The Digital Agora

Time for the third, and at the same time last one of the abstracts. Finally something closer to my own field and interests, with Valentina Rao discussing playfulness in her article

Facebook Applications and Playful Mood: the Construction of Facebook as a “Third Place”

Rao frames the focus of her paper in an interesting way. She proposes an interpretative framework
for a better understanding of Facebook Applications and similar products and practices in social networks, arguing there are similarities between social networks and the socialization areas defined as “third places”. She also aims at defining the status of Facebook Applications in relation to the various definitions of game and play.

The writer argues that novel cultural practices are establishing play as a central cultural value rather than an alternative to or escape from everyday reality. I agree with her; play and games are characteristic to the human nature [1], and when one doesn’t have to worry about staying alive anymore, more room is left for playfulness and creativity, and mental practices are given more value than before. Another interesting point she brings out is the diffusion of play in conventionally serious settings, the blurring of the distinction between everyday reality and play space, and the increasing importance of “playfulness” or “playful mood” in domains other than game design. The question that arises is: is this the prelude to a new era or are humans simply doing what is natural to them?

Games?

Rao argues that when Facebook Applications are complex enough to fulfill the definition of games, they usually are casual games. At a closer look, most are even more simplified. The actual gameplay is often substituted by a text offering a narration of the events and their outcome, and this narrative quality questions the essence of Facebook Applications as games; they do not allow the player to perform actions that will modify the behavior of the system. The writer states that other types of applications are even more problematic if one views them as games.

An interesting fact that Rao brings up is that although Facebook Applications are thought to increase the social interaction between people, people are not actually playing together or even asynchronously, due to the construction of the applications. On top of this, the users of Facebook Applications don’t usually see themselves as players. Thus, they do not seem to be games as such. They do, however, act as enablers of playfulness and game-like situations. The social construction of Facebook Applications is actually quite similar to the way people used to play in arcades back in the day: it is based on displaying the results, resulting in people competing for higher scores with their friends.

Third places?

“Third places” can be seen as a contemporary version of the agora, the tavern, the café – places where people can simply be together and unwind. According to Rao, important features of “third places” are conversation, socialization and playful mood. Social networks seem to fit the model well as their focus is indeed on conversation and socialization, and add-ons – such as the Facebook Applications – seem to be vital in establishing the playful mood.

The writer defines three main qualities that the playfulness of virtual “third places” can be analyzed with. The first one is physicality; according to Rao, playful mood in real-life “third places” is strongly related to the physical dimension, and since online settings lack this dimension, add-ons are needed to convey it. The second quality is spontaneity, which is also difficult to reproduce in virtual settings, and since Facebook’s architecture of participation doesn’t allow the user to express herself in an
unmediated fashion, it seem that the Applications can also play the role of a regulated outlet for the individual need for free expression. The last quality Rao lists is inherent sociability; according to her playfulness is intrinsically connected to social situations and cannot exist without them. Thus, most of the actions expressed by Facebook Applications can be seen as representations of playful actions or performances.

From gameplay to social play

When discussing how Facebook Applications situate themselves in current game theory, Rao states that we can regard them as the casual version of social play, being to social play what casual games are to video games. The single Facebook Application is usually an extremely simple game, and more often a representation, hinting to a symbolic, ritual construction of the place by social agreement. The elements of play in Facebook Applications, while not always corresponding to the strict definitions of game or play proposed by game theory, take a crucial part in “setting the mood” of social networks, and participate in the larger game of identity construction of the social network place as a virtual “third place”.

This seems like a good definition, and I am definitely looking forward to reading Rao’s later research on the topic.

[1] See for example the classic Homo ludens : a study of the play-element in culture (1955/1980) by Johan Huizinga.

References:
Rao, Valentina: Facebook Applications and Playful Mood: the Construction of Facebook as a “Third Place”. MindTrek 2008 proceedings. Tampere, Finland. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1457199.1457202

Breath of Life

Time to try and revive this blog. I’ll start off by posting some abstracts we are supposed to do for one of our master courses.

I’ll start off with

A Quick Look into the Article:

Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship

by danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison

Sites designed for social networking are quite a young internet phenomenon, and an even younger one research-wise. In an introductory article for a special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, danah m. boyd and Nicole B. Ellison aim at providing a conceptual, historical and scholarly context for the phenomenon they call social network sites or SNSs.

The authors define social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. Terms and definitions are always debatable, but I find this one to be quite good. The definition is very comprehensive but at the same time also confined enough, thus preventing excessive debating over the matter, although everything can of course always be debated if one wants to.

Previous Scholarship

Although the authors first describe the history of SNSs and then move on to describing the various scholarships that focus on studying the phenomenon, I felt going through the latter first fits my purposes better.

There are four scholarships presented in the article. Research focused on impression management and friendship performance, research on networks and network structure, research on bridging of the online and offline social networks, and research on the privacy issues that SNSs and other similar sites rouse. The authors also mention a growing body of research on other aspects of SNSs, such as the possible educational elements of SNSs.

Not being familiar with the history of SNSs research, nor the contemporary situation, I was quite surprised that such a young field is already so well defined, albeit not necessarily on a more general level. Young fields are obviously prone to terminological issues, and especially the idea of online and offline social networks – or online and offline life in general – is quite problematic. The line between the two is very porous, and as the authors note, most of people’s online social activity in fact circles around the same people as their offline social activity.

History

For me, the history-section of the article was the most interesting and educating, mostly due to being very US-centric.

According to the authors’ definition, SixDegrees.com, launched in 1997, was the first recognizable social network site. Although each of the three features described in the definition existed in some form earlier, SixDegrees was the first one to include them all. From the launching of SixDegrees in 1997 to the beginning of the next wave of SNSs in 2001, a number of community tools began supporting various combinations of profiles and publicly articulated Friends.

The next wave of SNSs started – in theory – with Ryze.com in 2001, but in practice Friendster was the one that really kicked it off. Launched in 2002, Friendster was a social complement to Ryze.com, and designed to help friends-of-friends meet. In 2004, Friendster’s popularity surged, and the site encountered technical and social difficulties. From 2003 on – when Friendster was starting to have difficulties – many new SNSs were launched. Most took the form of profile-centric sites, but there were also so-called passion-centric SNSs, and as the social media and user-generated content phenomena grew, websites focused on media sharing also began implementing SNS features. At the same time, blogging services with SNS features became popular, and SNSs were gaining popularity worldwide.

The latest wave in SNSs was started by Facebook. Although the history part thus far was very educating for me, this part was the most intriguing. Albeit having some sort of an idea of how Facebook, the mass media of our time, had started, I had never really looked into its history before. It was fascinating to realise that Facebook, among many other similar sites, started in 2004 as a very restricted site for Harvard students and employees only, but expanded to it’s present day vastness within just a few years. While this seems to be the trend of SNSs these days, some sites explicitly seek narrower audiences. Some intentionally restrict access to appear selective and elite, others are limited by their target demographic and thus tend to be smaller.

The authors state that while websites dedicated to communities of interest still exist and prosper, SNSs are now primarily organized around people, not interests. According to them, this more accurately mirrors unmediated social structures, where “the world is composed of networks, not groups”, as they so felicitously quote Wellman in his article Structural Analysis.

It should be no surprise that the internet, built by people, for people, used by people, is all the time evolving towards the same models and structures that the offline world operates with.

References

boyd, d. m., & Ellison, N. B. (2007). “Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship”. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 11. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html

Wellman, B. (1988). “Structural analysis: From method and metaphor to theory and substance”. In B. Wellman & S. D. Berkowitz (Eds.), Social Structures: A Network Approach (pp. 19-61). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

The Unbearable Heaviness of Defining a Research Question

Incredible but true, I’m still not feeling sleepy one bit, although it’s already 4:30am (GT +3 due to DST). This obviously a perfect time for some Intellectual Scientific Theorizing (from now on simply IST). On the other hand, I already had issues when trying to figure out the spelling for ‘theorizing’, so this might turn out to be either interesting, embarrassing, or both. Personally, I’m trying to keep up the flickering hope of something useful turning up, so here goes, for your entertainment if nothing else.

The heading is unusually long and heavy of me (I tend to do the long and heavy -part in the actual text), but I could not imagine affiliating anything lighter with this topic. Judging from what I’ve done and learned this far, defining the research question is the Ultimate Trial. Once one has overcome the Challenge of Challenges, coming up with a new, well-defined, shiny and bright Research Question, everything else falls into place by itself. Yes, yes, of course I’m exaggerating. Nevertheless, once figuring out a good research question, the rest of the work gets a heck of a lot easier, starting from source-hunting and ending up all the way in the actual thesis writing.

Although the almost-mythical Research Question seems elusive as ever (not only judged on the hearsay of graduate students, but also on my personal experiences), certain general ideas, topics and words keep catching my eye and ear time and time again. First and foremost, game studies. Mostly from a humanistic or a sociological point of view, although I’m also trying to understand the technological side of it. Narrowing down, I used to end up with game cultures, but recently the words have changed places or even form, and I’m sitting there with topics like “Games as Culture”, “Games and Culture”, “Games as Art” and “Games as High Culture”. Why? Let me open it up for you a bit.

Art as a whole is a phenomenon that has always intrigued me. Especially visual arts, like painting, sculpting and architecture never seem to lose their grip on me, and once I realized digital games is the area I want to specialize in, this art-fixation of mine started to hunt me more than ever. After my realization, some other topics have of course come up, some of them forgotten immediately, some still lurking in the back of my mind. Take Japan, for example. Some heavy lurking going on with this topic, since it even made me travel all the way to the other side of the globe for a year. While spending most of my time studying the language, I did also manage to wade some room in my schedule for getting to know the thing I went to Japan for: games. Especially people who play games, or even better, make them. Getting to know a number of people who work in the business was the final factor convincing me on the essentialness of including their views in my thesis, maybe even making it the focus of the research.

This brought up another thing that had been circling in my mind: finding out what people think about games. Game developers’, indie or commercial, but also gamers’ opinions. Very soon after coming up with this, I realized I also want and need the views of Average Joe and those of people who don’t work in development, but could otherwise be considered experts in the fields of digital games, art, Japanese gaming culture, and all these combined. The last group of people is quite a mixed bag of course. So, I’ve got both the question and the people to pose the question to, why am I still saying it’s heavy business?

First of all, I’m doing a master thesis, not a doctoral one. There is no way on earth I could even dream of including all that in a hundred-or-so -pages and ending up with a good thesis. An easy problem, granted, and solved, for example, by simply narrowing down and focusing on one group of people. That’s what I did, and ended up with this: “Are games art?”. This is the oldest version, and very, very intimidating. Defining the research question like that, I’d be forced to define not only what digital games are, but also take part in the dreaded What Is True Art -conversation.

Most of my antipathy for this debate actually results from something quite different from fear: it seems to me a very pointless and endless fight, sometimes inducing eerie similarities with that of different religious groups, and at others sinking to the level that makes a fight over which are tastier, strawberries or blueberries, seem sound. Come on people, face it: there is no absolute definition for art! I know it’s hard for a human mind to accept some things can’t be defined the same way as the tectonic structure of our planet, but that’s just how it is, so live with it. Art is something that has a different meaning and manifestation to each and every individual on this planet, and that’s the closest we’ll ever get of having an absolute definition for art. Take it or leave it, get all emotional or don’t give a shit, it doesn’t change the fact one bit.

Not wanting to take part in this Holy War of Art and Non-Art, I tried my best to find a more eloquent research question, and maybe did. Unfortunately that has to wait for another time (maybe tomorrow?), since I’ve stayed up ridiculously long and should go to bed. Stay put for another episode of some hard ISTing and exemplary Holy War -avoidance, it might be coming up sooner than you expect!

As a side-note: Damn I wish this thing had a footnoting-system. Another side-note: No laughing at typos and aberrations, it’s frigging 6:43 am here.