Japan, as usual, sent me into a consumer frenzy (not such a good thing on a grad student budget). Among the items I picked up was a Neo Fami:

The Neo Fami is a game console capable of playing old Nintendo Famicom games. (The Famicom was later released in the U.S. as the Nintendo Entertainment System.) Of course I also picked up a bunch of used games in Akihabara:

(Clockwise from top left: Excitebike, Donkey Kong, Galaga, BurgerTime, Super Mario Bros., and Gradius.)

The result: video game nostalgia nirvana. I also picked up the 25th anniversary edition of Space Invaders for my Playstation 2 to keep the early 80s vibe going…

A note on the blog genre: I find it somewhat difficult to write longer, more structured essays in blog form. The rules of blogging substance and form seem to involve short, punchy observations. So I apologize for the somewhat rambling nature of the following.

Last summer I played quite a bit of Dark Age of Camelot, a MMPORG based on the King Arthur legends, Viking mythology, and Celtic lore. I enjoyed it quite a bit, mostly because I was able to play with a friend who knew the game well. As I read the readings for this week, I tried to reflect on how I could use them to analyze my DAoC experience.

Cultural Analysis

The sort of cultural analysis exemplified by Notes on the Balinese Cockfight is very relevant to games like DAoC. I saw a number of parallels to online gaming.

First, the importance of the fair referee. Geertz points out that the Balinese trust their umpires completely and cede them total authority. Online gamers have no choice but to trust their unseen “umpires” (the game administrators), and in those cases where trust is lost it can be devastating to the game community. See the discussion of a well-publicized case of arbitrary and unfair adminsitrative decisions in Everquest, “I Saw God and I Killed It.”

Geertz describes the cockfight using Goffman’s concept of the “focused gathering,” characterized by a flucuating group of people engrossed in a common flow of discrete activities. This concept is also quite appropriate for describing the DAoC “party,” a group of several players joined together to hunt monsters. Hunting is best done in groups so that more difficult monsters can be taken on, yielding more experience points and greater treasure. Parties can last for tens of hours, even though their membership may change quite a bit over time as people sign off and sign on. Killing mosters, like cockfighting, is a discrete activity. The party finds some acceptable monsters (not too easy and not too difficult), there is planning, there is combat, there is the result–utter triumph or utter defeat–and there is the gathering of treasure or the resurrection of the dead. Unlike in cockfighting, however, events are usually rehashed afterward. More on that later, when I get to the dramaturgical aspects of DAoC. First, more observations of the cultural values and ideologies of DAoC.

Like cockfights, MMPORGs are intimately linked with the wider market economy. Like for most other online games, DAoC items and accounts are auctioned off on Ebay, giving the in-game economy an explicit link to the “real” economy. Edward Castronova has studied this phenomenon extensively. But even without that explicit link the influence of capitalist society on DAoC gameplay is clear. Every settlement from small encampments to large cities has a marketplace (sometimes several). Much of the game revolves around killing monsters to obtain treasure in order to buy weapons and armor so as to kill stronger monsters to obtain treasure… The “progress” of levelling (as this process is called) can be compared to the “progress” of economic acension in actual life. In non-fantasy games like There the link is even clearer, as characters work to obtain the same brand-name goods as in real life.

Finally, Geertz’ observation that

[T]he cockfight renders ordinary, everyday experience comprehensible by presenting it in terms of acts and objects which have had their practical consequences removed and been reduced (or, if you prefer, raised) to the level of sheer appearances, where their meaning can be more powerfully articulated and more exactly perceived.

explains quite a bit about why online games are so appealing. There is a clarity of purpose in these games lacking in real life, and the fact that there are no serious consequences for actions makes these worlds far more forgiving than the real world. Achieving level 50 in DAoC has no effect on one’s social or economic status, but it satisfies the same urges for success that drive us in real life. It is both “play as progress” and “play as power.”

As for the rhetorics of gender in DAoC, I’ll just point out that my friend advised me to play as a female character so that male characters would give me expensive weapons and armor as gifts. He was right: I got loot despite the fact that my Valkyn could hardly be described as feminine…

On to dramaturgy. Players in DAoC are obviously performing for one another; on some servers any sort of “breaking character” (like naming your character something not suitably medieval, using modern terminology, or talking about the real world) is taboo. Even more interestingly, players will log their games or record screenshots and videos of important events in order to document them. As someone (I can’t remember who) pointed out, these movies are similar in form to machinima but opposite in intent: rather than using game software to realize fictional narratives, these players are making documentaries, recording actual events that “happened” to them.

Information Theory & Game Theory

Taking an information theoretical or game (in the microeconomic sense) theoretical view might be interesting for game designers, but it is less interesting for analysis from a player’s perspective. Salen and Zimmerman touch on most of the relevant points: the amount of uncertainty and information in the DAoC world is very great, given the huge space of possibilties in which players can wander. The result is a sense of freedom. However, the designers have been careful to maintain a certain predictablity to the outcomes of one’s actions, particularly in battle, to keep players from feeling lost in chaos.

DAoC also has the typical “huge worlds to explore, complex economies of items, and hidden fighting moves” of which Salen and Zimmerman write. Players have imperfect information in regard to most aspects of the game, like player and monster levels (which are indicated by the color of the name labels–but since this is relative to your level, you cannot necessarily know how strong a given monster is relative to your stronger or weaker party member with asking that member). Most fundamentally, the player’s information is limited by physical distances in the game: you can only see what’s around you (though you can communicate at a distance with friends).

Genre Analysis

This is the least interesting and useful method of analysis, at least in respect to DAoC. I could ramble on about how DAoC has inherited some of the genre conventions of IRC and its instant messaging successors, but I think I’m going to call it a night…

Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre is crucial reading for anyone interested in computer-human interfaces. That said, I definitely disagree with a lot of what she has to say.

Laurel often brings up the problem of “holes in the mimetic context,” those places where the metaphor or abstraction being employed in the interface breaks down. This is a serious problem with metaphorical interfaces or indeed any kind of computational abstraction. (See Joel Spolsky’s article on leaky abstractions for a discussion of the problem in a computer programming context.) Laurel tantalizingly mentions Ted Nelson’s views on alternatives to metaphorical UI design, but soon gets back to the world of metaphor. She seems to believe that the answer to the problem of leaky abstractions is to design abstractions that don’t leak. Unfortunately, this isn’t possible. You will always reach a point where you’ve pushed an abstraction to its limit, and if you don’t have some understanding of what underlies it, you will be lost and confused.

Laurel’s ideas apply better to the world of games, although the idea that games have narrative structure like theatre is pretty controversial. Even limiting the scope of the discussion to massive multipleplayer online simulations like There and Second Life, which seem to be intended as venues for communication rather than as games, it is questionable whether these immersive experiences are really good interfaces (for enabling communication). As David Kushner writes in the MIT Technology Review:

There will always be people who prefer the ease of a quick e-mail or instant message to manipulating an avatar. Often you don’t want to hang out; you just want to tell someone to meet you for lunch at noon.

I enjoy online games for

• the social gaming experience defined by the rules of play
• the fact that I can play with friends
• the aesthetic pleasure of the graphics

I don’t interact with MMPORGs like I would with a theatre production or a film. And I certainly wouldn’t want to interact with Emacs or Thunderbird the way I interact with MMPORGs.

danah says:

When you are focused on building social networks just to build them, you make very different design decisions than when you are trying to design a tool the utilizes social networks as a concept employed to solve a task problem.

This is the point I was trying to make about LOAF: it utilizes existing networks to (attempt to) solve the problem of spam, rather than “building” a network just for the hell of it ala Friendster, Orkut, etc.

On the other hand, I think danah’s blanket condemnation of the solution-seeking approach to innovation (inventing something first, then looking for solutions it can provide) is a bit off. It would be ideal if we could always work from problems to solutions, but for whatever reasons, humans don’t seem to innovate well that way. The Economist has an interesting article about this. A study of where innovative ideas come from and how their origins determined the success of the ensuing invention showed that solution-seeking was a more successful strategy than need-spotting (actively looking for answers to known problems). It seems that we make hammers and look for nails because it’s a strategy that has proven successful.

On the other hand, the study showed that most successful innovations result from serendipitous random events. This is interesting, and something that I think ties back to the idea of what social networking tools might be good for: increasing the probability of serendipitous encounters with potentially significant consequences. Imagine a tool which didn’t present you with social conundrums caused by people trying to actively utilize the network but promised to passively create opportunities for finding out that you’re sitting in a cafe with a good friend’s friend, halfway around the world from home. Sounds pretty good to me.

A foolish robot alerted me to LOAF, which lets you use your social network as articulated through your email patterns to avoid spam. This is way social networking software needs to go: built into existing communication channels to serve a specific purpose, rather than just another web site.

昨日、日本に帰りました。疲れちゃった。吉野家の豚丼食べて、お風呂入って、すぐ寝た。

(Yesterday, I returned to Japan. I was exhausted. I ate a pork bowl at Yoshinoya, went to the public bath, and immediately fell asleep.)

Today I saw my nephews, Gakuhi and Gouki:

Well, kind of. T-Mobile is giving out cards good for one free day of WiFi through their hotspot system. I picked up a few, and after giving my DNA checksum to T-Mobile was on.

The bad news: for some reason sending mail through the SIMS authenicated SMTP server doesn’t work. Not sure if this a T-Mobile issue or a SIMS issue. Next time I’ll probably just stick to my 115Kbps Bluetooth dialup. It’s slow but at least I don’t have to fill out forms.

So the Milgram-powered meme of “six degrees of separation” has been thriving, despite the fact that it seems to be not true. Interesting. But what I found most interesting about Kleinfield’s debunking of the myth was her initial purpose in investigating it: to establish that sociology is not just “the systematic study of what you already know.” She was looking for counter-intuitive results found by sociologists, and Milgram’s study seemed like a good candidate. It turned out not to be… which leads me to wonder, are there any counter-intuitive results in sociology? Although I appreciate the value of investigating social matters systematically, I have to confess that while reading the literature I sometimes get the feeling that the social scientist has no clothes.

This survey article on studying social networks is pretty good. It answers a lot of the questions I raised earlier, especially regarding ego-centered vs. whole networks and the different approaches to partitioning social networks.

I liked Granovetter’s paper on “The Strength of Weak Ties” quite a bit. The concept of information diffusion gave his investigations of social networks the clarity I felt was lacking in the questions I was complaining about earlier. While information diffusion is certainly not the only perspective from which you might want to look at social networks, it is very useful for the kinds of problems Granovetter seems to be concerned with (labor markets, neighborhood coalitions, etc).

While Granovetter argues convincingly for his hypothesis that information diffuses primarily through weak ties in social networks, I found some of his starting assumptions problematic.

Granovetter defines stronger ties as ones that involve larger time commitments. Personal experience tells me that this is not the case. My family ties are stronger than my professional ties, despite the fact that I spend far more time with my co-workers than my family. Among my friends, there seems to be little correlation between time spent together and tie strength: I have very strong friends whom I see once a year or so, and “weaker” friends whom I see quite often.

Granovetter’s theory that network overlap correlates with tie strength also conflicts with the intuition that strong ties are created by shared experiences. For example, two travellers who meet overseas may form a strong bond based on their shared experiences in exotic lands. This bond may last a lifetime despite the fact that the two travellers live in different places and share no mutual friends. These kinds of stories seem to be fairly common among soldiers and expatriates.

In general, however, Granovetter’s theory coincides with my personal experience. I’ve found my most satisfying and enjoyable jobs through weak ties. And I generally find that useful information comes from people outside my immediate social group. For example, I rarely receive interesting information from my fellow SIMS students. This isn’t a reflection on them, but is a consequence of the fact that we all have many common interests, and thus I’ve usually already heard about the things I hear from them.

My class on Analysis of Information Organizations is focusing on the topic of social networks. The instructors have asked us to answer the following questions:

• What are the purposes of your various social networks?
• What are the shapes of your social networks: how large are they? How do they combine face-to-face and online contacts? How old are they? What are their functions?
• Are you going to use your social networks to get a job? Find a partner?
• How, and when, do you use your social networks?
• Propose a typology of the functions, origin and duration, and size and density of social networks, based upon your own experience.

I have some serious problems with these questions. Let’s take them one by one.

What are the purposes of your various social networks? This question assumes that one can unproblematically enumerate one’s “various social networks.” My first inclination is to point out that there is really only one social network in the world (assuming that there aren’t any tribes cut off from all other civilization yet to be found). Which part of the network is “mine?” Of the part which is mine, how would I (and why would I) divide it into sub-parts? And does it make sense to ask what the the “purposes” of these parts would be? What is the “purpose” of a family, or a group of friends?

What are the shapes of your social networks: how large are they? How old are they? Again, we’re brushing a slew of more fundamental questions under the rug here. But let’s assume that I’ve come up with some way to divide the people I know into groups. Some of these groups may be small, some may be large. But measuring size in that way seems shortsighted; if one of these groups has 40 people, each of whom know only a couple of people other than me, is that part of my network larger or smaller than another part consisting of 3 people who each know 100 people other than me? Measuring age is similarly problematic: if I recently met a friend of my parents, is the part of my social network comprised of the four of us old or new?

How do they combine face-to-face and online contacts? I rarely consider anyone whom I haven’t met face-to-face to be in my social network. But having moved locales and jobs frequently in my life, I take advantage of online tools (primarily email) to keep in touch with people I can’t easily see face-to-face. I use online tools to maintain links, and only rarely for making them.

What are their functions? Back to “purposes” of social networks again. Why this focus on teleological explanation?

Are you going to use your social networks to get a job? Find a partner? Well, yes. I’ve used personal contacts to find jobs in the past and will no doubt continue to do so in the future. And I met my wife through personal contacts, not through a dating service. Having built on-line recruiting software and seen the workings of recruiting companies first-hand, I have no desire to commoditize myself through those kinds of formal systems. It’s kind of amusing that many people who would sooner die than sign up for Match.com have no problem marketing themselves on Monster. The two systems are more similar than different.

How, and when, do you use your social networks? This question basically boils down to “How, and when, do you exchange information with the people you know?” “How” is pretty straightforward: in person, via email, on the phone, and on IRC. “When” is more difficult:

• when I want to gather socially
• when I want to kill time
• when I want to give people information they might find useful
• when I want to learn something
• when I need help
• when I want someone to remember me
• when I feel a duty to

Propose a typology of the functions, origin and duration, and size and density of social networks, based upon your own experience. Having read thus far you can probably guess how I feel about this question. I don’t think it makes sense to classify things without a clear statement of why we are classifying them. For example, the way we classify books will depend strongly on why we are doing the classifying. If am a researcher, I am concerned primarily with things like subject and author. If I am a collector, attributes like “signed” and “first edition” become salient. If I am a manufacturer of recycled paper I may have an entirely different classification system. Any typology of social networks will necessarily emphasize some things and gloss over others. I can’t specify concepts to emphasize unless I know why I’m doing it.