"I'm Just Here to Play Games": Social Dynamics and Sociality in an Online

Session: Social Activity in Games February 11-15, 2012, Seattle, WA, USA “I’m Just Here to Play Games:” Social Dynamics and Sociability in an Online Game Site Gregor McEwan1, Carl Gutwin1, Regan L. Mandryk1, Lennart Nacke2 1Department of Computer Science, 2Faculty of Business and IT, University of Saskatchewan University of Ontario Institute of Technology 110 Science Place, Saskatoon, SK, S7N 5C9 2000 Simcoe St N, Oshawa, ON L1H 7K4 {first.lastname}@usask.ca [email protected] ABSTRACT play regularly with particular partners, form new friendships, There are many web sites that allow people to play board or or associate with subgroups). card games against other human players. These sites offer tools and opportunities for social interaction, but little is Little is known, however, about social behaviour of people known about how people really interact on these sites. To on these game sites. Previous work in CSCW has looked at learn more about social dynamics on game sites, we analysed other online communities (e.g., [3,6,15]), but game sites are a three months of log files from a large site to explore three different type of gathering place than discussion forums, themes: permanence (whether people formed a long-term multi-user dungeons (MUDs), massively multiplayer online association with the site); social interaction (in terms of games (MMOGs) like World of Warcraft, or social virtual shared activity and verbal communication); and formation of worlds (VWs) such as There. Game sites do not provide a ties (whether people made contacts with others). Our persistent world (as with MUDs or MMOGs), but instead are analyses showed that while the site seems very social when based on playing individual short-duration games. In we consider gameplay, the population was highly transient, addition, interaction in parlor games is not driven by verbal and people talked very little. To explain these behaviours, we communication, as it is in MUDs or social VWs (although suggest that games and game-based activity should be games are certainly used as a setting for conversation in the considered as a legitimate form of human interaction. Our real world). Understanding social dynamics in these kinds of analysis provides new information and new ways of thinking online environments is important for designers to understand about how game environments can be designed to support their user group and to inform decisions about providing many kinds of sociability. social features in a site’s interface. Author Keywords To find out more about social behaviour among users of Games, game sites, virtual social groups, sociability. online game sites, we carried out an analysis of one large and popular site called PlayOK (www.playok.com). The site ACM Classification Keywords administrators provided us with logs detailing player activity H5.3. [Information interfaces and presentation]: CSCW and communication over a three-month period (totaling more General Terms than 400 million events); we also frequented the site, Human Factors; Design; Measurement. observed gameplay on a regular basis, and gathered responses from an on-line survey of 124 PlayOK players. INTRODUCTION Our primary analysis involved the activity logs, employing The world-wide web has many game spaces where people the ‘social accounting’ techniques that have been used in meet to play parlor games (e.g. board or card games). Many previous work [4,8]; observations and survey data were used of these sites are large and heavily used—for example, sites to help interpret and fill out the log analyses. such as Yahoo Games, Pogo, and PlayOK host thousands of games at a time, and often have tens of thousands of players Our study explored three themes that are frequently online at once. These large gathering places provide many considered in work about online communities. These are: opportunities for people to interact socially with others, both permanence, the idea that social groups benefit when people through shared activities and through verbal (usually chat- are long-term residents of a place (virtual or real) [2]; social based) communication. The sites’ persistence also provides interaction, which has been primarily considered in terms of opportunities for longer-term connections (e.g., people may verbal communication, but which can also include shared activity [7]; and forming ties, in which people meet others, Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for associate, and make lasting connections (whether strong or personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are weak) [7]. not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, Our analyses show that PlayOK is quite different in terms of or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior social behaviour depending on the questions being asked. specific permission and/or a fee. When considering questions relating to playing games, CSCW’12, February 11–15, 2012, Seattle, Washington, USA. Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1086-4/12/02...$10.00. people appear to be very social – for example, there are more than three million active members and more than 670,000 549 Session: Social Activity in Games February 11-15, 2012, Seattle, WA, USA games played per day; many people (more than 10,000) play Virtual Communities several games per day (more than 20), and people play much Research into real-world, place-based communities more frequently with a small group of opponents (on distinguishes between neighbourhoods and communities, average, people play more than half of their games with only similar to the distinction between space and place in the ten people). CSCW literature [10]. Communities are neighbourhoods that have a sense of community. A similar distinction can be made In other analyses, PlayOK seems like a much less social in the online world between virtual neighbourhoods and place. Overall, people talk very little during games (72% of communities [2]. Considering whether a virtual community games have no chat messages, and 89% have three or fewer), is a community according to classic definitions (e.g., Park’s and there is even less conversation outside of the games. 1936 definition [18]) is beyond the scope of our paper, so we Many interactions on PlayOK appear to be highly refer to previous analyses of this issue, such as those by impersonal, with many one-time-only games; in addition, the Driskell and Lyon [7] or Wellman and Gulia [22]. interface automates much of the articulation work of the games, allowing people to play with no conversation. Last, In social psychology research a widely accepted definition of the player population of PlayOK is highly transient – most a real world sense of community is McMillan and Chavis’s people stay for only a few days, and only a small proportion [14], which is composed of feelings of membership, feelings of users stay active for more than a few months. of influence, integration and fulfillment of needs, and shared emotional connection. Blanchard and Markus [2] have Although there are some exceptions to these findings (one extended this work into the online world to define a virtual person even met her future husband on PlayOK), the overall sense of community, which is composed of exchanging picture is one of a population whose only real contact with support, creating identities and making identifications, and one another is through the games themselves. This poses a production of trust. question that has not been widely considered previously in CSCW – how can an online gathering place survive for so However, a characteristic of these community analyses is that long, and be so popular, with so few of the characteristics they are dependent on measuring the internal state of that are seen as vital to the health of a community? members through psychological measures (i.e., questionnaires) and/or content analysis of communication This question leads us to consider the role of games as a within the community. In contrast, we investigate a virtual social interaction mechanism. Our analyses suggest three community via large-scale log analyses. Our approach is ways in which games are interesting as social interaction, closer to the archaeological style advocated by Jones [12], or ideas that can help to explain how sites such as PlayOK the social metrics used by Ducheneaut et al. [8]. We explore succeed. First, play-based shared activity can be considered sociality in the game site through simple cultural artifacts, as a legitimate form of human interaction, where the social such as counts of games and chat messages. elements of the experience arise almost entirely from the game activity rather than from verbal communication. Games as Virtual Meeting Spaces Second, the impersonal interactions that seem common in The game research literature has examples of different types game sites (and that are facilitated by the games themselves) of online games being used as virtual meeting spaces. are still social connections that fill particular human needs, Initial studies of social interaction in MUDs followed shortly and that have parallels in a variety of real-world settings. after the first MUD was developed in 1979 (see [6] for a brief Third, the ‘unconnected interactions’ of game sites like history of MUDs and CSCW studies of MUDs). Although PlayOK are an opportunity and setting for people to engage many studies of MUD-based interaction were based on in a pure kind of sociability, a surface-level but still- ‘social MUDs’, a study of a ‘combat MUD’ – where the important part of human social engagement. game was the primary focus – showed that players acted Although our investigation is preliminary, it seems clear that together to play the game, but had limited social involvement the kinds of interactions seen in PlayOK have as many with one another [15].

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