Superficial Intelligence

One cool thing about the HCI field is that we can justify playing games as research. It’s all for the noble goal of understanding how humans interact with computers after all. Today’s paper is about such type of research. Don’t forget the comic strip at the end of this post.

Paper: “Alone Together?� Exploring the Social Dynamics of Massively Multiplayer Online Games (reference at the bottom of this post)

What in the world did they do?

The authors of this paper basically played a lot of World of Warcraft. In their spare time, they studied the social interactions between players, relying more on empirical data than on subjective data.

What’s so cool about that?

Getting research done while playing video games is awesome. It’s also interesting to see how people interact with each other in a virtual world.

Did anything worthwhile come out of it?

They found out some interesting stuff while play… while researching World of Warcraft. Games such as World of Warcraft attract players because of their social aspects. But what these researchers found out was that most players play outside of groups for most of their stay in the game. Still, there were some social aspects that attracted players to the game. The authors of the paper described them as the following:

- Interacting with an audience – Reputation plays a big role in this game. Many players just enjoy the fact that they can show off or have an audience during their play. The authors compare this to playing pinball in a crowded arcade, where spectators gather around the machine to observe the best players.
- Being surrounded by others – People simply enjoy the sense of social presence. It’s sort of like hanging out at a café reading a book, where you barely interact with anybody, but you still enjoy being surrounded by people.
- Laughing at and with others – This is the “spectacle� factor. Other people are simply a constant source of entertainment.

So in the end, what the authors concluded was that players of World of Warcraft like to play “alone together�, by themselves but surrounded by others.

Why should I care?

As online communities become more common, it’s helpful for designers of these communities to understand why it is that people want to be surrounded by others. Sometimes it’s for the socializing, but other times, such as with World of Warcraft, the motivations are different. If designers can understand these differences, they can better understand the needs of the users and can design communities that are a better fit to their members.

Extra

I just wanted to show one paragraph of their paper that shows just how much effort they put into playing the game:

“We began our study of WoW by observing the game from the inside and started playing right after its launch in November 2004. All authors created a main character and several “alts� (secondary characters on different servers). We picked different character classes to get as broad an overview of the game as possible. We joined guilds, and participated in the community’s regular activities (quests – alone or in groups, guild raids, player-versus-player combat, etc.). This provided us with a rich qualitative background to frame our analyses.�

Without further ado, the comic strip for today. (Click on the image to enlarge it)

Reference: Nicolas Ducheneaut , Nicholas Yee , Eric Nickell , Robert J. Moore, "Alone together?": exploring the social dynamics of massively multiplayer online games, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems, April 22-27, 2006, Montréal, Québec, Canada