch as a solo designer and a gamer in his own right encouraged players to support Minecraft. Notch’s tolerant attitude towards the modification (modding) of Minecraft by players influenced subsequent developments in the game, and allowed a plethora of stories, maps, technical changes to change the game in one form or another. Notch has frequently championed the Agile approach to development and frequently added updates that responded to fan demands. Until 19 November 2011, Minecraft was also still in beta, and although Notch passed development of the game on to colleagues, the game continues to be regularly updated with bug fixes and new content.

Finally, Simon and Lewis are still making webcasts. Most Yogscast videos, released daily ‘just around teatime’, are viewed by more than 1 million people. The Yogscast capitalized on the success of Minecraft, writing stories, playing fan-made maps and discussing various changes to the game made by both players and Mojang’s development team. However, it also began to expand with playthroughs of other games, at first including fellow gamer and third founding member, Hannah Rutherford, and then by employing friends, former guild members, popular UK webcasters, talented video editors and Yogscast fans themselves. The main Yogscast channel is the most subscribed YouTube channel in the UK, and is regularly part of the top ten in the world, with more than 5 million active subscribers and 2 billion page views since the videos were first released (July 2013). In 2013 the Yogscast community employed more than 30 members of staff and had gained a huge fan following amongst millions of gamers around the world.

Together, Notch, Simon, Lewis, Hannah, and Zynga represent the huge differences evolving within online gaming communities: a large corporation creating games that millions of people were happy to play while socializing on Facebook, until marketing became too aggressive; players who endorse an obscure title such as Minecraft to the point where Persson was forced to admit that his company was no longer ‘Indie’ (Makuch, 2012); and support for the common gamer through the Yogscast, with billions of individual views on its channels.

In this book, I investigate these changes. I argue that although gamers have become too large a group to be examined as a cohesive whole, they are becoming hugely influential in modern cultural practices. The nature of gamers, who are hardwired to play because their intent within games is to play, means that they are constantly experimenting and toying with the medium. Although not every gamer is a producer, the gaming community has a huge investment in perpetuating itself, and is a dynamic force in online society. It is also a community keenly aware of the stereotypes that surround it, and although it does not always use these creatively, it does work to explore them. I argue that the fan-producers and developers who act as spokes-people for these games are becoming an increasingly powerful element of gaming culture and have an important role to play in the development of gaming culture. Even gamers who are not as high profile as The Yogscast or Notch often work to effect change, express ideas collectively and develop new modes of gaming activity. Increasingly, gamers have realized that their consumption and interaction with games and gaming culture can be influential. As a result, they are turning away from more hegemonic modes of production and are relying on themselves to provide authoritative voices.

Introducing the Gamer

Online gaming is a gateway to a hugely diverse community. Millions of people log onto their given world every day (or week, or month), and a vast amount of these people also engage in social interactions that deliberately surround or have been created for each game. The media generalize about the players of these games and still cannot resist the unfavorable monikers—the young, obsessive player of World of Warcraft (2004); the 5-minute housewife or office worker player who loves Diner Dash (2004); and the slightly over-enthusiastic couple who met through a guild in Everquest (1999). Even the games in these examples are tried and tested signifiers of each genre.

Yet even though all of these people exist as stereotypes, they are simply not an accurate portrayal of the player. Nor is the often repeated definition of the ‘average gamer’ as 35, lower middle class, white and of either gender (Cook, 2013; Entertainment Software Association [ESA], 2013; Warr, 2013) particularly useful, since it is so bland as to be virtually meaningless.

The ‘average online gamer’ is a title that cannot be applied to a generation, because players include students, young professionals, mothers, retired silver surfers and children just learning to use the computer. It cannot be pinned to a specific subculture, because criminals, farmers, swimmers, agoraphobics, schoolchildren, dog lovers and hunters, from all ages, social classes, religions and races, play together. Most importantly, it cannot be applied to gamers, because the revenue generated from the games industry has been regularly surpassing cinema releases since 2009 (Chatfield, 2009; Martin, 2013). This suggests that a vast social demographic are consuming games, and were the metrics to be reversed, it seems laughable that anyone would ever try to categorize an ‘average’ moviegoer. In short, the online community is as diverse as anyone who can access a computer.

The demographic of games has also shifted, accommodating a growing number of players who have grown up with games, so called ‘silver surfers’ who play games during their retirement, and children who are experiencing games for the first time. Female players were estimated to be about 40% of the player base in 2008 (ESA, 2008), and grew to a 45% split in 2013 (ESA, 2013). This is reflected in the diversity of online gaming as well as attempts to produce more gender-neutral titles.

Free Realms (2009) is specifically a ‘family friendly’ game (Smedley in Hindman, 2011) and aims to create a new pool of players familiar with gaming conventions who will hopefully integrate games into their leisure activities throughout their lives. The gender-neutral marketing of the game suggests that gaming companies such as Sony have clearly recognized that they are trying to attract both sexes in a shared (family) environment, rather than simply returning to more stereotypical images of the target audience as male. All these groups, and others, form a disparate audience which cannot be grouped into one package and which does not have one unanimous gaming desire.

At the same time, modes of play have emerged in new arenas, and gaming patterns have changed. Jesper Juul (2010) and Mia Consalvo (2009) have argued persuasively that casual games are often played in what might be considered a ‘hardcore’ manner. Players investing huge amounts of time in casual games, which may involve the creation of networks, socialization and play behaviors such as grinding which in the past have been more commonly regarded as aspects of Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPGs). Conversely, gamers in an MMORPG may log on to do nothing more than socialize or check their post, briefly grind the minimum of materials to add to the communal bank for the raid later in the week or spend the rest of the evening chatting to people on Ventrilo without performing any in-game objectives. In this respect the ‘hardcore-casual’ and ‘casual-hardcore’ behaviors are reversed (Consalvo, 2009). There is also considerable agreement that the casual gaming audience outstrips that of ‘hardcore’ games; the Casual Games Association (CGA) estimates that more than 340 million people play casual games on a regular basis (Benedetti, 2010; CGA, 2012). Finally, the growth in free-to-play games, download platforms which supply multiple titles or socially networked games, has changed where and how players interact with games.

With gaming becoming a more pervasive leisure activity, it should be unsurprising that it is becoming more acceptable to be a gamer, or so one would think. During the writing of this book, I read a series of game biographies with natty titles such as The Elfish Gene (Barrowcliff, 2008), From Fantasy Freaks to Gamer Geeks (Gilsdorf, 2009), Of Dice and Men (Ewalt, 2013) and Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress: A Girls’ Guide to the Dungeons & Dragons Game (Mazzanoble, 2007), in which the authors rediscovered their roots in the early gaming scene. Rather impressively, all these authors seemed to have played Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) with the original rule book, despite the fact that the first print run consisted of only 1,000 copies. What disappointed me throughout these books (excepting Mazzanoble, whose book was published by current D&D license holders, Wizards of the Coast) was the continuous Lacanian Othering of the player that took place. The author—usually a middle-aged male suffering a self-confessed mid-life crisis—regarded the gamers he met and interviewed as carrying on with an obsession (not a hobby) that he had left behind once the heady days of college, beer and girls had intruded on his fantasy world. Gamers who had continued to play throughout their lives were regarded with suspicion. Gilsdorf, early in the struggle to find himself through gaming, writes a list of issues to which he sees gamers subscribing:

Why Fantasy?

1. Blatant escapism (from problems: emotional, marital, societal-terrorism, economic)
2. Feelings of powerlessness (relate to 1)
3. Desire not to feel ordinary, to feel ‘heroic’; to feel part of larger narrative (immortality?). (2009: 41)

The list continues to a tenth point, ‘Regress to childhood / relive childhood’, and the emphatic, overanxious eleventh point: ‘FYI, this is not me’ (ibid).

It seemed to me that this placement of the gamer was unfair; especially when compared with the people discussed in this book. If gaming was becoming so all encompassing, why were gamers still seen as reclusive freaks? My own background has been that of someone who continued to play games since childhood, and I initially experienced a self-defensive response to the people suggesting that my way of life was somehow wrong. Yet, condemnation for remaining faithful to a beloved leisure activity seemed rather unfair, especially when my gaming life seemed so varied—from running player meet-ups, to raiding with guilds and groups online, to teaching Game Studies at my university. Fortunately, the huge variety of players that I came across during my research immediately gave me cause to validate this extremely diverse suggested perspective, but, despite this, to realize I had picked up a few bad habits of my own.

Despite my own immersion within various gaming cultures, I still had a narrow view of the gaming world and its players, separating them into those with long term experiences with games, and those without; those who played games consistently, and those who dipped in occasionally. In my mind, there were ‘good’ and ‘bad’ associations for these activities, ones which authors such as Rachel Kowert are at pains to dissect and present in a more diverse light (Kowert, 2013a). These binary, black-and-white, oneor-the-other assumptions turned out to be very wrong. Some players had no prior knowledge of the genre and were discovering it for the first time. Others adamantly refuted the title of ‘gamer’, despite being experts at casual games or having multiple titles on their Facebook or iPhones. These people would actively deny that they were playing games, afraid of the stigma, even when I could actually see the game paused on their smartphone screens or ‘caught them in the act’ during lunch breaks. Others had always wanted to play games but never had the opportunity. Simon Lane of The Yogscast, who one might expect to epitomize the geek stereotype, admits he did not really play D&D as a child. Instead, he ‘used to play it a bit, but never as often as I wanted to. I mostly sat around reading the rulebooks and dreamt of slaying dragons’ (Lane, 2011). Some gamers had no interest in games beyond the one they were playing. Others were too young to have experienced early games (and sometimes genres of games), or came from cultural backgrounds that made access to gaming difficult.

From these melting pots, some unexpected results emerged. It was fascinating to observe, for example, players with no knowledge of the conventions of D&D (which many scholars, including myself, see as the birthplace of modern gaming); for them World of Warcraft set the gaming tropes they understood, and a good example of a roleplay event was return...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ‘Give Honeydew 46 /1’
• 1 A Brief History of Online Gaming—or Not
• 2 ‘Did He Just Run in There?’: Defining Gaming Communities and Players
• 3 ‘Digging a Hole’: Reframing Game Narratives through Webcasting
• 4 ‘Someone a Fan Made’: Gaming Fan Communities and Creative Practice
• 5 One More Block: The Essentials of Indie Gaming
• 6 Indie Grows Up: A Man Called Steve
• 7 Always in Beta: Strategizing Gaming Communities
• Coda: Final Thoughts
• Bibliography
• Index