A Reality Game to Cross Disciplines: Fostering Networks and Collaboration

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Stokes Benjamin Watson Jeff Fullerton Tracy Wiscombe Simon
2014 DiGRA '13 - Proceedings of the 2013 DiGRA International Conference: DeFragging Game Studies

The rise of reality gaming introduces a new possibility: that games can directly shape real-world networks, even as they educate. Network relations and skills are associated with career growth, educational attainment and even civic participation. Using methods of network analysis, this paper investigates the game "Reality Ends Here" over two years. The semester-long game is designed for freshmen university students, and is deliberately kept underground, which is rare in education. The game fosters multimedia production by small student groups, with hundreds of team submissions created each semester. This paper seeks to advance the formative use of network analysis for games that address human capital in education. Findings confirm that a player’s network centrality correlates with their game score. Team formation was biased by gender and academic discipline, but appears within acceptable levels. Implications are discussed for how game performance can be tied to various network indicators.

 

The game boy’s network. A network analysis of the German digital games industry

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Kröger Sonja Domahidi Emese Quandt Thorsten
2011 DiGRA '11 - Proceedings of the 2011 DiGRA International Conference: Think Design Play

This paper aims to map the German digital games industry. Using expert interviews and social network analysis, the current paper focuses on the industry development in Germa-ny, identifying structures of organizational and personal networks in the digital games in-dustry. Following a holistic approach, it is argued that while actors of the standard value chain are key units in the digital games industry, stakeholders who influence the political and social discourse have to be taken into account as well. The results show, that not only console manufactures have an outstanding role in the German digital games industry. Considering in-degree and eigenvector centrality, trade associations (e.g. GAME, BIU) and political organizations (e.g. USK, KJM) are well connected and consequently im-portant actors too.

 

The Words of Warcraft: relational text analysis of quests in an MMORPG

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Landwehr Peter Diesner Jana Carley Kathleen M.
2009 DiGRA '09 - Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory

As the growth in popularity of massively multiplayer online games and virtual worlds has correspondingly increased research interest in investigating culture in synthetic environments. One representation of culture in games is the narrative provided in MMORPGs’ quest sets. Quests -tasks given to players- provide a window into the traits of artificial cultures created for these environments, and researchers have used specific quests to advance arguments about game cultures. We expand on this work by trying to discern cultural traits expressed in the complete quest set for the MMORPG World of Warcraft, We subdivide this set into three corpora: two for the quests intended for players in one of the two in-game factions, one for those that can be completed by members of either faction. We then performed relational text analysis on these corpora, looking across them for shared textual relationships. We find that while all three corpora employ diverse terms, locations, and organizations, the only relationships present in any of the corpora at least 5% of the time are those emphasizing the relationships between players, enemies, and quest giving computer-controlled characters. Given the simplicity of these relations, we suggest that text is currently not a method used for sophisticated themes in game worlds, and designers should either rethink their use of it or rely on alternate methods if they wish to convey such themes.