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2006 Games + Learning + Society Conference: 3:30 PM session: Motivation & Addiction

(I got into a long conversation at lunch and missed the 1:30 session. Sorry. If you go to the GLS website, though, you can find webcasts of all the sessions!)

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Presentation #1: Wow, addiction psychiatrists from Cedars-Sinai.

Uh, oh, “intrusive thoughts about gaming” from an audience member. Um, sometimes when I am chatting with someone, my fingers twitch at the number keys, like I am trying to cast “Tesla Cage” at you. Interpret this as you will.

Overall, audience members are producing negative definitions of “addiction” that focus on impediments to functioning in other areas of life. I think they are trying to please the psychiatrists, who are now trying to motivate us to come up with more positive definitions–after all, ad copy frequently describes games as “addictive,” and that’s supposed to be good.

I once went to a cocktail party populated almost entirely by psychiatrists. It was weird.

The key criteria, as you would expect, is when an activity disrupts other areas of your life. Anal people are not obsessive-compulsive unless they have trouble leaving the house because they can’t stop washing their hands, yada yada yada.

They’ve got a biological model for substance dependence up now. It has to do with dopamine, which mediates the pleasure and reward pathway, is increased by effects of drugs and whatnot, and then decreases markedly in withdrawal. This probably also leads to decreased sensitivity to natural reinforcers (e.g. sex). It’s not that you’re getting less dopamine, it’s just that it doesn’t affect you like it used to.

God, I am so tired. Two nights of inadequate sleep just KILLS me now. Ah, adulthood.

Slides of neurons. Cocaine makes you happy by keeping more dopamine active, I think. Here’s a slide with brain imaging showing how cocaine functions in the brain. Some research subjects got free cocaine. Possibly rats, I guess.

Meth breaks your decision-making brain parts.

Proposed criteria for online gaming dependence with the salience model:

• Preoccupation with online gaming
• Needs to play online games for longer periods of time in order to achieve the desired excitement
• Has repeated unsuccessful efforts to control online gaming
• Plays online games longer than intended
• Lies to family members, therapist or others to conceal the extent of involvement with online gaming
• Has jeopardized or lost a significant relationship or job because of online gaming
• Some others, but he went through the slides too fast. Basically, things that fuck up your functioning.

Historical background of cognitive-behavioral therapy studies–may be possible to use games in diagnostic and therapeutic ways and actually introduce positive changes in the brain.

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Presentation #2: Nick Yee. I’ll be seeing him at PARC in the fall; he was also at my table at lunch today, and encouraged me in my new plan to build a sex MMOG for women who want to have gay male sex (the original plan was just to market to gay men, since the central problem for the new sex games coming out seems to be how the hell to get straight women to participate, but as Nick pointed out, it might be too easy for the gay men to just get face-to-face sex, so: slash fans and rural gay men are my target market).

Lots of screenshots of various games, including a gay pride rally on CoH. (You know what I’ve learned over the past two days? CoH has like the best avatar customization of all the big games.)

Some stats on MMOG players; here are a few that interested me: only 25% are teenagers. Age is not correlated with usage. 80% of players play with someone they know (friend, family member, or romantic partner).

When you ask people about various things they enjoy in MMOGs, they tend to shake out into three categories: achievement, socialization, and immersion.

Achievement: advancement (leveling, getting loot, etc.), competition (beating the snot out of other players), and mechanics (mastery of the system: min/maxers)
Socialization: socializing (chatting), relationships (deeper connections, emotional support, etc.), and teamwork (group achievements)
Immersion: discovery, role-playing, customization (avatars, etc.), escapism

Age is negatively associated with achievement motivation. Male players also score higher on the achievement motivation and lower on the relationship motivation–these differences are stastically significant but very small. There’s 87% overlap between genders.

Many people’s motivations also shift over time–you may come in wanting to do one thing and gradually discover you also enjoy something else.

So how do games make you want to do stuff?

Start with behavioral conditioning: B.F. Skinner!* Things are made satisfying through rewards. Leveling starts out as a very quick process; it gets slower and harder, but eventually the action of attacking mobs becomes intrinsically rewarding.

Games may also give users a sense of control and agency that they lack in meatspace. Wherever you are, you know what to do next and how close you are to the next level–and in the newer games, you never LOSE ground. In CoH, for instance, you incur experience debt that has to be made up with half the experience you earn following a death, but you don’t lose experience like you used to on Ancient Anguish, the MUD I played in junior high (you lost a whole level there every time you died).

Younger and male players are more likely to show signs of problematic usage. People motivated by escapism and advancement are more likely to develop problematic usage, but escapism predicts twice as well than advancement (and about the same as number of hours played per week predicts for it).

A lot of MMOG players play 20 hours a week–but the average American watches 28 hours of TV a week.

We talk about MMOGs in a different (more alarmist) way than we do about other media–but this isn’t really surprising; we read an article in virtual worlds about the typical patterns of new technology adoption, and new technologies are always presented by the media in alternatingly idealistic and alarmist ways. Connecting back to some stuff that was said earlier today and Belleweather’s comment on the subject, it’s entirely possible that MMOGs are seen as more threatening than console games simply because they’re newer. Yee goes on to say that he thinks the paranoia is new; obviously, I’m not sure about this, but on reflection, it’s possible that the accumulation of technologies now available to us makes it easier and faster to spread this kind of paranoia, making it SEEM more pervasive.

In general, the literature suggests that “internet addicts” typically suffer from other, pre-existing psychological conditions: depression, anxiety, etc. One could view the internet addiction as similiar to self-medicating with alcohol (and probably less physically harmful?).

Ultimately: is it pathological to prefer being where you have social status and respect?

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*Remember this for the prelim.

2006 Games + Learning + Society Conference: 11 AM Workshop Session: Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat

Workshop title builds off the anthology edited by Justine Cassell and Henry Jenkins: From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games

Earlier workshop proceedings: http://eda.ucla.edu

Betty Hayes talking about E3 as a gendered experience; having gone to three of them, she feels very much like a Middle Aged Woman there, surrounded by scruffy young men, with most women present as booth babes rather than as experts, although more women this year than in previous years.

Yasmin Kafai talking about the ghettoization of female gamers–classified as “casual gamers,” not important by some within industry?

MMOGs’ attraction for women:

• customizable characters
• choice of game activities
• community participation

Casual games’ attraction for women:

• limited in time
• stand-alone
• independent

We need to distinguish between women gamers and girl gamers; different age groups, they also do different things. Nick Yee finds that significant difference between male and female characters was very, very small. Age is a much better predictor of achievement motivation in MMOGs. Women tend to be older (and introduced to MMOGs by significant others), so the age difference gets conflated with the gender difference.

Reference: See T.L. Taylor on women gamers. Definite differences in women’s gaming activities in the U.S., Asia, and Europe (more female gamer events in northern Europe?).

Yasmin Kafai is noting that the gamer geek stereotype has had to shift because “everyone plays games now.” I’m not sure about this. We should definitely know better, but I get some pretty classic reactions from a lot of “regular” people when I mention MMOGs in particular–are MMOGs seen as nerdier than console games?

–I asked this question and Yasmin thinks that part of the issue is that most people now grew up with console games, but still don’t know much about MMOGs; it’s the old fear of new technology dystopias.

Nick Yee is talking about the Locker Room Culture of MMOGs as the main deterrent to women’s participation in MMOGs, NOT game mechanics (importance of competition/achievement, etc.). He mentions sexualization of female avatar bodies, but also the assumption of most players that women don’t play MMOGs with the concommitant rejection of most claims of female identities. Many players will only accept such claims if the player can produce a male romantic partner with whom she games–women are ONLY believed to enter the space via male connections.

Jill Denner discussing the involvement of girls and women in game design, although noting that gender /= play style. Some doubt about whether or not women will really make “girl games” as currently conceived. She’s done work having middle school girls design their own games, and found that some mirrored typical gender stereotypes, but others were more subversive. Humor was also more prevalent than in current popular mainstream games.

50% of the game designers for the Sims were women; Denner suggests that this led to the development of a game with broader appeal. It’s not that the Sims is really a “game for women”; 50% of the players are male. It’s just that unlike most popular games, it is NOT a “game for men.”

An audience member comments on boys’ unwillingness to enter areas that are color-coded female (pink, purple), whereas girls will go to those areas as well as the more “masculine” color-coded areas (green, blue, red). I wonder if players in MMOGs interpret feminine color costumes as markers of authentic femininity, like Andromeda Sparks’s preponderance of pink. This would be a pretty easy thing to survey–create female characters identical in costuming except for color schemes, and have respondents rate perceived femaleness of the players behind the characters. This would dovetail with my observations about cuteness as a more authentic femininity in MMOGs than hypersexualization (which in fact is generally taken as evidence of player maleness).** You could also look perceptions of more and less sexualized costumes/bodies that way.

Carrie Heeter says that “women want ‘entertainment plus’: fun AND good for me (learning, healthy, time with family and friends).” She also just said that probably none of us ever watched Star Trek, which seems like a weird assumption, but you know, whatever.* Has anyone seen a documentary about how Star Trek shaped the future? She was mentioning it.

(I missed some stuff here because I had to go to the bathroom. I got my coffee at the break.)

My table’s discussion: gaming culture discourages women (see my experience trying to buy City of Heroes at a game store at the East Towne Mall); what’s the “killer ap”?

“Girl games” are generally too girly–they don’t do well because boys absolutely will not play them. I think what we really need are games that offer more choice–for instance, male and female protagonists, and various things that can be done in games. Appeal to a wider range of people in general, and you’ll get better gender distribution.

Lunch!

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*Mr. Spock: my first non-animated crush.

**It would also represent a continuity with some of my earliest research, a 4th grade science project that demonstrated that 50% of 4th grade research participants favored cookies with pink icing over identical cookies with yellow, green, or blue icing (and yes, I mixed up the batches to keep it random), while preferences for the other colors were pretty evenly split. Can you believe this project only received a 3rd prize ribbon, while a project in which some total non-innovator PLAYED MUSIC TO PLANTS was more highly rewarded?

2006 Games + Learning + Society Conference: 9 AM session: Are You Experienced?*

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Presentation #1: Cognition and video games. Experienced video game players are better at new-to-them video games than novice video game players because they have already developed basic schema** for understanding and navigating games.

I’ve always thought this is why I’m relatively good with computers as compared to many members of my peer group who only really started using them in junior high or high school. I don’t know how long it takes to form such schema, but it probably helps to be young when you’re doing it, as with language skills. We got our first PC when I was about six, and so I’ve had a basic sense of what to look for in software, and what questions to ask if I don’t know what to do, since then.

Given that I never played a lot of combat-oriented/finely controlled video games, though, I’m still not sure why I don’t have the trouble with, say, stairs in CoH that plagued my father’s attempts at it.

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Presentation #2: Developing expertise in World of Warcraft (more notes, this is the one I really wanted to see). This male presenter plays a level 60 female Night Elf. Color me unsurprised. (Also pink leopard print. Business casual my way, folks.) World of Warcraft is particularly known in the field for being better designed for n00bs.

Funny Penny Arcade example: “Quests are when people tell you to do things they are too lazy to do themselves.”

Presenter won’t actually play off-color WoW “The Internet is for Porn” video. Boo.

Experts solve problems quickly, but spend more time analyzing the task beforehand (this is why I am still pretty good at chess–for a first grader). Experts are strong self-monitors.*** They possess extensive and highly integrated bodies of domain knowledge. Some of this they get from outside sources: forums, websites, etc. Travis is much better about this for CoH than I am, which is why he is a badge whore and I am inevitably surprised when I suddenly get a badge in almost any situation.

Snowball sample from presenter’s guild; 39-item Likert scale questionnaire administered to 48 experienced gamers. 40 male players, 8 female players. Primary characters: 28 male, 20 female. (Question: any gender-swapping female players? Probably not, or maybe one.) 2/3 of respondents between 18 and 25 (female players older?). Almost everyone says they “understand own character’s role”–I got yelled at once for being a bad blaster, when I’d been playing CoH for a month or so. Failure is feedback. Social enforcement is probably particularly strong for healer class characters, I bet.

Random thought: I should make a controller and actually play her. Maybe I’ll rebuild Marie LeVeau. Although I did respec Achryn and get rid of “taunt.” Yeah, that was a useful power for a controller.

Experienced players in this presenter’s sample tend to talk to guildmates and NOT non-guildmates, but then again, these are people who are in his guild and value the association enough to answer his survey questions. Expert solo players probably systematically differ from guild-oriented players–and might be more likely to use commercial strategy guides that guild players avoid, although then again, they’re probably still computer savvy enough to find all the free material available online. –He says he’s doing a larger survey now; what does the sample look like?

I should just dissolve Andromeda’s super group and join Granny’s Irregulars with her. They’ve already got a base.

No news: you need to play a game a lot, and consistently, to maintain expertise and, relatedly, in-game standing.

Presenter’s website: http://www.peegee.net

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Presentation #3: Games as a starting point for general IT expertise. “Islands of expertise”: topics in which children have an interest and develop a deep knowledge of, e.g. dinosaurs. (I loved dinosaurs. I once castigated another small child for mispronouncing “diplodocus.”) Expert communities are those which are continuously changed by individual knowledge gains and attainment.

God, it’s 10 am and I need coffee like heroin. I mean, I don’t need heroin. But I sure as hell need coffee. I need it bad.

Why does everyone at this conference keep remarking about how their research participants**** are “not your typical computer geek”? It’s a freaking GAMING CONFERENCE. I think we all recognize the inadequacy of “your typical computer geek” as a concept.

This guy does Nintendo fansites. Man, I need an emulator for this laptop. I want to play Super Mario 3.

Another guy, who runs a fan fic/fan art site for Legend of Zelda. Remember the cartoon? I used to love that. He uses Terragen… I think I vaguely remember trying to use this once, but I cannot remember why. Anyway, he is now doing commissioned work for money and devoting little time to fan production. You know, older fen frequently complain about the volume of execrable Harry Potter slash produced by 13-year-olds, but as long as 13-year-olds have large quantities of leisure time, they’re always going to lead production.

So game use/fan production in particular can lead to multiple and integrated tech applications. Where are the girls? Well, they’re not writing fan fic about Legend of Zelda,***** but they’re certainly IN fan communities… But are female-dominated fan communities less tech-oriented? Certainly fan fic does not have a high skill threshhold; the people who use PhotoShop even seem to garner pretty high standing in the community thereby. But there are whole icon-making communities on LJ and whatnot.

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Constance’s summary slide for the session:

• Theoretical Models of Expertise
  • Domain Knowledge
  • Set of Practices/Tactics
  • Outcome/Product oriented
  • A Trajectory (progressive problem-solving)
  • Expert subcultures
• Methods
  • Prompted Recall
  • Self-Report/Survey (of guild)
  • Strategic Case Studies
• Next Steps, etc.
  • Tie research to design
  • Bearing back on theory?

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*My little joke. Not actual session title.

+Last night I had a dream that it was time for the prelim and I hadn’t done any more reading or made any notes or anything. I kept waking up and realizing it was a dream and sternly instructing myself that I did not have to take a dream prelim for which I was totally unprepared, and then I would drift back off and it would start all over again.