We analyze collaborative play in an online video game, World of Warcraft, the most popular personal computer game in the United States, with significant markets in Asia and Europe. Based on an immersive ethnographic study, we describe how the social organization of the game and player culture affect players ’ enjoyment and learning of the game. We discovered that play is characterized by a multiplicity of collaborations from brief informal encounters to highly organized play in structured groups. The variety of collaborations makes the game more fun and provides rich learning opportunities. We contrast these varied collaborations, including those with strangers, to the “gold standard ” of Gemeinschaft-like communities of close relations in tightknit groups. We suggest populations for whom similar games could be designed.

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Abstract. Georg Simmel [American Journal of Sociology 55:254–261 (1949)] is widely credited as the first scholar to have seriously examined sociability – ‘‘the sheer pleasure of the company of others’ ’ and the central ingredient in many social forms of recreation and play. Later Ray Oldenburg [The Great Good Place. New York: Marlowe & Company (1989)] extended Simmel’s work by focusing on a certain class of public settings, or ‘‘third places,’ ’ in which sociability tends to occur, such as, bars, coffee shops, general stores, etc. But while Simmel and Oldenburg describe activities and public spaces in the physical world, their concepts may apply as well to virtual or online worlds. Today Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) are extensive, persistent online 3D environments that are populated by hundreds of thousands of players at any given moment. The sociable nature of these online spaces is often used to explain their success: unlike previous video games, MMOGs require players to exchange information and collaborate in real-time to progress in the game. In order to shed light on this issue, we critically examine player-to-player interactions in a popular MMOG (Star Wars Galaxies). Based on several months of ethnographic observations and computerized data collection, we use Oldenburg’s notion of ‘‘third places’ ’ to evaluate whether or not the social spaces of this virtual world fit existing definitions of sociable environments. We discuss the role online games can play in the formation and maintenance of social capital, what they can teach us about the evolution of sociability in an increasingly digitally connected social world, and what could be done to make such games better social spaces. Key words: automated data collection, online games, sociability, third places 1.

Summary. The modeling of realistic networks is of great importance for modern complex systems research. Previous procedures typically model the natural growth of networks by means of iteratively adding nodes, geometric positioning information, a definition of link connectivity based on the preference for nearest neighbors or already highly connected nodes, or combine several of these approaches. Our novel model is based on the well-know concept of k-cores, originally introduced in social network analysis. Recent studies exposed the significant k-core structure of several real world systems, e.g. the AS network of the Internet. We present a simple and efficient method for generating networks which strictly adhere to the characteristics of a given k-core structure, called core fingerprint. We showcase our algorithm in a comparative evaluation with two well-known AS network generators. 1

The recent trend towards miniaturization of projection technology indicates that handheld devices will soon have the ability to project information onto any surface, thus enabling interaction and applications that are not possible with current handheld devices. This opens up an emerging research area on interaction using handheld projectors. With the ability to project information, a handheld device can surmount the limitations of its small internal screen by creating a larger information display on an external surface. By doing so, the display and interaction space can be expanded to cover almost an entire physical environment. Large amounts of data can be displayed, a rich interaction vocabulary can be supported, and multiple co-located people can share the viewing experience at the same time. In this thesis, I investigate research issues involved in the design, implementation, and user performance and behaviors regarding the usage of interactive handheld projectors. I create a handheld projector interaction prototype platform, and explore interaction concepts and techniques to support both single and multi-user interaction using one or several handheld projectors. I also empirically investigate the user behaviors

At personal goal-setting websites, people join others in committing to a challenging goal, such as losing ten pounds or writing a novel in a month. Despite the popularity of these online communities, we know little about whether or how they improve goal performance. Based on theories of goal-setting and group attachment, we examine the influence of two social factors in an online “songwriting challenge ” community: early feedback evoking a shared social identity, and one-on-one collaborations with other members. Combining five years of longitudinal behavioral data with member surveys, we find that users who engage in these social features perform better on their goals than those who are non-social. Furthermore, these early social experiences are associated with strong community-centric behaviors in the long term, including donating money and providing feedback to others.

Finding ways of reducing undesired behavior in online interactions is at the forefront of the social computing research agenda. One promising way to reduce perceived “bad behavior ” is by matching members of online social environments with corresponding behavioral preferences. We present an empirical study (N = 267) of an experimental system for matching users. As a test bed we chose the online game MechAssault, which largely supports one-off encounters within a socially homogenous population. Even within this population we found great variability in the way users selected their gaming partners. One type of player chose partners mainly on their skill, another mainly on a friendly gaming personality, and a third preferred aggressive players. Detailed analyses revealed the underlying attributes of user profiles that generated these user types. The findings suggest that a matchmaking system can better promote desired online interactions than the enforcement of uniform behavioral standards. 1.

Millions of people now participate in Massively-Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), placing tremendous and often unpredictable maintenance burdens on their operators. Thus, understanding the dynamic nature of MMOG players is critical for the designers and implementers of the systems and networks that host MMOGs. This paper improves our understanding of player dynamics in MMOGs by collecting and analyzing a 5-month long measurement study of World of Warcraft, a leading commercial MMOG. Our novel findings include the following: First, the distribution of player session lengths is similar to that of peer-to-peer file sharing sessions, despite a game’s interactive nature, but has a shorter tail. Second, we find several good predictors of session length, such as in-game character level or age. Third, despite the social nature of MMOGs, interactivity between players accounts for little of the dependence between sessions of different players, and most sessions are not correlated at long time scales. Fourth, changes to a game’s virtual world can cause dramatic shifts in the population densities of in-game locations, which are otherwise relatively stable. 1

In its heyday, the video arcade was a social scene to prove one’s video gaming prowess. The introduction of a revolutionary head-to-head fighting game called Street Fighter II in 1991 ushered in an era of competitive video gaming with unparalleled complexity. An influx of copy-cat games and the arrival of consoles with capabilities rivaling coin-ops led to the arcade’s demise. However, the release of Street Fighter IV (SF4) has brought about a revival. I report on the cultural practices of hardcore gaming that have revolved around SF4. SF4’s release on both the console (which enables fighting others online) and the arcade has engendered a new set of challenges in constructing what it means to be competitive and legitimate in the world of head-to-head fighting games. I observe that the enrolment of an ecology of technological artifacts allows players to translate braggadocio from the arcade, a central phenomenon in competitive gaming. Author Keywords Video games, video arcade, discourse analysis, gaming culture,