The Fractured State of Social Media in Gaming

It seems that social media is all the rage these days.  Facebook. Twitter.  Blogging. Linkedin. Four square. And so on. The mass communication field is no different.  As researchers and teachers we are searching for ways to examine and incorporate social media into more traditional mass media.  For video games this presents an especially tough challenge, which is ironic since video games were social media years before Facebook arrived. And yet while console games have carried an online component for the past ten years, in many ways the explosion of other social media has left gaming behind.  There is certainly no need (and this is not the space) to recount how popular Facebook and Twitter are, but before these two social behemoths became popular Xbox Live had friends lists that allowed gamers to interact with their peers from around the world. Yet today the bulk of “social” in online gaming is adversarial multiplayer matches or cooperative games.  Two recent releases that showcase these features, and more, are Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit and Call of Duty Black Ops.

EA's Need For Speed Hot Pursuit

Criterion’s Need For Speed Hot Pursuit (NFSHP) contains a feature called autolog that immediately presents your friends records and accomplishments for a race or challenge you just completed.  In addition, it allows you to jump right into a race so you can attempt to beat your friend’s time. This shameless adaptation of Facebook game score announcements has been hailed as a shot in the arm for the racing genre and arguably so since it encourages racers to compete for the best times even if they cannot race head-to-head.

Black Ops takes a different approach.  When the player enters the multiplayer suite, he/she is treated to a crawler at the bottom of the screen which displays challenges his/her friends have completed or new ranks earned.  I admit those messages are mildly interesting, but they don’t really mean much to me.  Black Ops also contains a file share system much like the one Bungie has been using for Halo games since 2007.  Recent multiplayer matches can be viewed and saved for friends or the entire Black Ops community to see.

These two models work better than say, a web application like dynasty anywhere in NCAA Football 11 because they exist in-game.  And while web extensions like Bungie.com have been quite successful, the ability of gamers to interact with other players or information about those players is certainly more organic when it is contained to game world, first, and then to other, extra-game media.

The problem with console games application of social media is that they are limited and inconsistent across the gaming medium.  Right now, gamers using Xbox Live can watch movies together via Netflix or watch a sporting event together using the ESPN app.  There is also the new video chat via Kinect. And of course gamers can play together in real time across many games in different genres. However, while the concept of playing together is as social as social can get (at least online), the options that exist outside of real-time interaction are extremely sparse.  What the medium needs is a way to generate social interaction outside of the standard multiplayer, co-op, or movie-watching sessions without asking users to create either text-based or out-of-game media. That is the problem with dynasty anywhere: it requires users to sit down and write about their games ala a sports journalists. That brings a limited response because it is so far outside the realm of virtual football as to be foreign to most of the participants.  Game related social media should a) occur inside the game and b) be restricted to the simple creation of media such as film clips, challenges to best friends, and announcements of scores and so on.

Activision's Call of Duty Black Ops

For example, suppose I finish a multiplayer session in Black Ops where I record 25 kills on a certain map.  I could choose to have that match uploaded into my file for my friends to see.  If they log onto Black Ops within, say, 24 hours, they will have an opportunity to play the same match type on the same map to see if they can beat my score.  If they do that, oh, 20 times, they could get a reward (think achievement or trophy).  The objectives could change daily or weekly.  Today it might be kills, but next week you may have call in more helicopter strikes on a certain map than I did.

A second approach could be to create the feel of having friends playing even when they are far from their consoles. Your friends’ play styles could be incorporated into gaming sessions. Black Ops has a game mode called combat training.  In this mode, the player (and friends if desired) fight against computer controlled bots.  This is nothing new of course though Black Ops developer Treyarch did add the nice touch of allowing the bots to display names from the gamer’s friends list. Shooting bots “disguised” as your friends is a nice middle ground between plain vanilla bots and actually having your friends in the match.  It makes things more personal.

However if the game took information from those friends such as favorite weapon, kill-to-death ratio, and accuracy (that information is already recorded and displayed elsewhere in the game) and incorporated those stats into bot play, it adds another dimension to the game play.  Now, not only is my success important to me, but it also factors into how well my friends do when they play that particular mode. If the idea of helping your neighbor (in this case fellow gamer) is not the epitome of community and social, I don’t know what is.  This next step in social gaming seems, at least to me, like a natural evolution of the shared gaming experience.  After all, video games are a unique medium and that should be reflected in how gamers interact with each other.

Holiday Gaming 2010

Half Life 2 is on the top of my holiday gaming list.

Once I finish grading final papers and exams, I plan to sit down for a few weeks of hard-core gaming.  One of the perks of teaching in academia is the solid month off between the fall and spring semesters.  Oh the gaming!  Of course, I have some ulterior motives (read: research) in mind for some of these games. On the top of that list is The Orange Box, but I also plan to start (and complete) Splinter Cell Conviction, Halo Reach, and Call of Duty Black Ops.

Valve’s The Orange Box contains one of the finest first-person-shooters ever crafted in Half Life 2.  I simply loved it the first time through and have been waiting to play it again.  While the games characters, especially Eli and Alyx Vance, shine I also want to more fully explore the various settings and the pace of narrative. To me, HL2 is a game that does more with less.  Yes, the game engine is old, but it still manages to create wonderful environments and mood.

I'm determined to actually finish a Splinter Cell game.

Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell Conviction presents a different challenge.  I have never finished a Splinter Cell game, though I really enjoyed Splinter Cell Chaos Theory on the original xbox.  I can’t seem to get the hang of stealth games, no matter how I try.  At least Conviction offers a co-op suite as well and a friend has offered to go through it with me. I would rather play co-op than adversarial multiplayer anyhow.

Similarly, Halo Reach also has a co-op mode called Firefight where you and some buddies (or strangers even) team up to fight off waves of alien bad guys.  This is where co-op is at its best.  You either work or “perish” together. Unlike adversarial multiplayer where people don’t really communicate, co-op modes like Firefight (and Horde mode from Gears of War 2) force players to talk to each other in order to survive and advance to the next round.

My goal for Call of Duty Black Ops is simple: finish the campaign.  I spend most of my time in the game playing team death match or combat training (both online). I think I’ve been a little lax regarding the single-player campaign since I have played a Call of Duty game every year since ’05. It’s gotten a bit old now.

My hope is that aside from having a lot of fun, I will gain some insight or epiphany that will, in turn, produce some good blogs (and perhaps a conference paper).

Kobe Bryant and Black Ops: Perceptions About Video Games

Activision: There is a soldier in all of us.

I’ve been playing and studying video games long enough to know that a major release like Call of Duty Black Ops will cause controversy.  However sometimes I am surprised as to the path it takes. The hot issue this time is the advertisement where Kobe Bryant and Jimmie Kimmel are among dozens of people participating in a live action multiplayer match.  I admit I really didn’t think it was that big of a deal until I saw my old professor, Dr. Robert Thompson of Syracuse University, on ESPN’s Outside the Lines (OTL).  Well technically I saw it over Xbox Live’s ESPN channel (ironic, I know).

So Prof. Thompson and four other gentlemen whose names escape me were having a rather vigorous debate about Byrant and the messages his participation sends.  While Bryant’s team, the Los Angeles Lakers, and the NBA have been silent on the issue, there must be parties or groups who feel that Bryant should represent more wholesome entertainment. Thompson correctly pointed out there is, though there shouldn’t be, distinction between actors in a game and those in film.  If Bryant is to be condemned for his involvement in Black Ops, then why not condemn actors for participating in violent films?  However I will take it further: if Bryant were to play the part of a villain in a summer action movie would there be controversy?  Would there be such a discussion if Bryant were to take on Bruce Willis in the next Die Hard movie?  The implication here is that video games, especially the more violent ones, are not as acceptable as other media such as television and film.

In fact, video games reside at the lower end of popular culture.  Yes, we know that in the United States, the gaming industry out-grosses the domestic box office.  But if anything, that speaks to how popular gaming is and that sometimes leads to the argument that because games have broad appeal, they have little cultural value.  When compared to books, film, radio, and television video games cannot match the cultural appeal mainly because this newer medium is still viewed as “games.” As such, games sit on the lowest rung of the cultural ladder, somewhere between monster truck racing, Jerry Springer, and pro wrestling.  The message here is: “it’s okay to sit and watch violence in the movies, but it’s wrong to pick up a controller and kill someone.”

Now unless I am missing something, nobody actually dies in a movie.  It’s fiction.  We say characters die, but the actors who portray these people are very much alive.  Likewise, nobody dies in games.  It’s fiction, however interactive it may be.  Yet one type of violence is more acceptable than the other.

So while the gamer in me may be offended that such a debate even takes place, the researcher in me continues to be fascinated by the struggle of this medium to reach a higher level of acceptability in mass culture.  Over the past three years, I have watched debates swirl around Mass Effect, Grand Theft Auto IV, Six Days in Fallujah, Medal of Honor, and now Black Ops. In this last case, the message from the commercial was supposed to be that Kobe Bryant is just like you and me: he loves hopping into a MP just like the next gamer.  However the lasting message might end up being that Bryant risked tarnishing his image by signaling that he approves of violent games and that would be a sad commentary indeed.