Virtual Postcards: Multimodal Stories of Online Play

Virtual Postcards: Multimodal Stories of Online Play

Abstract This paper documents the use of a multimodal data collection tool developed for research on Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). Addressing a central problem of qualitative research on MMOGs - how to document the activities of players’ domestic, everyday/everynight play practices - we describe how the virtual ‘travelogue’ allows participants to share, and annotate, screenshots of their MMOG play. Based on our preliminary analysis of 69 travelogues, we explore how these texts function similar to travel postcards, as generic images of in-game events and environments that are personalized and narrativized through players’ annotations. We also discuss two themes across the travelogues, (in)authenticity and individualization, that illuminate the ways players negotiate the standardizing effect of many MMOG play experiences.

Author Keywords MMOGs; Postcards; Visual Methods; Qualitative Research; Travelogue ACM Classification Keywords K.8.0. [Personal computing]: General – Games. General Terms Design, Human Factors

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CHI’12, May 5–10, 2012, Austin, Texas, USA.

Copyright 2012 ACM 978-1-4503-1016-1/12/05...$10.00.

Nicholas Taylor York University 4700 Keele Street Toronto, ON, Canada, M3J1P3 [email protected] Victoria McArthur York University 4700 Keele Street Toronto, ON, Canada, M3J1P3 [email protected] Jennifer Jenson York University 4700 Keele Street Toronto, ON, Canada, M3J1P3 [email protected]

alt.chi CHI 2012, May 5–10, 2012, Austin, Texas, USA

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Introduction Massively-Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are online communities in which multiple players participate via their avatars in a computer-mediated environment, collaborating and competing with one another, through environmental challenges and computer-controlled enemies, as well as player-versus-player (PvP) combat. The popularity of these online communities has inspired a great deal of research on a variety of topics including design choices, social play, and issues of gender and ethnicity. For qualitative researchers of MMOGs, a central problem continues to be whether and how we can observe and document the activities of players in their everyday contexts of play, in order to better understand the forms of digitally-mediated sociality and sociotechnical practice that are cultivated through prolonged engagement with(in) these games. Qualitative studies of MMOG play have, for the most part, consisted of either auto-ethnographies of the researcher and her network of peers and friends [17, 22] or small-scale interviews and participant observations. The limited number of participants in these studies (and the invested interests of player-researchers) makes it difficult to extrapolate from these studies to larger populations of MMOG players. In this paper, we introduce a tool for visually and textually documenting the everyday play experiences of expert-level players who participated in a multi-site, international study of MMOGs. The study’s primary focus was on documenting the MMOG play of participants in labs and more naturalized settings (LAN events, Internet cafés, gaming conventions, and informal gatherings of gamers in public sites), in order to connect players’ in-game activities to the material conditions of their play: to ascertain, in other words, an

understanding of players’ relationships to one another, and to the virtual and physical technologies, that co-produce their play. We combined survey data on participants’ demographics and gameplay habits, solicited through face-to-face interactions with participants in both lab-based and public settings, with qualitative observations and audio-visual recordings of participants’ MMOG play. The result is a ‘on the ground’ examination of the complex relationships between players, virtual worlds, and the localized contexts and conditions of play. Related work With the prevalence of virtual worlds and online communities, methodologies such as “online ethnography” [3] and “netography” [9] have helped to adapt traditional ethnographic research methodologies to these digitally-mediated environments. Correll’s online ethnography describes a variety of methods by which researchers can observe and interact with members of an online community [3]. While the study dates back to 1995, Correll was interested in how a community that was entirely mediated by the computer could be created and maintained by its users.

More recently, ethnographic methods have been extended to virtual worlds and MMOGs [e.g. 7, 15, 17, 18, 19]. Methods such as survey-based data collection, participant observations, and auto-ethnographic accounts of online play [e.g. 2, 16] are commonly used. Many of these auto-ethnographies tend to focus on play within guilds, or the observations of a single player [e.g. 22, 23].

In contrast to these localized, in-depth ethnographic studies, researchers have also devised means of


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gathering data on player activities directly from the game [4, 5,25, 27]. The allegedly “unobtrusive” techniques used to generate large large, extensive data sets include automated avatars that record other players’ actions and communications in a given area of the virtual world [4]; the use of the World of Warcraft Armory (http://us.battle.net/wow/en/), a publicly-accessible online database of all WoW avatars over level 10 [8]; and the acquisition by research teams of server-side data collected by game publishers over a period of years [26]. These methods are typically accompanied by online, self-selected surveys posted on game forums. Aside from the ethical issues regarding recording and observing players without their explicit consent [20], what is often unacknowledged in these studies is the inability of participants to offer their own interpretations and stories of their MMOG experience.

The travelogue is an attempt to address these limitations in both qualitative methods (limited observational data) and quantitative approaches (large data sets of in-game play coupled with self-report survey data). The theoretical framing of the study, as well as the travelogue tool and our preliminary results, are discussed in the next sections.

Theoretical Framework In this work, we were guided by Actor Network Theory (ANT), as developed and articulated in the field of Science and Technology Studies by Bruno Latour [10, 11, 12], John Law [13], and Michel Callon [1]. Latour argues that sociology has too often regarded non-human actors (technologies, artifacts, animals, and so on) as incidental to ‘social’ relations, when instead we should read interactions with one another as being enabled, shaped, compelled, and constrained by our

relationships with tools, non-human companions, and contexts. The project of ANT, described by Latour as an “object-oriented sociology for object-oriented people”, lies in “reassembling the social” – in demonstrating how sociality is actually the product of choreographed and contingent relationships between human and non-human “actants” [12].

In ANT-driven studies of digital games so far [6, 7], this approach has been used to map the virtual agencies at work in single- and two-player games, in order to explore how players are acted on by non-player characters, geographies, narratives and rules. Giddings and Kennedy’s micro-ethnographic explorations of cooperative Lego Star Wars play, for instance, demonstrates how games “configure” players by cultivating, and compelling from players those decisions, actions, and skills that are required to progress [6].

Whereas these authors have used ANT as an analytical framework to examine the push-pull relationship between games and players, we are attempting to deploy it methodologically, in our study design. Here, we are guided by Latour’s injunction to “follow the actors” [12]: the travelogue is one means by which we can learn directly from participants regarding how they perceive and describe their relationships with games, avatars, NPCs, other players, and so on. Using a visual methodology to explore and analyze what players themselves think is interesting about their play is the primary focus of the remainder of this paper. In the next section, we describe the travelogue in detail, and then go on to discuss our results from this initial study.


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Travelogue The travelogue is an online tool designed as a complementary data collection mechanism to be used within our multi-site, mixed-methods study of MMOGs. In order to complete a travelogue, players whom we meet either in lab-based settings or at public gaming events must first complete the study survey about their demographics and gaming habits, and, where possible (primarily in lab-based settings), play in two MMOGs: one of their choice, and another instrumented, browser-based game built specifically for the study. They are then invited to complete the travelogue on their home machines and at their own pace. To do so, they connect to an online form that presents them with a series of questions about the MMOG of their choice, to which they submit both textual and visual responses. The first nine questions are the same for all participants; the tenth is an additional question presented to WoW players regarding their use of add-ons or mods. The travelogue was designed to get a glimpse into participants’ domestic play, giving them control of what they choose to present to us as researchers, and in that way, providing a visual record from their play. The travelogue is intended as a way of getting multimodal data (visual and textual) not only on how players play at home, but what kinds of behaviors and practices are elicited by the different MMOGs they play. We received a surprising range of images: participants submitted doctored images, concept artwork, screenshots from gaming websites, and even photographs from their life ‘outside’ the game, including their other hobbies, and their romantic partners and friends.

Postcards Using the travelogue, participants were able to show us what they thought was significant about their play: from the mundane to the comic, to what they might consider tragic. Because they were (for the most part) taking screenshots of their in-world play and reporting back to us through the travelogue tool, we came to view those screenshots as ‘postcards’ from the virtual world they were sharing. Viewing these screenshots as postcards has interesting implications methodologically, as postcards have been traditionally used as “reminders of distant places and things seen” [14]. Because participants had the freedom to upload any image for each question, many were able to make use of catalogues of screenshots they had already taken, meaning that they could draw from, and share with us, selected elements from a visual history of their play. In this case, we found that many of our participants took care in selecting and sharing images they already had on file, and were very willing to share those with us. In a literal sense, they were using those screenshots as reminders of significant in-game events, like beating a difficult boss or obtaining new weapons and armor

Viewing these screenshots as a kind of eclectic collection of postcards resituates gaming experiences within the realm of visual “consumption” [24], and gives us access to valuable play experiences that we might otherwise never see (especially across such a large group of participants in so many different games). Moreover, as with postcards, these screenshots most often depicted practices/places that are common to many players’ experiences, but which were nonetheless personalized by participants’ textual accompaniments.

Participants Presently, 69 participants have completed a travelogue. These participants were recruited at LAN parties, public gaming conventions, or on campus. Participants were players of World of Warcraft (37), Maple Story (10), Aion (5), Second Life (3), Guild Wars (4), EVE Online (5), and Miscellaneous (5). As outlined above, participants who filled out a travelogue also provided us with additional data from a survey, interview, and in most cases, one or more videotaped game play sessions.

It is important to note that while participants in the project represent all levels of expertise, including novice players, the participants who completed a travelogue all identified as "expert" players.


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From our preliminary analysis of the travelogues (both images and text) we constructed two principal themes: (in)authenticity and invidualization. (In)authenticity refers to instances in which participants clearly used images that do not depict their own gameplay, and in some instances were pulled from Google image searches, but which nonetheless tell a rich story of their play, as narrated by their textual captions. With regards to the second theme, individualization, we offer examples of the ways participants put a personal ‘stamp’ on their identities and experiences in online environments. We conclude with a discussion of how both of these themes can be seen as artifacts of virtual environments that often, and particularly at the higher levels of play, enforce on participants a degree of standardization in terms of avatar customization and play practices. That is to say, we believe what the travelogues are most successful at demonstrating is the ways players’ craft (and share) means of personalizing and ‘owning’ their engagement in environments that are inherently constraining, and that often standardize play experiences. This is not unlike the experience of travel photography: everyone who visits the Pyramids, for instance, takes similar shots of the monuments, but it is in the telling of their travel story that their experiences are individualized.

Themes From our preliminary analysis of the travelogues (both images and text) we constructed two principal themes: (in)authenticity and individualization.

(In)authenticity In our preliminary analysis, we encountered instances of participants submitting ‘fake’ images that contained watermarks (for websites) or that were far too

pixelated to be actual screenshots from the game. For example, the following image was submitted in response to question 4, "What do you like to do when your friends ARE online?" The accompanying text reads "the first boss in icecrown citadel. we are gathering up and ready to fight him." The size of the image and watermark indicate that the image is from a website - yet the participant describes it as showing his play.

While the image did not come from that participant’s account – its watermark, its certificate of authenticity, giving it away as inauthentic in relation to his play – it nonetheless indicated that this participant knows of, and perhaps does participate in, these high-level raids. The image may not be ‘their own’, but the story, and its presentation in our data, certainly is.

One way we can approach this and other instances of ‘inauthentic’ data is to situate them as artifacts of the games, and specific in-game practices, they depict. As other researchers have noted [23], and as we observed particularly from more experienced players, the fantasy-themed MMOGs we observed in our study (paradigmatically WoW, but also Guild Wars, Rift and Maple Story) elicit from players a substantial degree of standardization in terms of avatar customization and play practices. Arguably, one successful encounter against Lord Marrowgar proceeds in similar ways to another. Within this context, we ask, does it really matter that participants contribute an authentic screenshot? Were it not for the image’s watermark, we may not be able to infer that this image was not produced from the player’s account (though as it appears in the travelogue text and in our data, it was certainly ‘co-produced’ by the player, regardless of whether it was from their account). As we learned

Figure 3. “The first boss in icecrown citadel. we are gathering up and ready to fight him."


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through our observations, interviews, and through the repetition of themes and images from our travelogues, World of Warcraft and other fantasy-themed MMOGs can be, for many players, homogenizing spaces. Rather than a false depiction of some unique event, this player’s experience with ICC raids may be very well-represented by an image pulled from a Google image search for “ICC raid”.

Such ambivalence might be read as a limitation of our travelogue; we cannot be absolutely sure in some instances whether the player is accurately or consistently depicting ‘their own play’. But this concern is arguably based on a positivist notion of what constitutes good, or for that matter authentic, data. On one occasion, during fieldwork at an Internet café in the downtown of a large Canadian city, one of the authors helped a participant complete a travelogue that was almost entirely made up of ‘fake’ images, taken from Google image searches for the game. The participant was, at the time, living in a youth shelter, and only had the opportunity to play when he was at the 24-hour Internet café where we solicited his participation. After completing the survey, we informed the participant that they could, for more reimbursement, complete the travelogue. He indicated that he would like to, but wanted to do it on-site so he could have the compensation immediately (more often, in lab-based settings, participants dropped by our laboratory upon completing the travelogue, usually one to two weeks after their initial session, in order to receive their compensation). He proceeded to open up the game (Combat Arms, a free-to-play first-person shooter/MMOG) and take screenshots from his account and his avatar but, after getting frustrated with the loading time to enter the game environment, opened

up an internet browser and image-searched for relevant screenshots – ones that would allow him to address the travelogue’s questions and to craft a story around his gameplay.

This exchange told us as much, if not more, about the realities of this player’s everyday play as a more ostensibly authentic set of images may have – including the fact that he had no domestic setting for his play, and that he was able to give a nuanced account of his play through a bricolage of images taken from the Internet.

Figure 4. Participant’s answer to “Where do you and friends

meet, hang out, and/or pass time?”

This ambivalence around ‘is it their own or is it someone else’s screenshots’ that is opened up for us by the players who are very obviously using ‘fakes’ (because the images are watermarked, or because we watched them do it) is, for us, not so much a limitation of the tool, but a property of many of the games we are studying; in many cases, what sets one player’s experience apart from the other is NOT something they did or did not do in the game, but the way they enframe, embellish, and narrativize it.

We turn now to some key examples of how players individualized their play experience through the way


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they completed the travelogue; how they in effect crafted narratives through the travelogue that demonstrated and illustrated what makes them and their play experiences unique within these often standardizing environments.

Individualization The most prominent examples of ‘individualization’ involved participants re-situating the focus of the travelogue to themselves (rather than their in-game experiences), and articulating their own play experiences through a subversion of otherwise highly standardized content. Also worth mentioning here, but beyond the scope of this paper, are instances where participants provided a back story for their avatar(s), and responses in which participants created collages of multiple avatars to show how they crafted a stable identity across avatars and in some cases, across games.

To re-focus the subject of the travelogue from participants’ gameplay to themselves, several participants took advantage of two questions which asked them 1) what they do when their friends are not online, and 2) where they and their friends like to meet. While the majority of participants submitted screenshots of their avatars soloing or hanging out in-game, these participants took the opportunity to upload photographs of ‘real world’ experiences.

For example, one participant submitted three responses to “What they do when their friends are not online”; two of the images depict the participant with his significant other, giving us a glimpse into his offline life and showing us that his narrative includes online and offline spaces. His third response to the same question

is a more conventional image of an avatar that he levels when playing solo. Another participant shared an image of himself with a group of friends at the same LAN event where the participant and his friends were recruited to take part in the study. A third participant, in response to the same question, submitted photos of himself falling asleep at his machine, and another picture shows him mountain biking. Pictures of friends at LAN events also featured for the same participants in response to the question, "Where do you and your friends meet?"

We also saw examples of participants who acknowledged the standardization of gameplay and game content, yet chose to frame their responses in a way that personalized the content they consumed. For example, in response to question 2, "What is your preferred mode of transportation?" one participant submitted the following images (Figures 5 and 6).

Figure 5. Image of a popular Internet meme.

The image shown in Figure 5, along with a dozen or more variants, was at the time a popular Internet


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meme. The second image (Figure 6) is of the participant's main character on a black war bear, and the pose is (either deliberately or incidentally) similar to the main figure in the preceding ‘Bear Cavalry’ image. The accompanying text reads, "This is my black war bear. There are many like it, but this one's mine." Here, the participant acknowledges the fact that every other "black war bear" mount in WoW is indistinguishable from his own, yet through visually linking his screenshot with a popular Internet meme, and through his annotation, he is able to personalize and embellish his war bear.

Figure 6. Participant's avatar riding a black war bear.

The use of pictures from participants’ offline lives (where other participants submitted screenshots), and the personalization and narrativization of otherwise highly standardized elements, are two of several ways in which players choose to individualize their gameplay.

Discussion and Conclusions As a means of enabling participants to draw from and share elements of a visual history of their MMOG experience, the travelogue affords us access to

participants’ everyday, at-home play. It does so in a way that is more extensive and reaches a broader pool of participants, across a broader range of games, than auto- and small-scale ethnographic research. At the same time, the travelogue allows players to share and annotate their own experiences in ways that are not at all possible through larger-scale, quantitative in-game data gathering techniques, in which ‘participants’ may not even know they are being observed, much less have a say in how their experiences are reported.

Looking at the images participants shared with us as ‘postcards’ generates methodological and analytical insights that are vital to our understandings of MMOG play. Methodologically, we are able to show that, and how, many players use screenshots to catalogue their play over time; in a sense the travelogue tool is simply a way to leverage and “make public” [12], through research, this pre-existing practice. Analytically, the travelogues contribute to a growing understanding of the ways MMOGs constrain and standardize player experience – from limited avatar creation and customization options to template-driven avatar ‘builds’ and play practices. Like a travel photograph, an image of an avatar, or of a particular in-game setting, may tell us very little about the player’s unique experiences when read by itself. As with travelogues of ‘real world’ spaces, it is the combination of images, and their textual annotations, through which players personalize their experiences. The generic quality of the experiences depicted in screenshots made it possible for some participants to use someone else’s screenshots to tell their own story -- very much like buying a postcard and then describing, on the back, your own experience with it. Other participants demonstrated how they put their personal stamp on


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what is often a de-individuating play experience; they did so by, among other means, depicting material realities (partners, hobbies, friends) directly into the travelogue, and by linking otherwise standardized game elements to a personalized story or joke. These moments illustrate, for us, the central importance of “following the actors” – of letting them tell and share their own stories – in our efforts to understand online play and sociality.

As this study continues, we expect that more extensive deployment and analysis of travelogues can contribute further innovations to the study of MMOGs. Because we

are studying multiple MMOGs using (among other qualitative means) this stable, multimodal format, we will be able to compare how different MMOGs – for instance, EVE Online and World of Warcraft – can elicit and support drastically different configurations of online play of interactions with other players. Thus far, studies of MMOGs (particularly those using qualitative methods) have largely focused on player activities and communities within individual games; the travelogue represents an effective but straightforward method for undertaking an empirically-driven, multimodal comparison of sociality and play across multiple MMOGs.

Acknowledgements This research is sponsored by the Air Force Research Laboratory.

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Virtual Postcards: Multimodal Stories of Online Play

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