Virtual Team Interactions in Networked Multimedia Games

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.