Authors
Kerr, AphraIvory, James D.
Topics
Digital Games and MediaEducational Games and GamificationImpact of Technology on AdolescentsAPHRA KERR National University of Ireland, Maynooth, IrelandJAMES D. IVORY Virginia Tech, USWhen we agreed to edit the theme on online games for this Encyclopedia our first question was, “What is meant by online games?” Schol ars of games distinguish between nondigital games (such as board games) and digital games, rather than between online and offline games. With networked consoles and smartphones it is becoming harder and harder to find players in the wealthy industrialized countries who play “offline” digital games. Most games developers now include some element of online activity in their game and the question is: What is the degree to which the gameplay experience occurs online? Is online gameplay more a multiplayer than an individual experience? If we move beyond the technological meaning of “being online” we should, as Newman (2002) argued, be concerned with varying degrees of participation during gameplay. We wanted to embrace a broad approach to online games and explore the possibilities of the term, rather than to narrow it down. Contrib utors were given some leeway in interpreting online games – and thus the reader will find examples ranging from early multi-user dun geons (MUDs) to massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs), and from first person shooter (FPS) online games to browser games. This diversity points to the challenges faced by scholars in this field. Not only is there little agreement about the use of terminology such as “online” games, but different collective nomenclatures are used, varying from “video games” to “computer games” to “digital games.” While North American scholars and publications tend to use “video games” or “videogames” as the collective term, scholars in Europe have adopted “digital games” or “computer games.”The International Encyclopedia of Digital Communication and Society, First Edition. Edited by Robin Mansell and Peng Hwa Ang. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.To make matters worse, the publishing arm of the industry uses the terms interactive software and interactive entertainment to avoid certain regulatory and legal issues (Kerr, 2013). Even the term “gaming” is troublesome. In Western Europe “gaming” is used sometimes with ref erence to forms of gambling and an emergent area of research concerns those genres where the distinction between gaming and gambling is breaking down. Galloway (2006) uses the term “gaming” (p. 2) to refer to the entire apparatus of the video game, including both the organic and inorganic machines. For others online gaming is a set of social practices or, indeed, sociotechnical practices. As in any area of research in the media and communications field, a personal interest and some gameplay experience are useful and help to overcome the “experiential gap” that Shaw (2010) discusses and which can lead to outsider status. Experiential knowledge helps researchers to communicate with gamers and game devel opers and leads to more informed research projects. We are aware that not all researchers in this field have such experience. Indeed, it is common for a games researcher at an academic communications conference to start a talk by asking how many people in the audience play games. It cannot be assumed that a majority of the audience is playing games in the way that television or internet researchers might assume. Nevertheless, the likelihood of game players being present varies by age group and country and the data suggest that the trajectory is one of growth. This question may not be asked in another decade. We have tried to ensure that the entries on online games cover significant theories and research conducted within the communications field on online games and reflect the international dimensions of this field of research. Regardless of the rate of growth of game playing over the past four decades, we now have at least three decades of scholars from a range of disciplines in many countries applying, adapting, and extend ing academic methodologies and theories inDOI: 10.1002/9781118290743.wbiedcs149 2 ONLINE GAMES the context of games. No postgraduate student today enters the world of online games without the help of an existing scholarly literature, but perhaps one of the challenges has been finding the key literature. Some of this literature is not in English and much of it is dispersed across a range of disciplinary journals. An important aim of the entries on online games in this Encyclo pedia is to identify work that is state of the art and synthesize some of the core theoretical and empirical research in the field. Even if there is disagreement with the focus, methods, or out comes of some of the early work, it is important to engage with it and to acknowledge the theoretical and methodological eclecticism of the field as a bonus and the lack of a reified “canon” as an opportunity. The following offers an overview of online games and their origins, of online game culture, and traces the key themes that have emerged in communications and related research to date. We outline different scholarly approaches to studying online games in the social sciences and humanities (embracing experimental, text ual, political economy, and cultural studies) and point to emergent themes that are ripe for research.What Are Online Games? Online games are played on or over a computer network, most commonly the internet (Craw ford, Gosling, & Light, 2011). The requirement for a network connection, a platform of some type (console, computer, cellphone), and often a subscription means that online games are mostly only accessible to relatively affluent people in well networked parts of the world (Dyer-Witheford & De Peuter, 2009). Most digital games in the second decade of the 2000s have some networked or online element and, increasingly, games are moving entirely online, although there is some resistance because of the control that it gives game companies and others to survey player behavior. The most widely known online games are MMORPGs, which are persistent worlds that a player engages with in real time and which continue after a player logs out. One such game is World of Warcraft (Blizzard) and although the game was developed in North America, there are now more players in China than in Western markets. Other forms of online games are nonpersistent and session or peer-to-peer based. A player logs in and starts a play session either against other people or against a machine. Examples include FPS games, where players log in to compete against each other (e.g., Activi sion’s Call of Duty, Riot’s League of Legends), and social or casual games, where gameplay can be asymmetrical (e.g., King’s Candy Crush Saga, PopCap’s Plants vs. Zombies) but sometimes involves synchronized updates across the players’ social networks. These games range from the very complex 3D graphical worlds with thousands of simultaneous players playing on high-end personal computers (PCs) to simple flash games played for short bursts of time against a computer and in a browser. Online games can be played on PCs, consoles, cellphones, tablets, and handhelds. Some online games are single player, but most games include a multiplayer mode. As with other media texts, online games have given rise to a rich and varied player and third-party online cul ture of paratexts, and help and cheat guides and tools. The origins of online games lie in nondigital traditional games, sports and theater, and there is a rich tradition of studies of play that informs digital game studies (Avedon & Sutton-Smith, 1971; Caillois, 2001; Huizinga, 1949). In addition, artists, hackers, and computer scientists have explored the potential of computer based con nections, interactivity, and virtual reality through installations, simulations, and hacking projects. The journal Simulation & Gaming has been pub lished since 1970, and the first computer based games emerged in public research laboratories in the United States in the late 1950s; they were usually distributed free of charge. Pen and paper role playing games, often with a war or fantasy theme, and live action role playing games existed before digital games. One of the best known is Dungeons & Dragons, first published by Tactical Studies Rules in 1974. Gary Fine’s (1983) book, Shared Fantasy, provides an early sociological study of user motivations for playing these games. Taylor (2006) traces MMORPGs back to table top games and especially to Dungeons & Dragons. She notes that these types of games provide the basic structure for many online multi-user fantasy based games, including character sheets, groupONLINE GAMES 3 action, and the use of statistics. Less than 10 years after the first commercial games on consoles and PCs, computer based “multi-user dungeons,” or MUDs, were developed. Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw developed MUD1 at Essex University in the United Kingdom in 1980. Bartle describes in his entry Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) how, despite these games’ text based nature, communi ties of students and academic players gathered to experience play and competition over the inter net. A key feature of MUDs was that the player could communicate while he or she played, if only through written text. Another important aspect of early online game playing was that the code was open source software and was freely available. This meant that the original MUD spawned copies, competitors, and emulators, albeit mainly in the educational world. In 1989 TinyMUD was developed at Carnegie Mellon in the United States and focused less on fantasy competition and more on socializing and world building. By the 1990s, persistent graphics based virtual environments with multiple users started to emerge. One of the first commercial graphical online games to reach significant player num bers in the general population in the West was Blizzard’s (1996) Diablo. This was followed by Origin’s Ultima Online in 1997 and the virtual environment Second Life, from Linden Labs, in 2003. These later environments encouraged user generated content and more multiplayer activity than had been seen hitherto. Of key importance to scholars in the field was the facility for play ers to create and customize an avatar based on preset characteristics, the ability to communicate through text and increasingly through voice to other players, and the requirement to collaborate in groups in order to compete. To some degree, these MUDs and multiplayer virtual environ ments developed as a sideshow to the commercial heart of the games industry that was focused on arcades and home console platforms. The early 1970s saw the first consoles commercially released in the United States while, in the United King dom, the relatively cheap Sinclair home computer was widely embraced as a platform for developing amateur games. In the 1980s, the Japanese games company Nintendo launched a games console in the West and targeted its iconic characters and games at children, transforming digital gaming.Sony is a relative newcomer and Microsoft even newer. It was not until the first decade of the twenty-first century that consoles were internet ready and that they had the capability to support multiplayer online games. Today, there are fewer and fewer technical reasons for online games to be tied to PCs, although the quality of the broad band network is an issue, especially in regions of the world where bandwidth offers slow data transfer or is very costly. Online games are material as well as virtual objects. The development of an MMORPG can involve years of effort, hundreds of person-hours, and very large financial investment. The main tenance of an MMORPG relies on a team of support and technical staff, and an extensive network of international servers, computers, and software. These technosocial networks are vulnerable to natural disaster, material decay, third-party attack, and commercial decisions (see Online Games Preservation). The material network of online games also embeds certain political and commercial decisions about the role that is given to game players. In 2013, Microsoft reversed its plans to require Xbox One players to connect online to play offline disk based games, which would have restricted their ability to play “used” or second-hand games. Online gaming raises issues that are as much about a struggle over control, surveillance, and boundaries as they are about gameplay. Embedded technologies may limit the number of accounts a player can have and the number of installations that can be made, which thus affect how, where, and for how long a gamer has access to an online game. An important aspect of understanding online games is who produces, distributes, and main tains the predominantly commercial material artifacts. The first documented computer based games emerged in public research laboratories in the United States in the late 1950s and 1960s. Most were developed by research scientists work ing on defense and military projects, and this relationship has continued in various guises in the United States in particular (see Online Games and Militarism). The first commercial console games were produced by Atari in the United States in the early 1970s, although there were earlier coin operated arcade games. Japan has a long history in arcade games and in animated films and it is not surprising that many of the 4 ONLINE GAMES first game companies emerged in that country. Nintendo, for example, was a flower card com pany before it moved into games. The United Kingdom’s early history of PC development and computer hobbyists also seems to have shaped its computer game development industry (Haddon, 1988). Given the context of the 1960s and 1970s it is perhaps not surprising that the first games drew upon themes of space, the Cold War, and sport. The online games industry is shaped by this pre-history. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are significant players because of the struggles and strategies of previous generations of game compa nies, but the shift online has brought companies such as Apple, Amazon, and Facebook into the field alongside game natives such as Valve, Ubisoft, NCsoft, and Tencent. The production landscape is complicated by the fact that some companies produce both hardware and software, while others specialize in software. Games are more than software, however, as O’Donnell (2012) has pointed out. As game development companies and projects have grown in scale, game development jobs have expanded to include audio, design, art, project management, and pro gramming. As the industry moves increasingly online, these positions are joined by numerous community and technical support roles. Game production can be conceptualized as cultural production and the games industry as a creative and cultural industry (Kerr, 2006), although parts of the industry resist this mantle as they attempt to oppose the forms of regulation and control that come with it. The producers of online games are widely distributed in the Western nations, although there is a significant struggle for con trol between the main platform and hardware gatekeepers and among the global regions of the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), and Asia Pacific. Today’s commercial online games are a long way from MUD1 and might better be described as the “ideal commodity in post-fordist information and promotional capitalism” (Kline, Dyer-Witheford, & De Peuter, 2003, p. 62) since their producers are part of global production and consumption net works. We find examples of cultural hybridization and glocalization in some of these games as com panies explicitly design games that will sell across cultures. We find highly contested local and intraregional cultures as game players negotiate, adapt, and adopt game content and there is evi dence of contraflows to the West.This is, however, a highly volatile industry, haunted by failures, and industry analysis is hampered by the fact that there are few independently verifiable statistics. Even after an online game is launched it continues to develop, expand, and change and game players have an important role in the production process from testing and providing feedback to providing publicity and new types of content.What Are Online Games and Who Plays? The communities and cultures that surround online games are being mediated by the same technologies that are used to play the games. In the mid-1990s, when internet connections were slow and relatively expensive in the industrialized countries and in emerging markets, players would often carry their consoles or PCs around with them and set up local area networks in houses or other venues to enable them to play multiplayer games. Some of that co-present play has trans lated into professional game playing tournaments (see also Professional Gaming) and into local indie game jams where amateurs and develop ers come together to develop games in a short period. In major Asian, European, and North American cities, internet connections are now fast enough for players to connect online from their homes, university dormitories, trains, and schools, without having to be colocated. Online games via mobile devices and mobile applica tions, or “apps,” are providing an important new revenue stream for the industry. Many aspects of online games and online game culture in its contemporary form emerged in Southeast Asia. In South Korea, the government banned the importation of Japanese consoles for sociohistorical reasons, but its investment in national broadband networks provided a stimulus for new forms of game playing online to emerge. Unfettered by the moral panics often evidenced in the West, this new gaming culture thrived in gam ing cafés called PC bangs and created celebrity players with tournaments broadcast on television and streamed online (Hjorth & Chan, 2009). This online gaming culture differed considerably from the more privatized and mobile gaming cultureONLINE GAMES 5 that developed in Japan, Western Europe, and North America. Similarly, microtransactions and prepaid cards emerged as a successful business strategy in Asian markets before they emerged elsewhere. In addition, companies in South Korea, Japan, and China have developed games for Western markets demonstrating that, in this domain, the flow of content and ideas is not one way (Jin, 2010). A large-scale survey commissioned in 2012 by the Interactive Software Federation of Europe (ISFE) found that 81% of respondents, on average, across 16 countries stated that they had played games online with other people in the previous year (ISFE, 2012). A South Korean government report put the online games element of its domes tic games market at 70% in 2012 and forecast the major growth sectors as online and mobile. A 2013 industry survey by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA, 2013) in the United States found that 62% of players played online. Instead of face-to-face communication with a team and competitors, players are using digital communication channels to communicate while they play online or, in some cases, they turn them off when they experience racist, sexist, or homophobic forms of trash talk (see also Online Games and Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia). Secondary audiences or viewers of gameplay are a growing feature of online games and live streaming of gameplay is becoming a new form of online content and a new revenue stream for the industry. Live streaming and broadcasting of professional game playing are documented in publications on e-sports (see also Professional Gaming). A widespread assumption is that online gaming is the sole domain of children and youths, partic ularly males. Player research, however, indicates that game players vary by genre, platform, and country with certain types of games and plat forms attracting a particular demographic. Adults are increasingly playing online games and more games are being produced that target an over-18 market. International academic and industry sur veys of children and their leisure time activities confirm that playing online games is often the most popular activity online for children up to 12 years of age (see also Online Games and Chil dren; Haddon et al., 2012). In North America and Europe most of these games were developed by large commercial entertainment companies and are provided “free” to game players. Children are playing games targeted at children and, in some cases, games targeted at teens and adults. At the same time, player populations are aging. The 16 to 24 year olds are intensive game players on con sole and computer with men still outnumbering women in all age categories (ISFE, 2012). Studies of MMORPGs conducted in North America and Europe point to a mean age in the 20s and an 80/20 male to female split. Peer-to-peer games such as FPS are more male dominated and slightly younger (see also Online Games Player Char acteristics). Casual online games such as card and puzzle games have a larger and older female player base. Across all platforms, the educational attainment of players tends to be high, reinforcing the access issues mentioned above. For Taylor (2006) online gaming is “deeply social” (p. 30) and players go through a process of socialization when they join a game. Early studies of online games mapped identity play and compared online social interactions with offline activities; for example, Dibbell’s (1998) account of a virtual rape in My Tiny Life at the end of the 1990s. His book recalls how the community of players struggled to introduce some form of mod eration and social control that eventually evicted the perpetrator from the game and resulted in the introduction of a system of player petitions and ballots. Higgins in his entry in this Encyclopedia (Online Games and Racism, Sexism, and Homo phobia) discusses how this incident points to the enforcement of white heterosexual normativity.An Emerging “Field”? Academics within media and communication studies have been studying digital games and digital game playing from a variety of perspec tives since the 1980s (Anderson & Bushman, 2002; Provenzo, 1991). Much of this work applied existing methods without much adaptation to the context of gaming and was highly critical of digital games and their effects on people. Examples are studies employing content analysis of game covers and magazines and laboratory based studies of the effects of short periods of gameplay (see also Online Games, Effects of; Online Games and Crime). Other scholars have 6 ONLINE GAMES criticized some of the methods and approaches used in these studies (Bryce & Rutter, 2006). Nevertheless, this work was valuable in establish ing digital games as worthy of scholarly study, in prompting researchers to apply alternative theories and methods, and in finding publishing outlets. This early research was supplemented with books by journalists that were typically celebratory of the rise of what was seen as a democratic form of entertainment. In between the utopic and the dystopic discourses, there was much work to be done to examine appropriate theories and methods and to move out of the laboratories to focus on public and private play spaces, and to talk to game players to investigate how the industry worked. A number of conferences in the United King dom and Finland in the early 2000s brought dispersed academics from different disciplines together to discuss their work. The key ques tions were “what is a game?” and “what are the most appropriate theories and methods for studying games and gameplay?” There was much debate over whether existing narrative or play theories were more appropriate for the study of digital games. There was talk of academic and disciplinary imperialism and some researchers drew upon simulation, cybernetics, computa tional, and software theories. The open access online journal Game Studies was launched in 2001 with a focus on “the aesthetic, cultural and communicative aspects of computer games” and provides a useful history of key issues in games research; many of the articles document the push for game studies to be established as a separate field of study. Aarseth (2001) in the first issue proclaimed the beginning of game studies. Blogs and websites were another impor tant space for sharing ideas. Castronova (2001) found that a paper on the economics of online games could achieve thousands of downloads on the Social Science Research Network. He was later involved in the launch of the Terra nova blog in the United States in 2003, which continues as an active blog. By 2006, the study of games was sufficiently established for Sage Publications to launch the journal Games and Culture. The initial articles argue for more aca demic research on games to counter stereotypes and moral panics. This need continues as the game industry, cultures, and technologies evolve raising new academic, educational, policy, and legal challenges. From the early 2000s, there were also tensions around the merits of games studies as a sep arate field, rather than studying games within an existing discipline or in an interdisciplinary research framework. The Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) was founded in 2002 with Frans Mäyrä, who heads the University of Tampere Game Research Lab in Finland, as its first president. It runs international annual conferences with online proceedings available in an open access digital library and it has con tributed significantly to the establishment of a field of game studies. Both of the associate editors of the online games entries have been active in supporting games research at estab lished media and communication professional associations such as the International Communi cations Association (ICA) and the International Association for Media and Communications Research (IAMCR). A Game Studies Interest Group was established in ICA in 2005 and in IAMCR games research papers can be found in the political economy, popular culture and communication, technology, and policy sections. The European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) held a pre conference on games and has sponsored a Digital Games Temporary Working Group since 2011. In 2014 a Game Studies Conference was held at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China and games research appears in a range of com munications, media, and education journals in the region. Academic job lists advertise positions for lecturers in game design and development or creative/digital media with knowledge of games. Game studies and/or games research is no longer marginal in communications, media, or related academic institutions. Communication scholars are common in the field of games research. Recent research has found that communication degrees are the most common qualification for games scholars in all the major organizations with a focus on digital and online games research in North America and Europe (Mäyrä, Van Looy, & Quandt, 2013). A survey of games scholars found that of 544 respondents, 16% had degrees in communica tion studies. Within communication studies, scholars had mass communication, speech, and ONLINE GAMES 7 journalism majors. People with communications degrees may be employed in other fields so this survey only highlights one element of the rela tionship between communication studies and game studies. The same study highlighted the multidisciplinary and collaborative nature of contemporary digital games research and found that game studies scholars also have degrees in the humanities, computer science, educa tion, and psychology. Studies of online games often require considerable computer literacy and some of the largest studies of online com munities often include scholars from a range of disciplines. The contributors of entries in this Encyclopedia have diverse backgrounds in communication, media studies, and other social sciences (including psychology and education) and the humanities. Communication scholars have contributed greatly to the study of digital games. They have evaluated the positive and negative effects of digital games and the most insightful work has adapted methods to address the specific challenges that online gaming poses in diverse contexts. They have explored the motivations of people who play online games and found that achievement, diversion, fantasy, arousal, challenge, immersion, competition, and social interaction are important. Indeed, for many players of both MMORPGs and FPS, socia bility is an important motivation and people play against peers, friends, and family. Despite findings demonstrating the diversity of player types and a range of player motivations, the stereotype of the sedentary young white male playing at home in his bedroom persists and is mobilized by hardcore industry marketing and regulatory campaigns as well as by the media (Williams, 2003). The label “gamer” is resisted by some players and embraced by others. It varies in meaning from culture to culture. In some instances, it serves to exclude people from the gaming culture, while in others it serves as a core badge of identity. Despite early hopes that online environments would lead to greater free dom from social discrimination and harassment, studies of online gaming cultures suggest that the variety of characteristics of gamers is multiplying and the increased communication possibilities in online games are supporting new forms of social distinction in human interaction in these spaces.Key Themes in Online Games The topics are organized around the following themes.History, development, and types of online games The treatment of online games starts at the beginning with an entry on multi-user dungeons (MUDs) by Richard Bartle. Bartle was co-creator of the original MUD online game as an under graduate student at the University of Essex in 1980. His career as both a games developer and games scholar enables him to discuss the role that online text based MUDs played in the development of online games – both as an early prototype and as a popular modern alternative to graphical online games. Holin Lin and Chuen Tsai Sun provide an overview of the development of an online game genre that has been a dominant presence in the industry and in research scholar ship – MMORPGs – and William Bainbridge focuses on World of Warcraft, an online game that has enjoyed global dominance in the MMORPG market for more than a decade. An entry from Tanya Krzywinska and Douglas Brown describes this and other online game genres, and Gerald Voorhees reviews a popular online game format, the FPS genre. Another online game format that is perhaps less commercially prominent, but of great social importance, is educational games, which Amanda Ochsner, Dennis Ramirez, and Constance Steinkuehler discuss in their entry. The Encyclopedia entries also follow the migra tion of online games from PCs to other devices with Frans Mäyrä’s entry on mobile games, and an entry by Annakaisa Kultima on social network and casual games. An entry by Burcu Bakioglu ˘ probes the ever expanding boundaries of online game ubiquity in alternate reality games.Commercial production of online games Online digital games present a powerful com mercial force worldwide and several entries examine how online games are produced, dis tributed, and marketed. Others deal with the economic forces that are influencing some online games and the active role of players in shaping game economics and commercial prospects.
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PublishedJan 1, 2015
TypeBook-Chapter
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