MULTIPLAYER VIDEO GAME-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION: A QUALITATIVE STUDY BY MARGARET E MATTOX A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS Communication May 2019 Winston-Salem, North Carolina Approved By: Ananda Mitra, PhD, Advisor Steve Giles, PhD, Chair Paul Pauca, PhD ACKNOWLEDGMENTS “If we take everything game developers have learned about optimizing human experience and organizing collaborative communities and apply it to real life, I foresee games that make us wake up in the morning and feel thrilled to start our day. I foresee games that reduce our stress at work and dramatically increase our career satisfaction. I foresee games that fix our educational systems. I foresee games that threat depression, obesity, anxiety, and attention deficit disorder. I foresee games that help the elderly feel engaged and socially connected. I foresee games that raise rates of democratic participation. I foresee games that raise rates of democratic participation. I foresee games that raise rates of democratic participation I foresee games that tackle global -scale problems like climate change and poverty. In short, I foresee games that augment our most essential human capabilities to be happy, resilient, creative—and empower us to change the world in meaningful ways.” Jane McGonigal, 2010 Thank you, Dashiell and Cora, for inspiring this idea and making every page of research so worth it, even the dusty ones with words that clacked together like dentures that were too big. My Pistol Petey, my Darlin’ Dash, I love you with all my heart. My sweet, bright, beautiful babies, thank you for being the phenom that lights up my world every. single. day. Thank you for your patience while I wrote all night and read all day. You have been helpful, inspirational, patient, kind. I love you Google plex! Thank you, Mom and Dad, for co-parenting with me, I couldn’t have done this without you! Thank you for doing pick up and drop offs more often than I have this month. Thank you for keeping the kids so that I could write all night. Thank you, Mom, for helping me edit…and edit…and edit. I know, I never met a comma that I didn’t want to bring along for the trip. Also, thank you both for setting the bar so high. Because of you, I knew that it would take more than a 200-year-old tree, a destroyed house, 7 moving vans, illness and a ghost. I knew I was made of the same soil that birthed Irene, Dwight, Wiley, and Elaine. And thank you Matt and Barbara, for all the skiing and hiking, and plays and stories in the mountains. Now I have time to learn to play that bass! Thank you Paul Pauca for all of your help. You are not even part of my department, yet you answered emails at night and checked on me in the morning as I wrote and wrote and wrote. You are truly an amazing human being! Thank you Ananda, for being so enthusiastic about my idea, connecting me with Ravin, and for believing in my research. Thank you Steve for bringing me in on the Sugar Sweetened Beverage campaign and for giving me the opportunity to prove myself. Thank you, Sheila White, for understanding when I spazzed out in my sleepy state and did something funky to my charts and page numbers, and for being so encouraging and supportive, and for giving me the time to go to Amity’s mother’s memorial, and to spill this out in one big thank you hiccup. Thank you. Thank you Hu Womack for turning me onto Jane McGonigal’s research and for helping me find news way to dig out articles on this emerging research topic. Thank you Ray Celeste, for your wizardry with charts and formats and song tunes and life – I wish I could make this sentence burst into an Ethel Merman song and tap dance ii across the page. You are the absolute sun in the sky every week at school. And thank you, Chris Miller, for the miles of smiles. Thank you, Marquis, for not making me feel like I’m older than your Mom. Thank you, Jack and Pablo, for being so damn interesting to listen to in class, and you too - Ray Celeste, Chole, Caitlyn, Natalie. Thank you, Natalie/Big ole’ brain, Chloe/Big ole’ cat, Caitlyn/Big ole’ attitude – you go get it mama, all of it. The two years have ended, and I never saw you dance or got that dance lesson, I will have to track you down wherever you land. Thank you Sarah (hey peanut, you’re precious), Amber, Annie, Candice, Kristen, Kaitlyn, and Shelby. Thank you. My life is much benefited because you beautiful ladies exist. Well, you - Ray Celeste, Caitlyn, and Natalie - you three ain’t ladies, you’re dames and broads. Speaking of dames, thank you Mary Dalton - I think we need to go drink some top-shelf silver Tequila and tell stories. Thank you Marina Krcmar, for supporting this when it was a too long, unwieldy paper, (that turned into piles of articles snaking around the entire first floor of my house and ending in a bloated 200-page rough draft) and for your singular example of badassness. Thank you, Ron, for having my back, and having really snazzy fashion sense, and having – I’ve heard rumors – really great Zumba moves. And Molly, for inspiring me to write another paper out of this tome, and also for your cat burglar black on black – you always look like you’ve just sashayed in from a small private plane somewhere after doing some espionage. Thank you Jen, for entrusting me with your class. I loved teaching so much. Even when things were frustrating and exhausting, I still loved it. And for the way that your classes hummed along on some in- phase, psychic wavelength and every week seemed to provide me with the exact thing that I needed to hear in order to keep putting one foot in front of the other. And Becca, for those times I was entrusted to dodge the spitballs and teach your rowdy class, and for so many brain tickling articles. And speaking of brain tickling, thank you Hyde for being our very own Oliver Sacks. Thank you Michael Hazen for loaning me thesis examples. And Allan, for all of those amazing parties at your house. And Glacier, for sharing your water bowl and tennis balls with Beatrice. And Jarrod, for really being one of the perennial good guys. Thank you Candice, for keeping up with my cups, phone, car keys, paper jams, 5 millionth copy of an article. For giving me tissues and a pat on the back, for watching my kids, my dog, my computer - you really are the roots that hold up the department’s tree. Thank you Llewellyn for offering to proofread 160 pages, and helping me not die of embarrassment after that massager with coffee stain comment that …um…yeah...that day...good grief. Thank you Cagney, for traipsing around from one end of the Triad to the other with me, and for picking up that one extra shot. Thank you Stuart (1.0) and Bianca. Stuart, you were there at the beginning of a road that led me here. It began when we were watching the sun creep out of bed then explode into another dawn, not while wandering through Europe, but back in the tiny apartment under the bougainvillea with the owl in the avocado tree. The curved door loft, where once the accompanist for the opera singer used to stay and drive the red hills and Keystone Cop rollercoaster streets of Echo Park, when Hollywood was an orange orchard and the studios and movie palaces stood downtown, not in humbled, tattered, graffitied beauty, but with regal promise. Yes, back then, those sunrises were the beginning of meeting that tickle that is the work that drives you through the night and into the day, bypassing sleep, toward a different sort of adventure, one that winds through the center of you and eventually leads that thing, that piece, that thought, that work, out to other people. iii And thank you Bianca, for New Orleans, and that phone call on the edge of the lake when all my stitches were loose and floating in last summer’s water when you sent me needle and thread through binary code, you beautiful hurricane of a Mazzamurello fairy. This is my year for Burning Man. Thank you. Yes, I’ve seen the calls from both of you. It’s just that I’ve spent...well...the last two years really, paddling.... with my house split open and resting on a broken broomstick, next to dirty stockings that peered out from the foundation, not a ruby slipper in sight. And the last two months I’ve had to paddle more furiously, in depths over my head, the tip of my nose just above water, under a thunderous waterfall. I will call back, I swear. Kyle, I can hear you. You shut your mouth; I’ll call you too. Thank you Stewart (2.0) for feeding me when I forgot to eat, for bringing me caffeine, for packing and unpacking and packing and unpacking and packing and unpacking (add another 6) with me, helping with the babies, and the festival. And for your seminal example of being a smooth criminal. And Lyndon, you’re a saint, I think you really might be.