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Jason Rhody, in his talk "/Em Speaks, Or Textual Practices, Online Communication, And Asheron’s Call" comes at MMPRGs from a hypertext theoretical bent. He's spending the first part of his talk discussing the graphical interface of Asheron's Call--particularly graphical and general text-based emotes. The game looks similar to MOOs in it's textual output. The majority of emotes in the game are textual, not graphically avatar based.
Asheron's Call is distinct from some MMPRPG in that it has narrative "roll-outs", with new story every month or so, and encouraged 3rd party modification tools. That's interesting to me because these modification are player tested and run--something that most online enviroments outlaw (including Habbo Hotel, where I'm a Hobba or "moderator"). This sort of authorship is crucial to online narratives, I think. It's there in the BAC too, in that audience is encouraged to submit work and host others' works. I focused on this in my talk earlier.
Rhody says what's interesting about Aheron's Call's plugin system is the way that user modification can penetrate the game narrative (after an interesting digression highlighting the tensions between narratologists and ludologists). Players can add to the narrative, but--in Rhody's example at least--cannot overturn the narrative.
Good talk planning: Dmitri Williams analyzes Asheron's Call 2 from a social scientific paradigm, displaying results of a field test to determine the "social capital" gains or losses of MMRPG players. He explains some new concepts for me:
Bridging social capital- the outer world of relationships
Bonding social capital - strong, solid relationships
Dmitri claims, and I agree, that social scientists need to start measuring these forms of social captial both online and offline (not just offline). There are other current shortcomings--studies focus on children, are too short to be effective (75 minutes max) and no contextualization of games by researchers. Dmitri's solution: his study has a representative sample (only 4% less than 18), lasted a month, and incorporated reasonably extensive game-testing (the fringe benefit of game research).
His results? Asheron's Call 2 affects social capital measures (no effects for newbies, but declines in veterans; offline bonding functions drop, offline bridging functions rise), existing social networks (14% decrease in friends 4-6; no change in family), civic media use (local TV news and other internet uses drop; long distance relationship and national news doesn't), and civic activities (more community spirit, less personal spirit). Interestingly, then, it seems that people develop broad community urges and close relations with distant friends.
There' a lot more to it, but I can't type fast enough.
Now,this is with a non-vibrant social game. Dmitri ends with question--what would a vibrant game do? He says that many more titles need to be studied to establish larger effects. I agree.
And there goes my battery. Oh well, conference blogging was fun while it lasted.
Posted by brandon barr at October 18, 2003 02:56 PM | TrackBack