After thinking long and hard about what kind of internet environment I wanted to explore for this assignment, I finally decided to take a break from thinking to do my habitual, daily browse of the web. For some reason, cooperative web gaming came to mind as a potential idea to look into. I realized that many websites that offer multiplayer “board” games enhanced for the internet (such as Reversi, Internet Chess, Poker, and others), generally provide a means for the different game players to chat while they are competing for points. It was at this moment that I remembered an old favorite game of mine, InkLink from Shockwave.com.
InkLink is a cooperative game for up to eight players. For each of the 10 rounds in the game, one player is selected and given a secret word to draw while the other players guess what the word is. (It was my turn to draw in the image above. I had no idea how to draw an artichoke.) The interesting thing about the scoring system is that not only do the correct guessers get points, but the artists get the same number of points as well. The game is designed in a way that allows the players to use their guess text boxes as a means of chatting as well. There is a “whisper” ability that allows you to carry on private conversations with other players in the same game as you. I chose this competitive, yet somewhat cooperative, group to chat with because it allowed me to observe multiple people in a closed environment.
I realized quickly that being friendly and open would generally warrant the same sort of responses in these chats. I found that on the whole, those who played InkLink were generally mature (regardless of what age category room I was playing in at the time) and courteous; they simply wanted to have fun playing a game they enjoyed. One major factor of the Big Five struck me the most. Though I didn’t find players to be very open about themselves, most were quite agreeable, especially due to the minor cooperative nature of the game. I was actually surprised to find extremely limited “flaming” and “trolling” in these games. Maturity in these games also surprised me to an extent, especially when competing against players with usernames like xTOOxSEXYxFORxMYxSHIRTx and dadog1234. I developed a CFO based position originally, only to realize that my short period of interaction with these players led me to reevaluate their personalities and realize that Social Information Theory was more applicable in this situation. By the end of these games, I had attempted to communicate with all the other players at least once, to get a feel for their online personas. But because I was not focusing on only one person to observe/analyze and I wasn’t able to collect too much information about the multiple players, I feel that I probably relied much more on SIDE theory by taking various personality traits I was able to pick up and throw them out into the extremities of the personality spectrum.
4 comments:
I really enjoyed your post! I too remember playing InkLink a few years ago and I admire your creativity in picking an online space. I agree that players in InkLink are a lot friendlier than the typical chat room frequenter. Everyone working together (at least at some point) creates a completely different atmosphere. Even though this is an online game, the types of people found in InkLink are not your typical somewhat odd online gamers. I would have liked to know more about specific people and their personality traits, but overall I was very impressed with your post (and use of pictures).
From my experience too, people are generally friendlier (or at least more responsive to friendliness) while playing games than while chatting. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that if the only activity is chatting and there's no automatic common ground (as with a game) people are naturally more suspicious?
Kristie-
I chose your blog to comment on, because you explored a different space than most our classmates. Most people looked into chat rooms or forums, but I think the gaming world is interesting as well. I wonder how different your observations would have been if you had picked a more competitive game such as Counterstrike or Starcraft.
In InkLink, the whipser seem to be used to chat, whereas it is used to start flame wars in the other types of games.
I think it's interesting that you assumed you would have found more vulgar conversations based on usernames. That would be another good blog topic. I would have liked to read more about what else you observed about your peers in InkLink. Some must have been more competitive and pushy than others. I wonder how you would view those that were bad at drawing or slow to respond. Would you consider them not as intelligent or confident just based on one action (as in the CFO theory)? Overall, well done!
Hi Kristie,
I enjoyed reading your post (you even got me to go try the game out for myself!). As someone who has never played games online with other users, I find it interesting that you observed people being more friendly and mature than in other online spaces. After completing this assignment myself, going in and out of chat rooms trying to find someone decent to talk with, I almost gave up hope of finding someone who wanted to talk innocently. My favorite part of your blog is how you pointed out your initial judgments based on immature user names and how such limited information can lead us to form such strong opinions. Great post (love that you included pictures)!
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