Interactions in Online Games

Virtual Team Interactions in Networked Multimedia Games

2007-05-10T02:23:00.000-07:00

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.

Creative Player Actions in FPS Online Video Games

2007-05-10T00:29:00.000-07:00

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.

Cooperative and Disruptive Behavior in CounterStrike

2007-05-09T17:38:00.000-07:00

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.

Multiplayer FPS Games as Co-creative Media

2007-04-22T13:59:00.000-07:00

http://www.digra.org/dl/db/05150.21522.pdf

Sue Morris, a PhD student from Australia argues in this paper that popular multiplayer FPS games for the PC are and always have been “co-creative media.” This means that the developers are never solely responsible for production of the final product regarded as “the game,” without input from unaffiliated, unpaid players (the “community). Morris goes over the evolution of FPS gaming, starting with its early roots in Wolfenstein 3-D, and ending with games such as Half-Life, Quake III Arena, and Tribes 2. She argues that id Software (the creators of the Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake series), who pioneered the genre, always released their source code to the public and relied on user modifications (“mods”) to make their products better and more accessible. She also gives examples of FPS game communities and the ways they enhance the games in question through extremely thorough testing and feedback, as well as ardent, if mostly selfish, modification. The best example is the game Counter-Strike, a mod of Valve’s Half-Life game created independently by two avid players that became the most popular FPS game of all time.

I wholeheartedly agree with the author. The most successful games, FPS games in particular, are those which have the best community-developer interaction and the best mod tools. Half-Life and Quake in particular had excellent level design and other mod tools and became vastly popular as a result. Having good community-developer interaction and good mod tools also prolongs the replay value of a game due to more regular bug fixes and updates as well as new things to do in-game as compared to a game that does not have these things. For example, Turok 2, published by Acclaim, had virtually no developer support and no open source. The game’s bugs were never fixed, and no new content whatsoever was released, even though members of the community pleaded with Acclaim to at least allow them to work on the game themselves. As a result, the game’s popularity declined fairly rapidly, and virtually no one was left playing after about two years. Conversely, Half-Life and its many mods are still popular today, despite the game being 9 years old (a very long time by video game standards) and having a critically acclaimed sequel out.

Gaming Addiction Myths and Stereotypes

2007-03-16T05:02:00.000-07:00

http://gamestudies.org/0601/articles/cover

Rob Cover’s study compared the stereotypes of gaming addiction to those of drug addiction and sought to refute common myths associated with excessive gaming. His major point was that people who look down on video games are simply expressing a conservative and outdated view on what technology is legitimate and what is not. He claims that video gaming is no different from playing with Legos or watching TV or reading in terms of the feeling of gratification experienced by the user, and all can be done for extended periods of time. Therefore, a gaming addict is a lot closer to someone who watches a lot of TV than to a drug addict. To back up his claims, Cover cites previous studies of both gaming addiction and drug addiction.

I agree with the author on most counts. I am an avid gamer, and have at times thought I might be addicted. However, in November I decided to test my theory by trying to stop playing my current favorite game, which I played for several hours daily then and still do now. I did not play it a single time between mid-November and mid-January. Unlike a drug addict, I did not have any kind of physical withdrawal symptoms, and though I did want to play at times when I was bored or trying to procrastinate doing homework, I always easily found something else to keep my busy or entertained. After roughly two months away from the game, I started playing again. Furthermore, the fact that I have had a girlfriend for the last year and a half, have plenty of friends (albeit, most of them at least light gamers), and have a GPA high enough to merit the “Good Student Discount” given by car insurance companies, all while spending, on average, two or more hours every day playing games goes to show that it is wholly possible to lead a perfectly normal life while playing a lot of games. I doubt I could say the same of heavy drug use. Gaming is a hobby like any other, and while it is not as healthy as a sport or as educational as reading (although it really depends on what you read), I believe it is more worthwhile than watching TV, something most people do for hours every day, and not nearly as destructive as heavy drug use or gambling. In fact, it recently dawned on me that I have almost certainly played on average over an hour of video games every day for the last twelve years, and yet I am still a relatively normal person – I would like to see a heroin or crack addict say the same.

Violence in Video Games

2007-03-07T17:50:00.001-08:00

http://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/12/4/390

This study from 1986 is probably one of the earliest studies of the affects of violent video games on player demeanor and emotional state. The study had about 50 college students play two games, one judged to be “mildly violent” and one judged to be “highly violent.” The students then filled out questionnaires about their perceived emotional state in terms of anxiety, hostility, and depression. The experimenters found that the very violent game caused a much higher level of anxiety than the mildly violent game and the “no game” control group. Both the mildly and highly violent game responses had a much higher level of hostility than the “no game” group, but had almost no difference between them. Depression did not seem to be affected by the violence level.

I’ve always been highly skeptical about claims that “video games increase hostility and aggressiveness,” as I do not notice this in myself when I play even grotesquely violent games, so this is quite remarkable to me. An interesting aspect of this study is the dated technology in question. The games they used for their test are nowhere near as violent as recent games. Even the game they called very violent likely had little or no blood graphics, and the death and destruction (though there was plenty of it, according to the description) was probably very stylized and unrealistic. I can only imagine what these researchers would have found had they been given access to games such as Grand Theft Auto (GTA) and its many, increasingly violent and realistic sequels. On the other hand, I have always maintained that only the mentally unstable (or very young) could be seriously influenced by violence in video games. While it is true that extremely violent games should probably not be available to children under 13, it is always the parents’ job to teach children right from wrong and explain to them that video games are fiction and fantasy, and never to be taken very seriously. This is a direct parallel to the film industry – just because someone watches an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, they will probably not be inspired to kill dozens of people (or turn into a cyborg). Likewise, someone who kills people on a computer screen will probably not kill people in the real world, unless this person is completely deranged, and then it isn’t really the game’s fault either way. Still, considering how much is attributed to violence in video games (I still remember quite well how the media blamed the game Doom for the killings at Columbine High School), and the political movements to ban or remove violence in video games, this is an issue I will have to put more research into.

Gender Bias in Games

2007-02-25T20:47:00.000-08:00

http://www.slis.indiana.edu/research/working_papers/files/SLISWP-03-05.pdf

This is a study by Anna M. Martinson from Indiana University regarding gender bias in games. She attempts to explain the general male proclivity and female indifference towards video games and proposes ways to expose girls to games in ways they would enjoy. Martinson believes that video games have always been considered a male domain, and therefore women are underrepresented in every aspect of game design. Some of the examples she gives include the ridiculous ways in which female characters are often portrayed in games in terms of physical proportions and clothing selection, and the often pathetic, background roles they are given. She also claims that since game designers are mostly white, middle-class males, they unintentionally design games with themselves as the target audience. Finally, she explains how girls may look for different things in games than do boys, and that the current game market does not have much to offer to girls. Some of the things she lists as desirable to female players are “a creative component, … female player-controlled characters, realistic setting, positive, unsolicited feedback, slow or variable pace, predictable rules, clear explanation of rules, absence of violence, absence of killing, absence of evil characters” (page 15). Most of these factors are absent from most games on the market, especially the complete absence of violence, and creative component. Martinson concludes that much like sports, video games, once a male-dominated domain, could become more equal and enjoyable to both sexes, if more games are made with women in mind.

I agree with the author that most of today’s games are not made for women. Even though many games now have important female characters, and most MMORPGs and other open-ended RPGs which allow the player to make their own character have options to make characters male or female, the games’ content is generally more male-oriented. Most games are heavy in combat and competitive elements, and lack creative elements or realistic settings. There are, however, games that fit Martinson’s requirements on the market. For example, the Sims has just about everything she wants in a game. Other games, such as Final Fantasy X-2 revolve around female heroines who are anything but helpless and pathetic (though as a side note, I was only able to endure about 10 minutes of the game as it was far too feminine for my tastes, and I don’t think this is what Martinson is aiming for). Furthermore, of the girls I know, the vast majority never played video games when they were young, and it is a lot harder to pick something up and be good at it if you did not do it from an early age. I spoke with two female friends before writing this entry to ask their opinion on games. Both replied with virtually identical answers: they thought video games were cool, but had never played them when they were young and therefore were not good enough at them to really enjoy the experience. Conversely, almost every male of my age group that I know played video games from the time they were in elementary school (even though some stopped a long time ago). I believe that as time goes on and computers and video game consoles become more common household items and less of a male-only activity, there will be an increasing number of female gamers and female game designers, which in turn will bring about an increase of female-oriented video games.

More on Latency

2007-02-23T20:20:00.000-08:00

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1103599.1103624

I am not going to summarize this study, as it is fairly similar to the first one I did. However, as a point of interest, this study found that 120ms was the average of players' ideas of maximum tolerable latency in WC3, the same number I gave from my own experiences without having read this paper at the time.

Table-Top Video Games

2007-02-23T19:43:00.000-08:00

http://grouplab.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/papers/2006/06-Multimodalgames-Tse-PerGames/06-Multimodalgames-Tse-PerGames.pdf

This paper by Edward Tse, Saul Greenberg, Chia Shen, Clifton Forlines attempts to demonstrate the benefits of developing a technology that would allow video games to be played on a digital tabletop by multiple people, using speech commands and gestures to control the action rather than the usual input devices such as keyboards, mice, and game controllers. According to the researchers, this would be a good addition to home gaming because it would allow users to see and hear each other (unlike multiplayer computer games) and give users the same perspective of the action and allow to look at one another instead of a TV screen (unlike multiplayer console games). To demonstrate their technology and its benefits, the researchers ported two single-player computer games to their tabletop system: WC3, and the Sims, a “life simulation” game where the player controls the lives of on-screen avatars when they are at home, and attempts to make their life “better” by upgrading their house. This allowed two users (in their scenario) to collaborate over the games, even though by default these games could only be played by two people if one looked over the other’s shoulder or they took turns.

While this system may be a good idea for the future, in my opinion it is not quite feasible yet. Furthermore, the researchers had some misconceptions regarding current multiplayer games. For example, they assumed that all multiplayer console games use a “split-screen” perspective wherein each player has a custom view of his/her in-game environment. This is not the case. While a split-screen perspective is the norm for console multiplayer FPS games, it certainly does not apply to all multiplayer console games. For example, games of the fighting genre and most sports games (with a few exceptions such as golf, which involves taking turns) show both/all players’ avatars on the screen in the same place at the same time, forgoing the need for the split-screen. Furthermore, all game consoles that have come out since 1999 with the exception of the As to the use of speech in multiplayer games, many systems now come with built-in voice communication, or use third-party programs to achieve this. Examples of this include Microsoft’s Xbox Live, which allows users to speak into headsets to other people in their game, Half-Life’s built-in button-activated voice-chat, and Ventrilo, a free program that allows users to do the same. Everyone who plays multiplayer online games that use teamwork (which is most games) at all competitively uses some form of voice chat to collaborate with their teammates. While this is not quite the same as just pointing to something on a tabletop, it is far more versatile. The biggest problem I saw with the tabletop system is the lack of possibilities it provides in terms of games able to be played. Though the researchers attempted to demonstrate the “variety” of genres one could play on their system, both games they ported had a bird-eye perspective and involved management of many things at once on a map (be it an army base and its soldiers, or people and their furniture). I fail to see how this system would work with any game that used a first person perspective (FPS, racing, many Role-Playing games) or even a third-person perspective focusing solely on controlling one avatar (fighting games, sports games, many other RPGs). Even if it were possible, controlling an FPS through a table would involve standing over the table with a finger constantly pointing somewhere, which would be far more tedious and tiring than the traditional method. This eliminates nearly all game genres, other than Real-Time Strategy (RTS), such as WC3, or other top-down simulations, such as the Sim series of games, and games of global expansion, such as the Civilization series.

The tabletop gaming system is a novel idea overall and may be fun to use, but would require games to be made specifically for it, and that is not likely to happen considering how competitive the game market is. I believe it would be best to play table-top games on a table (and there are plenty of table-top games on the market) and leave video games to their own realm.

The Effect of Latency on RTS Gaming

2007-02-14T14:54:00.000-08:00

http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/970000/963901/p3-sheldon.pdf?key1=963901&key2=9663941711&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE,&CFID=14398107&CFTOKEN=29806142

This paper is a description of a study done by 5 Worcester Polytechnic Institute students regarding latency (lag) in Warcraft III. These students split WC3 into three basic categories (building, exploration, combat) and tested the effects of lag on each of these using simple maps they custom-built for the experiment. They concluded that even at extremely high latencies (500ms-1000ms) combat and building were almost unaffected, and only exploration became much harder. The system by which they judged how much lag affected the game was rather vague: it compared different users playing together and took averages of game scores with different levels of lag. As far as I could tell, there was not a standard setup for who was the “host” player (no latency) and who was the “lagger,” and there was no compensation for player skill (or lack thereof).

I saw a number of problems with this study, which, perhaps, were more apparent to me as a player than would be to someone looking at the study through a strictly scientific approach. First and foremost, the researchers assumed that a “divide and conquer” approach was applicable to this study. They took what they perceived to be the three important aspects of the game and studied each one separately. I strongly disagree with this approach. The maps they used (page 6) for the study were ridiculously simplistic, and not at all like real WC3 multiplayer maps. Real maps combine all three aspects and more, and speed matters quite a bit. Even if a player with 500ms latency could compete against the 0 lag player on such a simple map, this is not an indicator that they could compete on a full WC3 map that includes so much more. Furthermore, they made no indication as to the skill level of the participants of their study, or how many different players took part in the study. For example, they even admit that their results for the exploration map are skewed because the player learned the map after a few tests (page 9). Overall, this study does not represent an actual online experience in the least. In fact, pings as high as those tested in this study never even occur in real gameplay because the game would be completely unplayable. I host games on Battle.net (WC3’s gaming server) almost daily and check pings before I start the game. Pings in the 200-275ms range are the high end of the spectrum; most fall far short of that, between 25-100ms. In fact, if a player pings higher than 200ms, other players usually clamor to have that player kicked from the game to prevent lag, even though it mostly affects only the actual player himself. Generally, players with pings over ~120ms will complain about lag being a problem and blame lag for any poor performance. I can personally attest that playing with ~150ms is not very much fun, and anything above 300ms is completely unplayable. Someone playing with a ping like 500ms is unheard of, and I’ve never even seen a ping above ~600ms. As a result, I have a hard time attributing any relevance to this study. Though the authors argue that lag is not a big deal in Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games like WC3, as opposed to FPS games, I strongly disagree with their conclusions. Due to the high level of micromanagement involved in a typical game of WC3 or DotA, the lag restrictions are virtually identical to that of an FPS game like CS.

Background

2007-02-14T14:07:00.000-08:00

To begin, I thought I’d write a brief history of my gaming experiences and the reasons for my interest in interaction in competitive online multiplayer games. My first serious online gaming experience began when I was 14. The game was Turok 2: Seeds of Evil (henceforth, Turok). This was a fairly standard First Person Shooter (FPS), with progressive net coding which allowed people with even very bad internet connections play without much detriment to their experience. However, the game had sub-par graphics for its time, and never had good support from the publisher. As a result, the community was never as large as many of the more popular online games, and dwindled progressively as the game got older. What the community lacked in size, however, it more than made up for in closeness and enthusiasm. This resulted in people staying with the game far longer than would be expected. I played Turok for about 2 years before moving on. My next game of choice was Half-Life: Counter-Strike (CS). This was initially a free, fan-made modification (mod) of Half-Life which quickly surpassed the official game in popularity. Its community was proportionally gigantic, and most times I played, I played with people I had never seen and would never see again in a game. I stopped playing CS about a month before I came to college. Though I still played occasionally, mostly with hall-mates who also played the game, this was limited to one or two times a month, not even close to the amount I played during high school. For the next two years I played mostly console games with my friends, and stayed away from online gaming. However, for my 20^th birthday (September 2005), two of my friends bought me Warcraft III (WC3), so that I could play with them. Since then I have, fairly actively, played another fan-made mod of WC3, called Defense of the Ancients: All-Stars (DotA). This game has a much larger community than did Turok but not nearly as big as that of CS, striking a good balance and rounding out my online gaming experience. Interactions with other players have been different in each game as well, but I will write more on that at a later time.