Playing Together

Been a busy period recently, with yesterday culminating in the 4th focus-group and 12th participant in 5 days. 

In a flickr style, What's in your bag? I thought i'd present to you some of things that i've been taking with me on fieldwork.

Above: 2 cameras (one video camera), maps+directions, 2 dictaphones, pens, note paper, keys, discussion guide and incentives. 


Below: some images from some fieldwork in West Yorkshire where i took some small recordings of the participants playing Mario Kart on their Wii.

So i mentioned a few days ago how i was going to pilot a research technique which is commonly known as a digital or Online ethnography.  This broad term pretty much encompasses any sort of social research that is conducted in 'technologically mediated publics' or, in layman's terms, online.  I decided to test out participant observation, specifically spending some time with some WoW gamers who granted me access to watch them. 

As part of the outcomes for this research, i've been trying to think of frameworks through which to analyse the various dimensions and behaviours of shared gaming.  The ways that people have generally tried to anaylse gaming behaviour has been through typologies of gamer; i'm sure most people have heard the terms 'hardcore' or 'casual' banded around fairly frequently...

The Guardian blogged today, referencing Forbes magazine, who, rather ambitiously, tried to proclaim that European and US gamers were two distinct beasts:

"Guns and gore also don't sell as well in Europe because Europeans like short, so-called casual games, rather than the long, epic tales that keep gamers pounding on their consoles for hours at a stretch. Casual games also fit the European lifestyle better: People can play these short games on trains and subways on their way to work."

Suggesting that a continent so culturally diverse as Europe can have a population that conforms to a certain type of gamer is probably not the greatest assumption. 

After falling quite far behind with the blog posts, i thought it was high time to give a bit of a lo-down on the research project.  So what we've done so far is questionnaires, which i talked a bit about here.  They were useful to a degree.  The demographic was well balanced: they were administered to a range of ages (13-19), passion and gender and so they enabled us to figure out what games were played by who, who with, and how often they were played.  The downside of questionnaires is mainly due to the inability to prompt and probe in order to obtain richer answers.  We've also been busy with vox pops and have begun conducting some depth interviews with small friendship groups of gamers. 

Here's a list of some of the findings from the questionnaire.  There aren't too many surprises and they are pretty much in line with some of our pre-conceptions about gaming behaviour mentioned here. 

As part of our research process we've been interested in talking to different groups of teenagers and young adults who take part in different forms shared or group gaming. Throughout the research we've tried to look at the 'socialness' of games from the perspective of the user.  How the gamer plays games with others, not the way that they are supposed to play, or the way that the game genre might like to dictate.  We find this a much more useful approach to take rather than draw attention to specific genres.  What's more interesting is not what genre of game teens are playing, but how. 

Last week i interviewed a group of teenage boys from West Yorkshire who regularly link up to play, games over the net such as Pokemon Battle Revolution on the Wii.  This week I interviewed two players of a different sort of multiplayer game, World of Warcraft. 

The big deal about World of Warcraft is the idea of role playing.   Assuming a character, a guise, personalising your avatar and supposedly entering into a world where you're not yourself.  You correspond to the in-house rules about behaviours and language and the ability to become someone different and create a new desired identity for yourself is supposed to appeal to its players.  

From what we've found though, and we might be wrong, WoW is less about role-playing and more about just being yourself.  The most desirable part of the game is being in a guild with your real life friends and completing instances.  It is enjoyable to play with people who you know and trust and who you can chat to whilst gaming.  Having to adopt a whole new language and not let your friends know of your true identity is just too much of an overhead. 

In terms of analysing the 'socialness' of games from the perspective of a gamer, these findings make me question the difference between an average MMOG and MMORPGS and more generally highlight the importance of looking at games from the perspective of the gamer.

Going through the questionnaire results and the video tape from the vox pops (i will put them up here as soon as i've figured out to embed .flvs into the MT blog!) made me think about the motivations for gaming amongst teenagers and what the social drivers were for their behaviours.  It also made me consider how gaming was perceived. 

James and myself attended Futuresonic last week in Manchester.  According the official site, Futuresonic is "an international festival of Art, Music and Ideas now in its 12th year occupying the orbits of both digital culture and music".  We weren't cool enough to catch the music in the evening but we went to several talks about social media and gaming.  On Friday, i was pleased to be able to catch a session on 'Future Play' delivered by Aleks Krotoski and Matt Locke.  It was then followed up by an hour long presentation and Q+A session by Justin Hall and Duncan Gough of Passively Multiplayer Online Gaming fame.  Luckily for you i decided to type up my notes from the presentations on gaming, so here they are!

The questionnaire i administered a few weeks ago has finally been completed.  Out of 26 that i sent out, 19 replied.  At 73%, that represents a "very good" response rate if i'm to believe Thomas Mangionne's classification which i picked out in Bryman's Social Research Methods.  The monetary incentives which i offered seemed to have worked a treat :)

I've created a resources page of useful stuff on the web that we've been reading.  Thought it'd be a useful way to keep a track of what's grabbing our attention.  It's compiled from our relevant gaming del.icio.us links and splits the material down into categories such as blog posts, news articles, academic papers and so on.  It kind of works like an annotated bibliography or mini literature review.  If you want to see our whole list of gaming articles, then take a peek here

Our research project has begun to sprout legs: we've started conducting some first-hand research.  From our panel of participants (equal male to female ratio, across all age ranges and a range of socioeconomic backgrounds) we started by administering a questionnaire to 25 teenagers aged 13-18 (13 girls, 12 boys).  We decided to set up the survey online using Survey Monkey.  Survey Monkey is probably the best online resource for creating surveys and questionnaires.  The type of survey we created is a qualitative self-completion questionnaire.  In order to get a solid understanding of the patterns of games consumption and considering our lack of expertise/knowledge in what games teens are consuming, we deemed this approach as being the most effective way of canvassing a lot of opinion using (relatively) minimal resources.