Over the past few months in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, I can’t help but feel like there’s been an increasing awareness paid to community. What it means to be part of one, how do we come together as one, how do we build one in an increasingly digital age?
So many questions that people are now asking themselves as though they’re waking up from a haze. For so long people have been going through the motions of life and only truly living in the wisps of what community is supposed to be. People love to blame the internet and social media for destroying historical meanings of what it meant to be part of a community—but many of these people have ceased to evolve to see what modern day communities are actually like.
Then COVID struck. Slowly, then encapsulating the world. With the physical spaces we used to gather no longer being accessible, people fled to the internet to try and make whole the social spaces they were deprived of. The very people who claimed that these spaces were the death of all community are now struggling to try to figure out how to use the internet as the vast saviour of all things social.
And yet, they still don’t understand.
Now that I’ve passed into the post-comps-dissertation-writing-I-swear phase of my PhD, it’s hard to not see things align in an eerily timely and useful way. While I write about gender and power dynamics for my dissertation, I’m effectively writing about how communities are built and developed online. How their ideologies are developed and perpetuated; how we make meaning in digital spaces. As my academic mantra has been for a while: People, Technology, Culture.
I’ve had the pleasure of receiving a series of graduate research scholarships to develop a community for the UW Games Institute from the ground up in a digital space—predating the COVID epidemic, but accelerated in kind by its appearance. I’ve had in-depth experience with thinking through how to build the culture we want to have, and how to reinforce the culture we already had, through an entirely virtual medium.
This has given me new perspectives not only on how simple it can be to consciously choose the framework you want a community to develop around, but equally how easy it is for people to overlook the simple things that can easily breed discontent and toxicity if overlooked.
As per usual, this is going to come back to World of Warcraft (shocker, I know). I spent the morning talking to my current GM of HKC, whom I’ve known for over 13 years now. We talked about our community, the world of gaming culture, and most notably, the recent scandal with Method.
This scandal sadly has come at no surprise to me, as one who researches within and participates heavily in the competitive gamer world. The stories relayed through this news blast aren’t unique—in fact they’re far more common than many want to believe—but the more these stories come to light, the more…hopefully…we’ll come to see a change in the gaming “community.”
I’ve been lucky that I learned to navigate these worlds earlier, and have surrounded myself over time with people who support the kind of virtual space I want to be a part of, but many aren’t so lucky. That spine, was an important part of my conversation today. We have a strong and long-lasting community within Hello Kitty Club. But despite our size, we aren’t free from risk of drama (nor have we not had our share of it in the 10+ years I’ve been a part of its leadership).
HKC BlizzCon 2019, HKC + Friends through the years (when we each joined Blizzard, approximately)
What struck me today was the willingness to work towards creating systems to stop, acknowledge, or offer recourse for situations in the same wheelhouse as what happened with Method (and others) before they even start. We aren’t some international gaming juggernaut, and yet, the importance of creating safe spaces for all members of your community, is no less important to us.
Over the years, there’s a reason why people keep coming back to HKC. Many guilds rise and fall. People disappear without a word. But for some reason, people keep coming back to us and remember us long after we’ve parted ways (or changed servers), and I can’t help but keep coming back to the question of community. We’ve evolved over the years but there’s something about our core, our attitude, our values that seems to strike a chord with people. Something we hope to soon put to writing to ensure that that energy can continue to thrive beyond the current leadership.
I mean….let’s face it, we might leave this game eventually right? (*awkward laughter*)
In the meantime though, I’m proud to be part of who HKC is today. We acknowledge our own missteps in the past but equally are learning from them in order to build a better community in the future. Even if it’s just in our one small corner of the Discord & Azeroth universes.
HKC BlizzCon 2019, closing ceremonies
#GamerGate, Tech industry sexual harassment leaks, #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and through this current Method scandal. All of these things happen everywhere, across the globe, but they are changed systematically at the small community level.
We work together to fight intolerance and misconduct at a local level and it can have a rippling effect that spreads across the whole of the industry. It’s human nature to gravitate towards what others are doing successfully. We must continue to fight, no matter how helpless it may seem by learning about these big-news items.
All news is local news, and the biggest of scandals start with the smallest of problems.
Build your communities with care and you’ll see them grow. Let them populate unchecked and you’re just setting yourself up for disaster. I’m sure Method meant well, but at some point you need to let go of old ways, evolve, and stand up for what’s right.
Change is an individual choice. Choose to build better communities, adopt more inclusive values, choose to listen to others.
Choose a better future by acting as though it were already here.
On August 13th (or 14th depending on where you were in the world) at 6pm EDT, Blizzard Entertainment released the latest expansion to World of Warcraft–the seventh expansion to be released for the nearly fourteen-year-old game. While WoW may be nearly thirteen, the Warcraft franchise itself is nearly twenty-four, as Warcraft: Orcs & Humans was released in 1994. As one of the longest-running MMOs, WoW and its universe clearly has to be doing something right.
In order to tie everything we’ve talked about so far together, I’m going to end by looking at the success of World of Warcraft not only as a game, but the ways in which they engage with their players in order to ensure success and account for the possibility of failure. Rather than only doing one or two things right, World of Warcraft is in fact, doing a lot of smaller things right, so that when failures come (*cough* Warlords of Draenor *cough*), the game continues to survive.
As I mentioned in the second content post of this series, I’ve been playing World of Warcraft since the early months of 2007. Eleven years of content, of characters, and of social situations, and yet, I continue to come back, why? Probably for the same reasons everyone else does–Blizzard has gotten me successfully engaged.
One of the first areas I noticed the depth of my emotional and psychological investment in Azeroth was when I was faced with having to switch factions last year. While I have played both sides of the faction divide over the years, I’ve always only played seriously on the Alliance. My first characters were Alliance, and most importantly, my now-main character was Alliance.
A Draenei restoration shaman, to be exact.
I swapped to my Draenei shaman not too long after learning the ropes of the game. By the time Patch 2.3.0 launched in November of 2007, I had gotten my bearings and was actively clearing raid content with my original guild. After we eventually got into Zul’Aman, the raid launched with 2.3.0, it became apparent that we would need a specific kind of class in order to complete it. That class was a restoration shaman. I offered to swap classes from warrior and never looked back. Suffice to say, my main character Shebalo and I have been through a lot, and she’s become an an extension of myself more than I had realized.
After re-rolling to a healer class, my ambitions soared. I got involved with more difficult content, and eventually joined Hello Kitty Club, who I’m still with today, after a lot of on-and-off periods. During one of those off-periods last year, I was part of a splinter group from HKC. We were comprised of the most ambitious and skilled of our raiders, who ultimately decided that the only way we could continue to progress through current Mythic (the highest difficulty) raid content was to swap to Horde on Akama, where there would be more bodies to recruit. Many of my peers easily made the change, quickly swapping to whatever Horde race they decided fit them best.
I, on the other hand, struggled. And naturally, thanks to running my Twitch, I recorded it. And so, for a very brief period of time, I was a Troll restoration shaman.
It never quite felt right, and the emotional turmoil I went through to swap sides, is visible throughout the two-hour plus highlight video. I felt my emotions welling up as I tried to transfer, bought the wrong transfer, ticketed Blizzard to get the right transfer–all the while dreading what I was about to do. It wasn’t just about leaving my guild home, it was going against my very in-game identity to become the opposite side.
In that moment, Azeroth was a very real place (Ruch 2009). It was not simply a place filled with pixels where I passed through. It was a place I “lived” in, a place I experienced the passing of time through, it was very real.
While I never really participated in roleplay within the game on Shebalo, over time, I built a headcannon about her movements through Azeroth, about her place, my place,in the community and the world. We were one in the same, and much like my aversion to playing Renegade Sheppard in Mass Effect, so too was I against playing something I didn’t feel to be me.
Despite a lack of active roleplay, I did (and continue) to consider how my character might react given in-game situations. In particular, during the last expansion Legion, players were finally able to visit Argus, the former Draenei homeworld. Naturally, when this first launched, I was still playing on the Horde and it felt as though something was missing. When Argus had been announced at a previous BlizzCon, I had already started to think about what it would be to “return home” as my character. As a Troll, this no longer applied.
What this suggests is that the avatar is neither entirely “me,” nor entirely “not me,” but a version of me that only exists in a particular mediated context. When that context, and with it the avatar, ceases to be, that part of the self dies as well. That part of the self, expressed and projected through the avatar in a shared virtual world, is as much a creation of the group as the group is a creation of the individuals within it (Pearce 119).
I went through many crises of identity while playing Horde side on my main character that truly demonstrated to me just how much I had invested not only in the game, but also who I was in the game. When I finally switched back to Alliance, everything just felt right. I quickly was able to re-select the face and attributes of the model I had used for so many years (with backup screenshots just in case).
Heading into Battle for Azeroth, I don’t think I could have had it any other way.
For the Alliance!
My time spent on Shebalo wasn’t just about my own relationship with my character, but also with my community. As I discussed in the previous post, I was lucky to find such long-standing friendships through Hello Kitty Club. Not only did we experience the rise and fall of our raiding progression (Juul 2013), we also spent extensive time exploring the virtual-physical world of Azeroth together, well into the late hours of the morning. Blizzard is well-known for including reclusive Easter Eggs, abandoned content, and memorials throughout their games (Gibbs et al. 2012), WoW being no exception. While we explored the world, we learned about the game and each other. We were able to interact without the chaos of raid combat, and friendships increased.
Over time, people have come and gone from our guild, but there’s a large core that’s remained the same. We interact on various social medias, and over time, have repeatedly brought each other back into the game. Beyond the itch to play, the promise of social interaction with a known group of engaged individuals, helps to keep us engaged in the content.
Our stories are not unique, and in truth, it’s probably one of the biggest features that keeps World of Warcraft so popular over time. So long as your social group stays, so too are you likely to as well. Combined with guild meetups and bringing virtual friendships into the tangible space, things become even more real and engaging. Conversely, if you only play alone, or have lost touch with the friends you used to play with, the draw to stay in Azeroth is likely lessened. The “massively multiplayer” component is not only important from a gameplay perspective, but also affects our engagement with the world. When the novelty wears off, when you can’t possibly fathom running your face into the same boss for another week in a row, friends and social experiences keep you engaged. Because of this, over the years, even in the recent Battle for Azeroth expansion, Blizzard continues to strive to increase friendship and community engagement.
World of Warcraft also succeeds at keeping players invested in line with the Sunk Cost Fallacy. After nearly fourteen years of running, it’s hard for players to turn away from their digital investments. Astonishingly, it’s also probably how World of Warcraft has retained their subscription fee, while other MMOs continue to drop theirs. Like an un-used gym membership, I have known countless people over the years who retain their WoW subscriptions, even when they play rarely-to-never, “Just in case” they want to return. It’s not even just subscription fees, the cost of accumulated expansion costs, in-game services (server transfer, faction transfer, race change, etc.), memorabilia, paratexts (novels, table books), and virtual goods (pets, mounts, etc.) are compounded into the real-world costs and fears of value loss.
To further encourage people to invest in their time with the game, Blizzard has also offered alternative sources of funding like the WoW token, which can be bought and sold with real money, for in-game currency, and vice versa. This has allowed people to invest more time into the game, by accumulating digital wealth, so that they can spend it on “real-life” costs, like subscription fees and Battle.Net currency for other Blizzard games.
Blizzard also continues to update the base value of the game, so that it is affordable for new and returning players. In July, they announced that new and returning accounts would be able to play all the way through Legion content with just a subscription. No longer are players required to buy-in to the game, or its previous expansions. Instead, the entire world of Azeroth is available to players up and until the most recent content, Battle for Azeroth. In this way, Blizzard capitalizes on existing players’ social capital, as well as WoW’s reputation as an MMO, to encourage new players or returning players to re-invest in the virtual landscape.
Finally, one of the ways in which Blizzard continues to enrapture their audience is through their extensive worldbuilding and storytelling. Not only are there the narratives which occur within the Warcraft games, but Blizzard also releases paratextual books, audiodramas, cinematics, and comics to expand their world.
World creation has become a core feature of many recent digital games, and this fits hand-in-glove with the generic features of fantasy; the carefully crafted, extensive worlds found in massively multiplayer role-playing online games such as Guild Wars, EverQuest II, and World of Warcraft offer players the opportunity to inhabit such worlds wherein they play and interact with others in the guise of heroic adventurers. It can be said that most popular cultural artifacts are reliant on intertextual features for the generation of meaning and recognition…these [contribute] to the high-fantasy ambience of the game, even if at times more quotidian aspects come to the fore, and provides in different ways the means of locating players meaningfully in the game world (Krzywinska 123-124).
Alongside the game’s paratexts, the world itself is filled with extensive quest-text, cut-scenes, cinematics, flavour text, lost pages, monuments, memorials, and Easter Eggs to discover. The cities are busy with NPCs (and ideally players as well), and increasingly lively, as Blizzard continues to make NPCs more immersive, including models, postures, and voice acting.
Further still, painstaking detail is put into not only the textural features of the world’s story, but also in its audio-visual aspects as well. Vast sweeping landscapes, digital sunsets, fanciful festivals, and haunting melodies encourage players to explore and to stay a while. There’s always the suggestion that there’s just a little bit more below the surface–some rare secret you might just get the chance to discover. There’s even an entire discord community devoted to just that prospect.
All of these contributing factors combine to keep World of Warcraft not only afloat, but sailing through the vast sea of other MMO efforts. In a genre that’s largely perceived of as dying, or at least who’s future survival is constantly questioned, Blizzard continues moving forward. In addition to the areas covered here, they also continue to innovate and improve upon game mechanics, player quality of life features, and storytelling ability. It raises the question, if all of this is not only the reason for their success, but also demanded by our current video game marketplace. The ability to hook and maintain investment of such a large segment of the globe for nearly fourteen straight years is an impressive feat.
Blizzard’s ability to continually engage with and emblaze their World of Warcraft community members is readily demonstrated through their cosplayers, Role-Players, fan-writers, community leaders, and gaming participants. How many other games do you know of that start real-life virtual protests of a fictional characters’ actions, thanks to another fictional character’s rebellious actions? Further still that the #NoHonorNoPauldron movement even charged-up players who don’t play anymore?
Whether it be a calculated advertising tactic, brilliant storytelling, or just dumb-luck side effects of a highly effective gameplay experience, Blizzard’s ongoing development of World of Warcraft and it’s virtual universe shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. They’ve survived a number of setbacks, but they continue to push forward and to learn from their mistakes, thanks to their successes in encouraging multi-faceted levels of player interest and emotional investment in Azeroth.
Perhaps the most obvious way that players are drawn into video games is the development of their virtual worlds. Implicit/explicit storylines, graphic design, music, narration, voice acting, game mechanics, character development, and so much more. The components that go into building our gaming worlds are as complex and diverse as the genre conventions that seek to govern them.
We need an understanding that can assess the materiality of play as much as that of the ideas or the objects themselves. A game can produce meaning or, perhaps better stated, experience. But what kinds of experiential meaning can games generate, exactly?…Art and games are not anything unto themselves. The experience of an artifact is contingent on so many factors outside the control of the object itself, let alone the artist or designer: historical context, situational context, the prior experiences and knowledge of the individual, and so on. There is no set way for a game to unfold or for play acts to be performed. The space of possibility within a game is all potential, a potential realized through play (Sharp 105-106).
While traditional storytelling may be able to paint a world for our minds, giving us something to see (in some cases like Lord of the Rings, they do it exceedingly well), video games actually take us there. While Sharp goes on to make the argument that some games are more “artful” and complex than others, I would instead suggest that all video games are as complex as the players who play them. While the simplistic narrative and world of the early Super Mario Bros (1983) cannot compare to the depth of the more artistic and polished Braid (2008), it doesn’t mean that they don’t still have this “potential” for artful engagement. In the empty spaces of the world, of the narrative, left by developers, players will build in their own stories.
Not all games enthrall their players with fanciful explicit narratives or plotlines to follow. Instead some, like Overwatch, tell their stories in the background and in paratext (Genette and MacLean 1991). Through this subversive storytelling, Blizzard Entertainment has continually hinted at what would-be upcoming hero releases and inclusions into the existing game. The ever-evolving landscape of Overwatch facilitates this kind of artistic engagement. Players develop their own theories and their own narratives to bridge the gaps until Blizzard decides to fill them. Sometimes they even guess quite correctly. Alongside the maps and flavour text of this FPS online game, Blizzard also releases comics and video shorts to fill out the world and their story. They have even included two specialty seasonal game modes which allow players to play “Overwatch Missions” from the past. These actions by Blizzard help to ensorcell their playerbase in a realm of narrative intrigue. Fans also are heavily involved in creating art, fictions, or cosplay to further explore Blizzard’s world. In this way, they are enraptured by one another, and are building Overwatch together.
Alongside the divide between explicit or implicit storytelling, developers also continue to incorporate player decision and consequence into narratives for a new way of gaining their attentions. Consequence chains in games like Mass Effect, Fable, The Walking Dead, Skyrim, and Undertale shape not only the story being told, but also pose the player as an active agent within it. Even though decision trees are still very much part of a procedural progression (Bogost 2010), they give the illusion of control in the worlds they come to. The most successful of these is perhaps not explicit narratives like those mentioned above, but is instead better demonstrated by games like The Sims. I looked into this somewhat in my previous post on modding The Sims, however, in the context of player engagement, The Sims is the epitome of potential play at work. The Sims from the outset is practically a blank slate. The dollhouse ready to be played with.
While there are some story features to breathe life into the world, especially in later versions of the game (including decision trees for walks through the Wharf with your favourite pupper), the largest part of the storytelling in The Sims is done by the player. Even if the player does not actively consider the story, or the world they are building, they are still participating in its creation. Every Sim made, every house created, every simoleon spent–they are enacting the world in every stroke. Mod creators go so far as to extend the world, in a way that may parallel how fanfiction or fan art relates with more traditional narratives. These things get complex. In a game like The Sims, the only real limitations are those of your imagination. All the game platform really does, is to facilitate the world you want to create. Perhaps that’s why it’s developed such a following, and why creation-sim games are amongst the most common best-selling PC games of all time.
Giving players the option of choosing paths in gameplay narratives, engage not only their minds but also their emotions, further enhancing their immersion in the game’s world.
Curious about the outcome of ill treatment, Wright began to slap his creature—then was astonished to find himself feeling guilty about it, even though this was very obviously not a real being with real emotions. This capacity to evoke actual feelings of guilt from a fictional experience is unique to games. A reader or filmgoer may feel many emotions when presented with horrific fictional acts on the page or screen, but responsibility and guilt are generally not among them. At most, they may feel a sense of uneasy collusion. Conversely, a film viewer might feel joyful when the protagonist wins, but is not likely to feel a sense of personal responsibility and pride. Because they depend on active player choice, games have an additional palette of social emotions at their disposal (Isbister 8-9).
Alongside story development and narrative, graphics and musical scores comprise one of the key ingredients to video game immersion and engagement. Video game soundtracks and ambient sounds in particular seem an essential part of our gaming experience. Their intentional inclusion or exclusion can illicit a wide array of different responses in players.
The audio soundscape [of Waco Resurrection] enhances the player’s visceral immersion in the experience: at different points, the player hears FBI negotiators, battle sounds, even the voice of God. The artists included audio recordings that FBI agents played to disorient the actual compound members when they launched their assault (i.e., the sounds of drills, screaming animals, etc.) (Isbister 14).
I’m sad to say that, despite its importance in evoking emotional and visceral responses, this is one of the only mentions within How Games Move Us that discusses the importance of the soundscape in gameplay immersion. While graphical representations are important for connecting to our avatars and actually walking through a world, these are features that our minds can often fill in. It is the music and soundscape which truly draws players in, often without them realizing it.
The immersive importance of game soundtracks and sounds is easily observable in the popularity of symphony tours like Video Games Live(above), Distant Worlds (Final Fantasy), or the Kingdom Hearts Orchestra World Tour. Video game music is designed to immerse us in what we’re doing, but not distract us from the task at hand. When relevant, it crescendos and brings us to our knees, never realizing the music that brought us to this breaking point.
For example, take the ending of Kingdom Hearts 1. While the theme song is found in various forms throughout the game, its placement at the ending is specifically to draw together all of the emotional buildup from the game and grab the audience one last time. Its lyrics are given greater meaning. It comes after a period of no music, following the dialogue of the protagonist and one of his best friends, as the worlds start to re-materialize around them, diving them on different shores. The song cuts in, just as their hands are ripped apart, the song continuing to play through the epilogue of the game’s emotional journey of friendship, light, and darkness.
I played this game at a very impressionable time in my life, at some point in high school. The game’s story and world had me wrapped in and obsessed for a long time, and arguably I still am, as I sit writing this in front of a full-scale replica keyblade (the game’s primary weapon). I lapped up all the information in the game as I could, side scraps of journal entries, secret cutscenes–as well as information outside of the game, Japanese special scenes, press releases, and most importantly, the soundtrack. I listen to the theme song from Kingdom Hearts 1 quite frequently, the same version that the game ends on. Listened to in this context, it provides nostalgic memories and warmth. However, after experiencing the emotional buildup of narrative, gameplay, and progression through the story, after reaching the crescendo of their hands being ripped apart, I cry every single time. The music alone is not to blame, but rather the journey and music paired which elicits such an emotional response.
Recently, I went to see the Kingdom Hearts OrchestraWorld Tour at the Sony Centre in Toronto. This scene played twice on the screen over the course of the concert. Once, near the beginning, it was part of a montage which included parts of this song. There was no emotional build up, no immersion to cause a response. However, they played the orchestral version of the theme song again in the epilogue/encore of the show. By this point, they had taken us through a large number of story beats through videos and synchronized symphonic song. They built us up to it. While the visual alone was not enough to send me into that emotional place, the build up of the music over time, was.
I left the theatre with weepy-eyes, having never touched a controller at all.
We’ve established every freedom we need in order to play well together. We know we can be silly when we want to, serious when we have to. We even know that we don’t have to do or be anything at all. But it’s different when you have to spend money for it. Even if you are only buying a game. It’s hard to take back. After all, that’s how games are sold. That’s how money is made. You buy it, and, baby, it’s yours forever (De Koven 105).
In more ways than one, money and time are huge factors in discussing how players engage with video games. There are obvious areas like barriers to games due to monetary reasons, or a lack of willingness to spend out of fear of lackluster content, but the reality runs much deeper.
The concept discussed in the De Koven quote above, is particularly interesting in light of the newest crackdown on ROMs and emulated content. I discussed this briefly in my post on the Game Genie and old cheat codes, but recently there’s been even more push against older content, with new laws valuing Nintendo ROMs at upwards of $150,000! The way things are going, Nintendo doesn’t even want you to be able to have ROM or emulated copies of the games you already own in physical formats. They want you to buy their updated version of the game, now that they have the NES and SNES Minis on the marketplace.
Many of us have nostalgic memories and value associated with our times spent with older games. In the digital age, and with old consoles no longer working, or no longer showing up properly on high-definition television screens, we sought other options.
Over the years, I have physically purchased at least four different variations on a “Sonic Mega Collection,” via PS2, Xbox360, Nintendo DS, and most recently, via Steam. Sonic 2 for the Sega Genesis was the first video game that I personally owned the console. It’s forever held a very large place in my heart ever since. While I no longer own a copy of Sonic 2, I still have the original copy of Sonic 3 I received not to long afterwards. I spent countless hours spinning Sonic in all directions, clearing zones, gaining Chaos Emeralds. Through the time I invested, I was impressed upon. To this day, I still believe that Sega was ahead of its time and should have won the console wars. Alas, all I’ve been able to do, is to continue to support them by buying new versions of old titles. In truth, I don’t think any of my “collections” have received anywhere close to the attention they did when I was a child, and yet, I insisted on having a copy on whatever my gaming platform de jeur was. I also possess a number of ROMs and a Sega emulator for the titles I could less easily find: Aladdin, The Lion King, Jurassic Park (apparently I liked movie games).
In Nintendo’s new paradigm, the only way we can gain access to our nostalgia, short of owning the original copies, is to now hope that they deem the game you want worthy of being ported to the newest system. It doesn’t matter how much you invested in the past, they want to continue to take your money today, to resell you the experience you remember.
Not all monetary investment is quite so stark. Players can also become invested in their video games depending on the amount of money they have or have not spent.
By the time I transitioned to an N64 from my Sega Genesis, I continued to rent or borrow video games, and only had a very small collection of my own personal titles. Money was tight and while I had rented and beat The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, I had recently learned that the next instalment Majora’s Mask was set to release soon.I scrimped and saved leading up to the release date, and as luck would have it, I was able to buy the game pretty close to its launch. Naturally, my thirteen-year-old self had neglected to realize that Majora’s Mask required the memory expansion pack for the N64, which it did not come with, and which I did not possess. Saddened and disheartened, I quickly realized that I would be able to rent Donkey Kong 64 which came with the memory expansion, and be able to play Majora’s Mask without having to find money I did not have to buy one. In light of the struggle it took for me to acquire and finally play Majora’s Mask, it is a game I have a much stronger attachment to than the original Ocarina.
Looking back, many of my fond gaming memories and “favourite” games, have similar kinds of stories. My nostalgic attachment to my games came not necessarily just from the games themselves or my experiences with them, but the memories of how I received the games. My Sega Genesis made Sega king in my eyes for the early console wars. I favoured 007: The World is Not Enough over 007: Goldeneye, because it was the game I owned. These feelings were particularly strong in my youth, and now through the lens of nostalgia.
However, the reverse can now be seen as true. I have a modest but still overwhelming amount of games sitting in my Steam library. I have countless copies of dusty Xbox 360 and PS2 games sitting on my shelves, next to distantly-used consoles. I continue to buy games not only on Steam, but also for these seldom-used consoles. In the case of the consoles, because the titles somehow carry distant meaning from a long time ago, and sometimes even on Steam for the same reason–and yet I do not play them.
At what point can we officially call this out as being more about the joy of picking up cheap games than the games themselves? I’m not sure, but I suspect Valve zoomed past it in a rocket ship quite some time ago, and if we can still see it, it’s only because it’s doing a victory lap.
But of course, the sale is only part of the story. When it fades, what’s left? A long list of games with metaphorical bite marks that you tell yourself you’ll totally go back to, but which inevitably slide down the priorities list by dint of being so last month. Dim, blurred memories (Cobbett 2014 via Eurogamer).
What is to be said for this kind of lingering engagement or investment. If we continue to pay for the content, countless times over, and yet the titles simply sit on a shelf, or as clogged-up megabytes on a harddrive, how engaged can we possibly be? Is it instead engagement with a memory? Or are we more enthralled with the thrill of the good deal, as Cobbett suggests? Are we trying to bridge the gap in order to create meaning and connection to our pasts through whatever tangible means necessary?
Or perhaps, it’s some twisted version of the Sunk Cost Fallacy? One of the other kinds of investment and engagement we need to consider is the amount of time AND money that people put into their gaming experiences. DLCs, microtransactions, new equipment, fancy internet connections on the financial side, hours, days, months, or years on the side of time. “Your decisions are tainted by the emotional investments you accumulate, and the more you invest in something the harder it becomes to abandon it” (McRaney 2011). Basically, if you already feel you’ve already put a point-of-no-return amount into something (be it time or money), you’ll feel less inclined to leave it.
Common in the minds of gamblers, video game arcades are arguably one of the earliest attachments to this model. Have you been to an arcade recently? Do you remember what it’s like to drain quarter after quarter into a machine for another chance to get the next highest score? It sounds a lot like slot machines, and in some ways it was, just for score digits instead of monetary ones. Alas, modern micro-transactions, especially in mobile gaming, echo this model. In many cases, the game is designed to pull you along long enough, to make the rewards quick and ready enough, until things slow down. “I only have to wait a day for this thing to unlock” you may say to yourself. But you are impatient, and the ability to fast-track your research task only costs five coins, and you have fifty! Your one fast-track spirals into another, until you’ve quickly drained your coins. Suddenly you’re at the precipice of spending real money to gain more coins and progress further. You could wait, but you’ve already gotten this far, it’s only a little further.
Once money has been spent, especially on a game you’ve been playing long enough, it’s hard to turn back. Through this profit-model, ‘free’ games don’t stay free for very long.
The Sunk Cost Fallacy also applies to more complex games like MMOs. Once you’ve spent enough time or money into one MMO, it can be difficult to jump ship to a different one. There’s a fear of losing progress, of failing. “World of Warcraft is interesting in that it caters well to…three goal types: it can be played for the goal of reaching the current maximum level, but it is also possible to play with the improvement goal for acquiring ever more points, possessions, and higher social status, and it is common to play many characters to the maximum level, making it into a game of transient goals, to be reached multiple times” (Juul 87). If you’ve accumulated enough “wealth” of whatever goal you wish, it can be difficult to pull away and be the bottom of the totem pole. It can be easily argued that this is one of the ways in which World of Warcraft has remained so successful–it’s just so hard for people to leave altogether, especially if they’ve been playing a long time.
In order to get to that point, of course, a game has to be enticing enough of an environment to begin with. [Part 5]
Information overload is an increasingly difficult thing for contemporary individuals in our connected technologically-driven society. We each deal with this bombardment of information differently – how do you stack up?
Information overload is an increasingly difficult thing for contemporary individuals in our connected technologically-driven society. We each deal with this bombardment of information differently – how do you stack up?
Jane wants to go to the mall, Billy just liked your latest Instagram post, Barrie is going live on Twitch, and your boss just emailed you yet another schedule change. Four notifications pop up on your phone, begging you to click on their strips of information, do you? The latest news on your favorite TV show, more patch notes for World of Warcraft, or rumors of the next Google phone. So many different avenues of notifications to pop up on your phone or computer at any given time, that it stands to reason that they cannot all be equally effective in their goals at gaining our attention.
We all like to stay up to date on what’s most important to us in our daily lives. Our friends, our hobbies, our choice methods of entertainment. Apps and websites know this too. They continually throw information at us left and right, regardless of whether or not it’s something we actually want to see. Comment on that one post from that former group member you kinda became friends with? Now you’re receiving every other message someone posts on the same thread. Sometimes it’s relevant, sometimes it’s not–quite often, it’s just white noise amongst everything else.
How many screens do you need to keep up?
Many people have become adept in sifting through the news they want to hear, or at the very least, grow accustomed to the onslaught of information they receive on a daily basis, enough to figure out what they want from their personal news highway. I know for myself, it’s a constant struggle to dismiss every notification that I can justifiably get rid of. Every little motivational comment from FitBit or news about my favorite band coming to town is pretty much instantly set to automatically be blocked by my phone before I even see them.
Other applications, like Instagram, Snapchat, or Discord, are allowed to (mostly) peek their notifications on to my screen as available. I will usually swipe them away pretty quickly, however, in efforts to keep my screen clear. I never let emails or notifications on Facebook sit too long without being cleared, regardless of how thoroughly I actually read the messages upon initial opening. In the end, it’s more important for me to acknowledge that something wants my attention and file it away than it is to leave it to sit there as a constant reminder that there’s something else I could be doing.
In-game, or out of game, notifications are pretty much everywhere.
It’s not that I don’t want to address everything that comes up on my screen. I want to stay up to date and in communication with as many of the important things and people in my life as possible, but when it comes down to it, I just don’t have the time. And the not-so-surprising fact is, neither do you. I swipe away notification after notification in hopes that I will have more time to go back and treat each one individually with more depth and care than I could in that moment. Leaving it to sit on my screen for hours (days, weeks or even months as some of my friend’s trigger-worthy mailboxes sit), does not help me accomplish that goal.
I’ve spoken to many people on this subject over past few months since this topic has really started to itch itself in the back of my mind – much like that one annoying Facebook thread that you only half need to keep track of, but seems to be the most bumpin’ thing online this week. My friends and family alike have nearly, without fail, fallen into two groups: the annoyed and the alerted.
The annoyed, like myself, will do whatever they can to keep their screens clear of pop-ups and numbers, putting the brunt of the effort onto their brains to remember who to contact, what to go back to, and more. The alerted individuals, on the other hand, keep everything open until they’ve had a chance to deal with it. Most commonly this has to do with text messages, news alerts, etc. that end up showing up throughout the day. If it hasn’t been dealt with yet, it doesn’t go away. People’s inboxes grow and grow to 800+ unread emails in this category, often without blinking an eye. They still need to be looked at, right?
In the end, both camps probably absorb the same amount of information and have the same amount of response rate to those stimuli, when averaged out over large groups. My point is by no means to make one camp stand above the other, but rather to draw attention to the world in which we live, and the different coping mechanisms we have all incorporated to try and reduce the amount of information overload we receive daily.
Is “Reflect and Review” a new app I can install?
We often seek gaming as an escape from the madness of everyday life. The chance to kill something big and reap the benefits, or at the very least, to blow off some steam and chill with friends in an environment that is all our own. It’s easy to forget that these worlds are not devoid of the same information chaos we have in our real lives daily, and to forget the importance of stepping back and reassessing how we manage what information we take in in-game and IRL. Is it more important for you to live in a quieter world where you address things when you have the time, or do you need the reminder staring at you in order to address what’s important?
Where do you stand? Are you annoyed by the notifications you receive daily or are you simply alerted by them?
[poll id=”3″]
Would you have it any other way? Let us know in our discussions and join us on Discord, on our Facebook page, or Twitter!
Then COVID struck. Slowly, then encapsulating the world. With the physical spaces we used to gather no longer being accessible, people fled to the internet to try and make whole the social spaces they were deprived of. The very people who claimed that these spaces were the death of all community are now struggling to try to figure out how to use the internet as the vast saviour of all things social.
My Life, or Something Like It 