http://www.tol.oulu.fi/~tmannine/publications/PRESENCE2001_Virtual_Team_Interactions_in_Networked_Multimedia_Games.pdf
Perhaps this is because the author of this paper is Finnish and English is not his first language, but I found the paper extremely difficult to understand, and really did not see what point, if any, the author was making. Almost half the paper is spent describing virtual environments, and potential real world applications to online communication. Then the author describes Counter-Strike, and talks about his experiences while watching players interact at a Finnish LAN party. He seems to conclude that cooperation and coordination can be helpful not only in a work environment but also in an online game, and that gamers think CS is a fun game.
To be perfectly honest, I don’t think that the author has ever actually played CS. Some of his descriptions of the game were flat out wrong. For example, he describes avatars “limping” and “bleeding” after being shot, as well as performance being altered, which is not the case. Being shot changes nothing in CS as long as you have more than 0 “life points.” I have seen a person survive a round with just 1-3 life out of an initial 100, while killing multiple people without any sort of hindrance. This is just one example; there are others. The screenshots of CS the author uses in his paper are straight from the official CS website. Furthermore, I am still not sure what the author was trying to prove with this paper, as his results could have been reached by anyone who has ever played or watched someone play Counter-Strike. The “main objective [of the research] is to acquire general understanding of team interactions,” and the author successfully concludes that people interact significantly, and work around imperfections in the in-game communication systems. Overall, this paper was not at all insightful and I was quite surprised to see that others referenced it in their work.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Creative Player Actions in FPS Online Video Games
http://www.gamestudies.org/0202/wright/
This paper analyzes speech patterns of CS players in-game in an attempt to show that the game is not all about mindless violence and involves a great deal of creativity, cooperation, and social interaction. The authors group all logged conversations into five very broad categories: Game Technical/External Talk, Performance Talk, Insult/Distancing Talk, Game Conflict Talk, and Creative Game Talk. The last of these is the main focus of the paper and is divided further and analyzed thoroughly with examples. The subdivisions, each with a section dedicated to it were names, naming and identity talk; joking, irony and word play; map creations, map judging, and logo comments and designs; changing game rules and technical limits (reflexive awareness of game features, i.e. low gravity); and popular culture references to in-game talk. General examples of each form of "creative" speech were given, and usually followed up by specific transcriptions of in-game chats or screenshots.
The authors made accurate observations regarding in-game chat in CS. Much of the CS gaming experience is spent in "limbo," while one's character is dead but while others are still playing out the remainder of the round. This is especially true for weaker players. During this period only other "dead" players see chat messages from the player. As a result, social interaction becomes a crucial part of the gaming experience, as it is not very much fun to silently watch others play. The last few times that I have played CS I have actually noticed how much less I enjoy the game when I join a random server where I don’t know a single person, as compared to when I was an avid player about four years ago and had a group of two or three servers I frequented where I usually knew at least a few people in every game. I would not go so far as to call most of the things people say in CS chat “creative,” but the social interaction is definitely crucial, and I’m glad that these authors took notice of this.
This paper analyzes speech patterns of CS players in-game in an attempt to show that the game is not all about mindless violence and involves a great deal of creativity, cooperation, and social interaction. The authors group all logged conversations into five very broad categories: Game Technical/External Talk, Performance Talk, Insult/Distancing Talk, Game Conflict Talk, and Creative Game Talk. The last of these is the main focus of the paper and is divided further and analyzed thoroughly with examples. The subdivisions, each with a section dedicated to it were names, naming and identity talk; joking, irony and word play; map creations, map judging, and logo comments and designs; changing game rules and technical limits (reflexive awareness of game features, i.e. low gravity); and popular culture references to in-game talk. General examples of each form of "creative" speech were given, and usually followed up by specific transcriptions of in-game chats or screenshots.
The authors made accurate observations regarding in-game chat in CS. Much of the CS gaming experience is spent in "limbo," while one's character is dead but while others are still playing out the remainder of the round. This is especially true for weaker players. During this period only other "dead" players see chat messages from the player. As a result, social interaction becomes a crucial part of the gaming experience, as it is not very much fun to silently watch others play. The last few times that I have played CS I have actually noticed how much less I enjoy the game when I join a random server where I don’t know a single person, as compared to when I was an avid player about four years ago and had a group of two or three servers I frequented where I usually knew at least a few people in every game. I would not go so far as to call most of the things people say in CS chat “creative,” but the social interaction is definitely crucial, and I’m glad that these authors took notice of this.
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Cooperative and Disruptive Behavior in CounterStrike
http://wwwai.wu-wien.ac.at/~hahsler/research/webBasedComm_cs/webBasedComm_cs.pdf
This paper by Austrian business students Michael Hahsler and Stefan Koch was a disappointment to me. I expected a paper entitled "COOPERATION AND DISRUPTIVE BEHAVIOUR – LEARNING FROM A MULTI-PLAYER INTERNET GAMING COMMUNITY" to be mostly about the community and the players. In fact, the paper had almost nothing about in-game interaction or the CS community. An explanation of CS, including the history, gameplay, graphics engine, and server mods takes up about half of the paper. Most of the rest is an explanation of the statistics the authors logged from the CS server they ran, with only one short paragraph about the actual community.
I don't know much about game theory in relation to math, which was a big hindrance to my understanding of the paper. The authors put heavy emphasis on the analysis of what they deemed cooperative behavior, based on relative proximity of players in-game. This very notion is incorrect - CS is a tactical game where sticking together may not always be the best course of action. For example, the Counter-Terrorist team may have to defend two bomb sites simultaneously. In order to do this they may have two people cover one entrance to bomb site A, one cover the other entrance to bomb site A, one cover site B, and a fifth cover an important choke point with a sniper rifle (this is an actual strategy used on one map: de_dust2). According to the authors' model of cooperation maybe two of those players would be considered to be cooperating, and maybe none at all, when in reality this strategy requires quite a bit of cooperation to pull off successfully. In fact, almost every single round of CS requires a lot of cooperation. Their measure of disruptive behavior was also limited to shooting or killing teammates. There are plenty of other ways to disrupt a game, such as sitting in the same spot for long periods of time (especially if the spot is out of the way or hidden), or excessive "flaming" or verbal abuse. Overall, this paper was not very comprehensive, and seemed to focus more on specific (and therefore ultimately useless) numbers rather than on community and interaction between players and the patterns that develop out of those.
This paper by Austrian business students Michael Hahsler and Stefan Koch was a disappointment to me. I expected a paper entitled "COOPERATION AND DISRUPTIVE BEHAVIOUR – LEARNING FROM A MULTI-PLAYER INTERNET GAMING COMMUNITY" to be mostly about the community and the players. In fact, the paper had almost nothing about in-game interaction or the CS community. An explanation of CS, including the history, gameplay, graphics engine, and server mods takes up about half of the paper. Most of the rest is an explanation of the statistics the authors logged from the CS server they ran, with only one short paragraph about the actual community.
I don't know much about game theory in relation to math, which was a big hindrance to my understanding of the paper. The authors put heavy emphasis on the analysis of what they deemed cooperative behavior, based on relative proximity of players in-game. This very notion is incorrect - CS is a tactical game where sticking together may not always be the best course of action. For example, the Counter-Terrorist team may have to defend two bomb sites simultaneously. In order to do this they may have two people cover one entrance to bomb site A, one cover the other entrance to bomb site A, one cover site B, and a fifth cover an important choke point with a sniper rifle (this is an actual strategy used on one map: de_dust2). According to the authors' model of cooperation maybe two of those players would be considered to be cooperating, and maybe none at all, when in reality this strategy requires quite a bit of cooperation to pull off successfully. In fact, almost every single round of CS requires a lot of cooperation. Their measure of disruptive behavior was also limited to shooting or killing teammates. There are plenty of other ways to disrupt a game, such as sitting in the same spot for long periods of time (especially if the spot is out of the way or hidden), or excessive "flaming" or verbal abuse. Overall, this paper was not very comprehensive, and seemed to focus more on specific (and therefore ultimately useless) numbers rather than on community and interaction between players and the patterns that develop out of those.
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