Futuresonic

Aleks Krotoski - Future Play

Aleks is a social psychologist currently studying for her PhD [her area of study is social networks in Second Life.  Her talk mainly centres around her study].  She helped out on the Byron Review.  She writes for the Guardian here.  Although she doesn't like to be reminded of it, she also used to present a show on C4 about computer games called Bits ;).  Her personal website is here.  Below is a pretty much blow-by-blow account of her presentation at Futuresonic. 


Popular misconception is that games aren't for adults.  Adults who play games are seen to be wasting their time.  But the reality is that adults play games all the time.  For example, Su Doku, Brain Training on the Nintendo DS (she showed a slide of Nicole Kidman playing the DS).

Moved on to saying that
a) Brain Training on the DS is sold as a learning tool, but it's just a con.  It's sold to the world as a game that can make you smarter.

She didn't say whether she had any facts to back up the effect of the game on educational development, but it assumed that she doesn't think you actually learn anything from playing these types of games, because:

b) Games like Su Doku, Brain Training etc are selfish.  You only learn how to play games on your own with them.  You don't learn social skills; you don't learn how to engage with other people.  

MMOGs like WoW etc, where you play with other people ARE educational.  You're learning to be social and you're learning to play with others.  People are using, abusing, engaging and learning how to interact better with people via the networks that are in place in these types of games.  The games afford greater interpersonal development.

It seems to me to be quite a bold statement to suggest that Nintendo's Brain Training doesn't educate you yet playing in WoW does.  True, it's probably a good marketing ploy on behalf of Nintendo to imporve the image of gaming, but surely it must have some education value?  Similarly for the Nintedo Wii - a game to play with others.  It would be interesting to uncover her viewpoint on its educational benefits or otherwise.  

She focuses the rest of the talk on 2 statements:

1.  Justin Hall's stance about online games "these spaces are poor replacements for the real world"

and

2. Matt Jones "get rid of [the concept in SNSs] of friending.  It means nothing"


Went on to talk about an one of the early MMOGS, a text-based virtual world called Lambdamoo.  She says it's an excellent example of how you can build emotional connections with others in spaces where you don't really know exactly who you are talking to.  

Cites the author Julian Dibbell who wrote "A Rape in Cyberspace" which is a book recounting an event that happened in Lambdamoo.  

The story is:  one day, a character named Mr Bungle entered the game.  He integrated [him]self into the community and then one day performed gratuitous sexual acts on two of the big players (who were female) in the game.  

Dibbell interviewed the two women behind the characters for his book.  They had felt publicly humiliated. The women said that they were extremely psychologically affected by the public humiliation that they had suffered in the game.  They felt that they had been defaced and defamed in public.  

This is evidence that relationships built up in online games do have plenty of significance in the real world.

I can definitely see how the game is socially significant in this way, but this is a pretty unique case-study.  I wonder how many emotional connections are built up with strangers online in gaming environments, and how much we value them in relation to 'real-life' emotional ties.

Secondly, Aleks explains how the activities that go on in MMOGs such as Wow, Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies develop working realtionships as well as emotional ones.  Problem solving forms a large part of the game narrative in these games and they require a great deal of co-ordination and collective compliance in order to achieve gaming goals.  Pervasive identities come together adding a layer of relationship that you wouldn't have thought would be there.  

Aleks has done a lot of research on different types of relationships in characters in Second Life.  If you analyse the relationships between people, they are quite sophisticated and meaningful; it is possible to identify relationship type and behavioural characteristics and you can see the different ways people are connected to each other.  

Her notion is:  people are learning in networks.  The notion that everybody has the same influence is not true, there is unequal relationship powers (she shows her Facebook friend wheel and also the connection between her and Robert Scoble - he is giving her lots of info and its not reciprocated).  

In the future, how we play has implications for how we learn and how information is spread around, because people are differentially connected.  There are different types of relationships based upon what you do, trust, credibility and attitudes.

Conclusion:  The virtual worlds and social networks that we play in are more real than sitting in a train full of commuters listening to your ipod and conducting solitary tasks.  These virtual worlds gives us the oppurtunity to learn, adapt and collaborate and all of this is done through play.  

Some questions:

Matt Locke asked about the performance of play and whether this is where the real nuances in friendship come to light

Aleks Krotoski:  Will Reader (Psychologist, University of Sheffield Hallam) talks about the performances, collaborations and achieving things as a group.  He says that the mutual experiences give you the basis to form stronger future relationships.  

Locke:  How important is the distincation between synchronous and asynchronous relationships?  Is there a heirarchy of play?  Is real time interaction more important?  How do the levels of bonding differ?

Aleks:  Not looked into this one in that much detail, but it is mportant to look at how and why relationships develop and apply this to an online space.  One of the notions is synchronicity - making sure that you are going to be at a particular place at a particular time.  If you make sure that you have a weekly meeting with someone that your relationship with that person is going to become stronger.  Synchronous relationships are more meaningful than asynchronous ones though (obviously).

Question from audience:  What is learnt in online games that can be related to the real world?  

Aleks:  There is a study at the moment into Everquest.  The teamwork and development of team systems is extremely useful for bodies like the military.  The coming together of a huge number of strangers to quickly bond and co-ordinate in search of a common goal.  

You also learn self-efficacy.  The self belief that you can do something.  If you are peforming in a virtual world where there is a gaming component and you are able to play and perform the role in the online space, it gives you confidence to take that notion offline.  



Justin Hall

Justin's talk was mainly centered on the development of his Passively Multiplayer Online Game and he started with some funny anecdotes of his growing up with the internet.  Funny guy.  Here follows a brief summary of what the game is and some of the questions and answer session.  

PMOG is an example of an extremely casual game, with extremely low barriers to entry and that is based around peoples existing workflows with the web.  It is entirely based around browsing the web and only requires Firefox and a plugin.  It rewards people for boradly surfing.  People who look at more stuff get more points and you can spend those points buying tools and 'annotating' the web.  eg.  you might go to George Bush's biography page and get 'hit' by a mine laid by another player in the game.  PMOG provides a framework for people to share the internet together.  Share coincidences.  

Matt Locke:  How does playfulness get people to engage?  PMOG narrativises data trails of people on the web.  Makes it more fun.  

Justin Hall: People don't have any fear.  People try to interrupt each other, and get into each others data stream.  Can you project where your friends are going to go and join them there to surprise them?

Locke:  How can the structures on PMOG change the way people think about the way their project stuff?  Matt gave the example of how munging his del.icio.us feed into his tumblr feed made him change the way he described his delicious links because they were going to be used in a new way.  

Justin:  Any point you want to prove, there's a website to prove that point.  One of the best educational things is how you can force people into a conversation about a topic.  

Tom Armitage:  This service is passive but at the same time its quite a malevolent trickster.  When you have a service that acts as a meta-layer to what happens beneath it, what do you think your responsibilities are re: privacy and keeping things in balance?

Justin:  We can't do the policing, we have to build the tools for policing.  There are tools for penalising 'bad actors'.  

Matt Jones:  Off the back of PMOG is there a bi-product of some kind?  A way of aggregating stuff?  

Locke [in addition to Jones]:  Are there any plans to build in the idea of actually co-ordinating the PMOG community to 'do good'?

Duncan Gough: PMOG is an asynchronous multiplayer environment.  You could introduce staggered gameplay, you could take surf trails and replay them as a multiplayer game to play synchronously.  

Justin:  re: Dopplr - they are the scale not the diet.  PMOG is built on the data.  

Audience recommended to check out both Jane McGonigal and Dan Hon's work on gaming behaviour in the real world.